Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature by Arnold Krupat (review)

Arnold Krupat's Changed Forever, Volume 1: American Indian Boarding-School Literature is an invaluable resource within the growing body of American Indian boarding-school scholarship that continues to respond to K. Tsianina Lomawaima's (Mvskoke/Creek Nation, not enrolled) 1994 invitational inquiry from They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School:"What has become of the thousands of Indian voices who spoke the breath of boarding-school life?" Since the 1990s, Indigenous historians such as Lomawaima have shaped the discourse of boarding-school studies with such works as Brenda J. Child's (Red Lake Ojibwe) Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (1995), and Child and Brian Klopotek's (Choctaw) collection Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education (2014). Such scholars continue to broaden, complicate, and nuance the narratives of boarding schools, alongside more recent histories such as Kevin Whalen's Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute's Outing Program, 1900–1945 (2016) and Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose's Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (2016).

Beyond contributing to the growing historiography of boarding schools by providing an extensive contextualization of Navajo and Hopi boarding-school experiences, Changed Forever joins an emerging branch of boarding-school studies that serves to recover, recontextualize, and legitimize the writings of more than a century of young Native American students as Indigenous literature. Building on Amelia V. Katanski's Learning to Write "Indian": The Boarding-School Experience and American Indian Literature (2005) and Robert Dale Parker's Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930 (2011), and adding to Jacqueline Emery's recent Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press (2017), Krupat's first volume of what will be a two-volume collection of American Indian boarding-school literature seeks to define boarding-school writing as an important and distinct genre of American Indian literature.

Krupat begins with a comprehensive introduction to the history of boarding schools centered on Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918). Krupat outlines the many problems of boarding schools, including examples of physical and sexual abuse, that have come to shape the narrative of boarding schools since as early as the 1990s. Yet Changed Forever moves beyond the victim-only narrative of boarding schools by guiding readers through the complicated autobiographies of boarding-school students, including six Hopi autobiographies (Edmund Nequatewa, Albert Yava, Don Talayesva, Polingaysi Qóyawayma, Helen Sekaquaptewa, and Fred Kabotie), four Navajo autobiographies (Frank Mitchell, Irene Stewart, Kay Bennett, and George P. Lee), and a collection of twenty-two "traditional" Navajo life histories. By placing such a range of life stories in conversation with one another, Changed Forever presents a diverse range of boarding-school experiences, both the unilateral challenges and the selfselected opportunities.

Within each of the included autobiographies, Krupat traces a number of similarities that he suggests establish the framework for a distinct genre ofboardingschool literature: "Their voices speak of a range of experiences, yet they regularly reference what I will call a number of scenes of initiation or initiatory loci, and also a number of topoi (frequently the same 'topics' the historians of the boarding schools had remarked) as they are encountered by one or another boardingschool autobiographer" (xxix). These definitive initiatory loci include "The Dining Room," "The Clean-Up," and "The Dormitory." Krupat's genredefining topoi include such shared experiences as "Clock Time," "Food," "Sex," "Religion," "Resistance," "Outing Labor," "Running Away," and "Identity" (6). By identifying foundational locations and topics of the broader boarding-school experience, Changed Forever provides readers with an analytical approach through which they can engage more directly with the writings of boarding-school autobiographers and other genres of boarding-school literature. In fact, unlike comparable publications that prioritize the recovery of boardingschool voices, Changed Forever focuses more on encouraging and modeling critical...