This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States by Andrew Woolford (review)

Andrew Woolford’s This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States is a history of Indigenous boarding schools in Canada and the United States through the concept of genocide. The author argues, “this book explores and analyzes the crucial role played by assimilative Indigenous boarding schools in the genocidal processes that unfolded in North American settler colonial nations” (8). Using a comparative approach of boarding schools in Canada and the United States, the author contends that these boarding schools were a form of genocide. Importantly, however, Woolford argues, “genocide is conceived of… as a process and not as a total outcome” (5). While public discourse and scholarship surrounding discussions of genocide continue to perpetuate the idea that genocide applies almost exclusively to the physical annihilation of entire groups; they leave little room for cultural genocide, which, Woolford argues, was a part of Raphael Lemkin’s 1943 original conception of genocide. Thus, Woolford, wrests it away from the narrow idea that complete physical annihilation of a group is the sole definition of genocide. As Woolford notes, “genocide, when it targets the cultural bonds of the group” disrupts the transferring of culture to children and therefore disrupts group identity (290).

Education as an assimilative tactic was a part of the broader processes of Indigenous genocide. The word process here is important because it highlights multiple levels of how genocide operated in the educating of Indigenous children, but also leaves open the ways Indigenous people tried to resist assimilation. A wonderfully written text, there are two major strengths that stand out.

First, it makes the case that, Indigenous boarding schools, as a part of the larger settler colonial processes, are, in fact, a form of genocide without dismissing other forms of genocide such as the Jewish Holocaust. Second, and this point assists in the book’s framework, Woolford considers how the process of genocide happens in a settler colonial mesh, working at multiple levels (4). A settler colonial mesh as a framework understands colonialism as a process that attempts to entrap Indigenous people into the settler nation state’s assimilation project, but also allows for “snags” and “tears,” which permit “resistance” and “subversion” even if Indigenous people were not able to fully tear down the mesh (4).

At the macrolevel, which includes laws and governmental policies, both the US and Canadian governments constructed the “Indian Problem” with the larger goal of gaining Indigenous lands, expropriating resources, and expanding the settler states. By the late nineteenth century, Christian and socially progressive organizations believed that in order to solve the “Indian Problem,” they could use education to achieve that goal by assimilating Indigenous people into mainstream society. Woolford sums up how Canada and the United States framed the “Indian Problem” whether as a form of “benevolence” or “racial social engineering”: “that the Indian as an Indian was a problem for each country, and therefore the Indian had to be eliminated through assimilation and civilization” (291). At the microlevel, Woolford examines particular boarding experiences, both how they were governed and how students were able to resist, even in difficult circumstances. In chapter four of This Benevolent Experiment, he examines the boarding school experience of students in New Mexico and Manitoba.

The author concludes by considering how both settler states might move forward in the process of decolonization. Woolford is skeptical that Truth and Reconciliation, as currently formulated in Canada, and education in general will work to end the destructive nature of settler colonial genocide. Woolford does not offer a prescription in how both settler nations might decolonize. However, using the concept of genocide, contends the author, can help us understand “the destructive path of settler colonialism, highlight the centrality of land dispossession and elimination to this process, and to press us toward...