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8. Resistance and Rejection Irish national school students devised crafty ways to fool their teacher and get time off from the classroom. One group brought a stray donkey into the schoolyard before the master arrived. He then asked for volunteers to return the animal to its owner—and the culprits, according to a folklore informant, would “spend most of the day on this mission.” Others connived with a local farmer to cart turf to the school, and the teacher called on volunteers to shift the load into a shed. Even lunch-hour football became a problem: the master often had difficulty getting the boys back to class as “they were inclined to roam during the play-hour.” More devious and indeed dangerous, a group decided to fake a near-drowning. When “they had no excuse one way or the other for any diversion,” they threw one boy in the river. Four of his mates jumped in and pulled him out. They then carried him to school, having also sent a messenger to his home and to the master “and made a terrible story of it.” Between the noise they kicked up and the “rí-rá” (shouting) of the teacher, “the rest of the day went without any class.” Adding greater spice to the whole affair: the parents rewarded the supposed lifesavers with gifts of money, and the teacher ensured that they got certificates.1 Many other Irish and Indian narrators recalled such harmless or potentially dangerous forms of resistance. The incidents are often interchangeable; without identifying names or locations, it would be difficult to tell whether they occurred at cnei or bia schools. Or further afield: Peter N. Stearns has claimed that there was “a battleground quality” to student-teacher relations in America during much of the nineteenth century, especially at academies and colleges, and at some French boarding schools, in which pupils played all sorts of pranks on their teachers.2 “There were times when the pupils became very tired of their books,” wrote Francis La Flesche in language like that used by the Irish informant, “and longed to take a run over the prairies or through the woods.” Then they “sought for ways and means by which to have the school closed, and secure a holiday.” On one occasion the mission school pupils loosened the joints of a chimney pipe and later deliberately tramped into the room, causing the weakened pipe to collapse. They also allowed some pigs to escape from the school resistance and rejection 217 farm. Gray-beard immediately called for volunteers among the boys to catch them. The unfortunate girls had to remain in class, intensifying the enjoyment of the plotters—who were later publicly thanked by the superintendent for their sterling work in capturing the pigs.3 Iwouldliketodistinguishsuchpupil resistancefromrejection.Obviouslythey are two ends of a continuum. By resistance I mean pupil violations of school rules, pranks against teachers or other staff, and temporary truancy. Such activities —sometimes blending with the secret subcultural activities examined in the previous chapter—were forms of accommodation, of “negotiation.” In the incidents cited above, Irish and Indian children merely sought for ways to get an afternoon off. Pupils who struggled to escape permanently were engaged in rejection. We cannot always categorize a pupil as either resister or rejecter; a boy or girl might play truant, voluntarily return to the school, and later flee permanently or be expelled.4 The present chapter, then, focuses first on forms of pupil resistance and then on rejection. I “This is a story of Indian students,” writes K. Tsianina Lomawaima on the Chilocco Indian School, “loyal to each other, linked as a family, and subversive in their resistance.” Of major recent historians of Indian schooling, she above all argues for the resilience of students, who created “relatively free spaces” in the school through their resistant and subversive activities. Other scholars, myself included, have also been deeply influenced by New Social History admonitions, and to some extent by postmodernist and postcolonial concepts of empowerment. We seek to understand the perspectives and actions of the “outs” of history, those until recently ignored by historians, and to show how they were more than merely passive victims. Although not all historians of Indian education would fully accept Lomawaima’s vision of student empowerment, most would concur that resistance was pervasive. One thing is abundantly clear, writes David Wallace Adams. Even at the supposedly total institution that was the Indian boarding school, “students, often...

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