Games of Silence: Indian Boarding Schools in Louise Erdrich’s Novels

There are many stories about Indian boarding schools in North America, and they run the gamut from unthinkable abuse to positive support. Some boarding school graduates describe the schools as nurturing and helpful. Others, many others, describe emotional trauma, physical punishment, and sexual abuse. Many schools punished students for speaking their native languages; after the reform era of the 1930s, some schools allowed students to retain and speak their native tongue. Some pupils received food and housing far more reliably than they could have at home; others were malnourished as a matter of school or government policy.

Even within the same school and the same general time period, stories differ. Adam Fortunate Eagle reports that during his time at Pipestone (1935–45), he and his fellow students “never [saw] anybody punished for speaking their tribal language” (48). Jim Northrup, who attended Pipestone from 1949 to 1952, writes that one of his first experiences at the school was when “the house matron twisted my ear because I had used an Ojibwe expression. She told me we don’t use that language here” (130). Just as there is no uniform “Indian experience,” so too is there no single “Indian boarding school experience.”

Thus we should not be surprised when we encounter a similar diversity of representations in Native fiction. It is nonetheless worth drawing attention to those novels that do not seem to reflect this range of experiences, particularly in the work of a writer like Louise Erdrich, whose novels encompass such a wide range of Ojibwe history and community. As E. Shelley Reid notes in “The Stories We Tell: Louise Erdrich’s Identity Narratives,”

Erdrich creates a new set of textual gestures that can more faithfully capture the multiple voices and extended family networks of Native American “individuals.” Her narratives also allow the representation of a larger community identity and weave her audience into the fabric of this extended family and its stories of survival.

(67)

Particularly in Erdrich’s early novels, the boarding schools most frequently function as safe havens for children who face uncertain situations at home, which elides their historical role in breaking up Native communities. For example, in The Plague of Doves, the narrator tells us,

It was a question of survival, after all. If I had not found the music, I would have died of silence. The rule of quiet in the house became more rigorous and soon my sister fled to the government boarding school.

(203)

It is not Louise Erdrich’s responsibility to represent a comprehensive take on Ojibwe history. However, especially for those of us who teach her work, it is important to know where we must supplement the text, and where we should offer additional voices. Because of Erdrich’s popularity, her work is often drawn upon to represent not only Native literature but Native experience, and she has also taken on some of that responsibility herself. I do not argue that Erdrich should not write about students for whom schools were safe places, but I wish to point out that many of her novels do not reflect the diversity of Indian boarding school experiences. This, in turn, may make it difficult for readers to understand the reasons why—or even recognize that—contemporary Native families and communities still bear scars that date back to the boarding school era.

Boarding schools

Certainly not all Native students who attended boarding schools were personally traumatized; some had (and have) positive memories of their time in these institutions. However, boarding schools had extremely disruptive effects on Native communities, and many researchers suggest that American Indian communities continue to show dysfunctions that can be traced back to the trauma of child removal and boarding school experience:

Many residential school children experienced a loss of culture, language, traditional values, family bonding, life and parenting skills, self-respect, and the respect for others. Their parents, in turn, lost their roles as caregivers, nurturers, teachers, and family decision-makers. Overtime [sic], the residential school system had loosened the emotional bond between parent and child, which Morrissette (1994) has likened...