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

Through the lens of genocide studies, This Benevolent Experiment illustrates how the Indigenous boarding school systems in Canada and the United States contributed to North America's cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. Woolford sets the groundwork for his book by defending the term cultural genocide; he argues that the qualifier "cultural" does not minimize the genocidal objective of the boarding schools, nor does it ignore the many Indigenous communities that persevered and survived the boarding schools' attempt at cultural annihilation. To do this, Woolford invokes Rafael Lemkin's definition of genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, which includes the extermination of a group's traditions, language, religion and culture for the purpose of eliminating the group as a whole. This Benevolent Experiment applies this definition to the assimilative mission of the North American Indigenous boarding schools to assert that Canada and the United States used the boarding schools as a tool for cultural genocide.

Woolford fashions the term "settler colonial mesh" to help readers understand how this cultural genocide operated on the macro-societal level (the larger social and political forces that conceptualized the "Indian Problem"), meso-societal level (specific government and non-government institutions, including the boarding schools, that sought to solve the "Indian Problem") and the micro-societal level (the individual actors, such as school officials, teachers, and staff, who interacted with students, parents and communities). Woolford visualizes each of these levels as nets, that when placed together form a mesh "that operates to entrap Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial assimilative project" (3). However, Woolford reminds us that mesh is porous, and therefore holes in the settler colonial project sometimes allowed for Indigenous resistance and survival.

Woolford applies the metaphor of the settler colonial mesh to two schools in Manitoba (Portage la Prairie Indian Residential School and Fort Alexander Indian Residential School) and two schools in New Mexico (Albuquerque Indian School and Santa Fe Indian School). Through this comparative analysis, Woolford contends that while the Canadian and U.S. systems were different in many ways, both Canada and the United States aggressively pushed residential schooling for the purpose of "destroy[ing] Indigenous groups as groups" (93-4). Furthermore, Woolford analyzes these schools to demonstrate how different assimilative practices were enforced, made flexible, and resisted in order to contract and expand the settler-colonial mesh, rendering it always in flux. Here, Woolford enters into conversation with scholars of the American Indian boarding schools, such as K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Child, by exhibiting how some students and parents took advantage of the porousness of the settler colonial mesh by resisting, or by taking advantage of, a Euro-American education.

Woolford not only contributes to the study of Indigenous boarding schools, but also to genocide studies, as he uses the histories of the boarding schools to show how nonhuman actors can play a role in genocide. Specifically, Woolford discusses the roles of food-scarcity, land/territory, and disease in the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples. Woolford argues that geography has generally been overlooked in genocide studies, and outlines the various roles that geography played in how administrators attempted to control the student body. However, as Woolford illustrates, geography also allowed Indigenous communities to influence and sometimes manipulate school administrations.

This Benevolent Experiment concludes with an analysis of how Canada has attempted to unravel the settler colonial mesh. Woolford takes a close look at Canada's Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) passed in 2006, Indigenous reactions to the Agreement, Prime Minister Harper's subsequent national apology, and the possible reasons why the United States has not followed Canada in similar reparations. Woolford argues that the United States lags behind Canada in reparations because of the U.S. boarding schools' perceived use of "softer" assimilation techniques marked by fewer reported cases of physical and sexual abuse. However, Woolford asks his readers not to glorify Canada's...