Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples: From Genocide via Education to the Possibilities for Processes of Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Reclamation ed. by Stephen James Minton (review)

AS SITES OF SOVEREIGNTY BATTLES, genocide, creative survivance, and cross-generational lived histories, residential schools have long been a central topic of research in Native American and Indigenous studies. Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples approaches histories of residential schools from the field of international and comparative education, critiquing educational practices and policies outcomes. Contributors to this anthology also contrast recent settler state–led legislative provisions with Indigenous educational and political relations campaigns anchored to self-determination.

The main chapters foreground six separate historical sites: Aotearoa, Australia, Greenland, Ireland, Norway, and the United States. Three additional chapters provide general frameworks to access the collection, foundational concepts and broad historical backgrounds, and final reflections on the process of creating the anthology. The book’s overarching points will be readily familiar to scholars of Native American and Indigenous studies: residential schools were totalizing institutions and components of broader genocide whose signature features developed alongside interlocking imperial and settler eliminatory and assimilationist goals; Indigenous people have been and continue to be active agents in this living history; and large-scale campaigns for truth-telling, restitution, reconciliation, and reclamation in a context of ongoing settler colonialism have been contentious, uneven, and important.

Attention to historical context, details about specific institutions and their administration, and the cross-generational reach of residential schools thematically unite the short chapters. Readers may find the wide-ranging examples of boarding schools and nation-state contexts particularly valuable for considering broad patterns and the particularities of individual places and peoples. For example, Tania Ka‘ai (who is of Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tahu, Native Hawaiian, Cook Island Māori, and Sāmoan descent) underscores the role of colonization and treaty violations in her study of mission schools in Aotearoa. Of particular importance, Ka‘ai points out, was the targeted attack on the Māori language and its far-reaching repercussions on Māori communities and sovereignty. Within this context, she unpacks several treaty violation claims presented to the Waitangi Tribunal to illustrate the limitations and possibilities for truth-telling, restitution, reclamation, and reconciliation. Across this critique, the author details ongoing Māoricentric work to provide education, emphasizing their tenacity in maintaining Māori values and language alongside schooling in European traditions. In contrast, the chapter coauthored by Helene Thiesen (Greenlandic Inuit) and editor Stephen Minton builds around Denmark’s 1951 duplicitous removal of twenty-two Inuit children (including Thiesen) to Danish institutions and foster families. Sixteen of the young boys and girls were returned to Greenland after eighteen months but were consigned to an orphanage that functioned like many mission schools: surveillance and containment dominated their daily life, and Indigenous languages and lifeways were forbidden. Despite Greenland gaining self-governance and establishing a Reconciliation Commission in 2014, a genuine process of truth-telling and reconciliation remains, as Thiesen notes, a failure fueled by “the continued colonizing mentality of Denmark towards Greenland and its Indigenous people” (107). Placing these and other chapters into conversation with one another draws attention to issues that are directly relevant to Native American and Indigenous studies: how our research projects and methods excavate, rehabilitate, honor, and sustain Indigenous peoples’ lived histories and imagined futures.

This collection seems primarily geared toward undergraduates and graduate students in international and comparative education. The absence of direct engagement with decolonization and an uneven familiarity with current Indigenous studies scholarship limits the collection’s intellectual interventions in our field. Still, emerging and established NAIS scholars may find chapters 3-7, which explicitly center on Indigenous peoples, nations, and histories, to be useful additions to their research and teaching work.

Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples explicitly invites readers to approach the collection from multiple directions and seeks to practice allyship and scholarly coalition through what contributor Natahnee Nuay Winder (a Ute, Paiute, Navajo, and African American citizen of Duckwater Shoshone Nation) calls...