Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico’s Indian Boarding Schools by John R. Gram, and: Community Self-Determination: American Indian Education in Chicago, 1952–2006 by John L. Laukaitis (review)

After an almost decade-long slowdown, the literature on Indian education is gaining momentum again. During the 1990s, scholars began telling the stories of Indian boarding schools that aimed to erase Indigenous languages and cultures and assimilate Native people into the broader body politic of the United States. Robert Trennert and David Wallace Adams elucidated the design of the schools, while K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Brenda Child, and others highlighted how Native students and communities endured boarding school experiences and protected the Native languages and cultures that the schools aimed to erase. Almost as quickly as the literature began to flourish, it went quiet again.

A new group of scholars is pushing the study of Indian education in novel directions. Where the first wave of scholarship on boarding schools often focused on specific schools, scholars such as Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert began looking at the lasting connections between schools and Native communities; others such as Julie Davis reminded us that Indigenous education in the United States went beyond boarding schools as she chronicled the rise of community-based Indigenous education in Minneapolis. Now, John R. Gram and John J. Laukaitis provide a pair of studies that have added even more depth and nuance to Gilbert’s attention to community approaches to boarding schools and Davis’s examination of Indigenous schooling during the era of educational self-determination. While Gram and Laukaitis tackle topics separated by vast time and space, they engage in a common push to enrich the broader literature on Indian education with close attention to how local contexts can both reinforce and reorder what we know about Indigenous education.

While Gram is not the first scholar to explore the complicated ties between Indigenous communities and federal Indian boarding schools, he adds new layers of complexity to this approach as he teases out connections between Pueblo communities of northern New Mexico and the federal Indian boarding schools at Albuquerque and Santa Fe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This nuance is especially apparent in the first two chapters, where Gram sketches out a political economy in which the schools desperately needed Pueblo students to keep their doors open, and where Pueblos held the ability to send their children to Catholic boarding schools or federal schools in Arizona and Southern California. Using this leverage, Pueblo communities often forced the schools to change policies and practices they deemed harmful or unsatisfactory. Foremost for Pueblo people was the ability for their children to come home during the summer months. Where other large, off-reservation boarding schools often managed to hold students over the summer, Pueblo parents and political leaders made clear that they would not send their children to Albuquerque or Santa Fe if they could not come home for the summer.

In his third chapter, Gram aptly places the schools at Santa Fe and Albuquerque within broader social and political contexts. Artists and writers such as Mabel Dodge Luhan and Charles F. Lummis—people the author calls “romantics”—held Pueblo culture as an antidote to the alleged moral and political decay brought by industrial capitalism, and they pushed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to protect rather than erase Pueblo lifeways. Alongside the visions of local crusaders, a nationwide disdain for boarding schools placed additional pressure on the schools at Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Here, Gram aptly demonstrates how the nexus of national and local politics provided Pueblo people with opportunities to exact change from school officials. Gram’s development of a political economy of Indian education stands among the most important contributions of his book.

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