Date of Submission
Spring 2022
Academic Program
Human Rights
Project Advisor 1
Nicole Caso
Abstract/Artist's Statement
In 2021, the location and repatriation of unmarked graves of children at former Indian Residential and Boarding Schools in Canada and the United States headlined some of the largest news media outlets in the Northern hemisphere. Through these media headlines, the untold history of the 19th and 20th century Indian Boarding Schools began to unfold for much of the American public. Through an examination of the history of Indian Boarding Schools in the United States, Western and Indigenous intergenerational trauma theory, memory scholarship, memories of Carlisle school descendants, and decolonial land-based healing practices, this paper explores how Indian Boarding Schools were implemented as tools of ongoing settler colonialism to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their ancestral homelands. As a form of structural violence, Boarding Schools were tools of Indigenous genocide, using the site of land and memory to further harm Indigenous peoples and lifeways. However, through efforts to revitalize and re-imagine intergenerational transmissions of land based knowledge, practices, and memories, healing from Boarding School wounds is possible.
Open Access Agreement
Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Tencer, Olivia Nicole, "Healing Intergenerational Wounds: Land and Memory as the Site of Indian Boarding School Violences in the United States" (2022). Senior Projects Spring 2022. 209.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2022/209
A letter from the Assistant Commissioner to Mrs. R. S Westing, “Inquiries Regarding Closure of the Carlisle Indian School,” February 27, 1928, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/documents/inquiries-regarding-closure-carlisle-indian-school.
Be a Carlisle Student.png (703 kB)
Yearbook entry by student Frank Verigan ‘18 titled “Be a Carlisle Student.” Carlisle Indian School, “Yearbook of the Carlisle Indian School 1918” (Yearbook, Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, 1918), Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/publications/yearbook-carlisle-indian-school-1918.
female Indigenous students.png (750 kB)
Photos of female Indigenous students at Carlisle with titles left to right, 1. “On the Bandstand with Teacher,” 2. “Studying on the Way to Domestic Science,” 3. “Smiles Kill Many Ills,” and 4. “On My Sole.” Carlisle Indian School. “Yearbook of the Carlisle Indian School 1918” (Yearbook, Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, 1918), Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/publications/yearbook-carlisle-indian-school-1918.
Feudalism to Freedom.png (770 kB)
Group of Indigenous students dressed up for a play on “‘Feudalism to Freedom’- Representative of the Year 1621.” “Yearbook of the Carlisle Indian School 1918” (Yearbook, Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections, 1918), Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/publications/yearbook-carlisle-indian-school-1918.
Mary Perry, John Chaves, and Ben Thomas (After).png (384 kB)
Image of Indigenous students, Mary Perry, John Chaves, and Ben Thomas’ before and afters (left to right). Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (October 1985): 61, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2326-8492.1985.tb00135.x.
Mary Perry, John Chaves, and Ben Thomas (Before).png (388 kB)
Image of Indigenous students, Mary Perry, John Chaves, and Ben Thomas’ before and afters (left to right). Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (October 1985): 61, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2326-8492.1985.tb00135.x.
Plains Indigenous prisoners (after).png (296 kB)
Image of unspecified Plains Indigenous prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida (after picture). Pratt regularly used before and after photos of his Indigenous students to “prove” transformation from “savagery” to “civilization.” Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (October 1985): 57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2326-8492.1985.tb00135.x.
Plains Indigenous prisoners (before).png (273 kB)
Image of unspecified Plains Indigenous prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida (before picture). Pratt had “experimented” with teaching prisoners English here before creating his school. Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (October 1985): 56, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2326-8492.1985.tb00135.x.
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