Writing Wednesday: Campuses and Control

As I noted yesterday, over the next few weeks, I’m working on a major revision of a chapter in my book on the archaeology of the contemporary American experience. This chapter considers military bases and, at least initially, college campuses, as landscapes of control. (If you want, you can read the chapter here.)

As I worked on it more over the last few weeks, however, I became increasingly convinced that I needed to address the archaeology of both Native American residential and boarding schools and a few other examples that show how the recent excavation of schools have revealed both horrors of abuse as well as significant narratives of resistance and survivance in these contexts. The design of their campuses to not only shape the bodies and minds of their residents but also to obscure the failings of the system of assimilation and “reform”. 

This what I was working on today. It’s a start and, as always, I’d appreciate any and all feedback on this.   

There is a clear and explicit relationship between landscapes associated with military training and the role that the architecture, landscape, and policies of schools played in creating discipline. Whereas the former, ideally at least, largely involved voluntary participants in the process of creating disciplined bodies and minds, the latter often involved involuntary subjects. The well-ordered appearance of schools reflected the promise of an orderly transition to a more disciplined life, on the one hand, and served both to prevent and obscure student resistance, on the other. It is in this context that the archaeology of educational institutions plays a key role in not only unpacking the methods that the schools used to communicate and enforce social expectations, but also evidence for student resistance. The following section will look at two sets of examples. One will focus on the archaeology of campus life and the role that archaeology has played in complicating our understanding of the contemporary student and faculty experience. The other set of examples will look at recent work done at Indian residential and boarding schools which explicitly considers how these places sought to suppress and hide student resistance to their mission.

The legacy and history of Native American residential and boarding schools is complex and often tragic. Introduced in the late 19th century, these schools represented a strategy designed to force the Native American and First Nations children to abandon their indigenous identities and adopt settler European ways of life. The origins of these schools was in the 19th-century shift from military and political efforts to colonize Native Americans as external enemies of the state to 20th-century efforts at internal colonization which sought to eradicate Native American groups through various forms of assimilation. The military origins of these practices persisted in the organization of boarding and residential schools where federal and state authorities sent, sometimes by force, Native American children for re-education. In general these institutions, such as the Carlisle Indian School founded in 1879, provided basic instruction in English, reading, writing, and math as well as vocational training military drills and discipline. In general, these institutions prepared Native American children for manual labor and domestic service after their schooling and sought to undermine their connection to their indigenous languages, traditions, and life ways. While most of the research has focused on the origin and early 20th century history of these schools, many of them continued to function in various capacities well into the late 20th century. More than that, the often traumatic experiences associated with time at these schools continues to shape indigenous identity in the US and Canada today.

Sarah Surface-Evans showed how the organization of the grounds of the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School served to enforce discipline, promote gender roles common in white society, and deter resistance among the pupils. This school functioned from 1893-1933 and drew students not only from the adjoining Saginaw Chippewa Reservation but also Menominee, Miami, Mohawk, Ottawa, and Potawatomi Tribes. The architecture and design of the campus not only imparted European standards of order through its use of symmetrical Neoclassical architecture, but also strictly segregated boys and girls sections of campus according to educational and social expectations. Girls dormitories stood proximate to buildings dedicated to domestic science, the hospital, and the laundry, whereas boys dormitories stood adjacent to vocational education buildings, athletic fields, and a wooded area of campus where boys had considerable freedom to roam. The degree to which the students adhered to these formal devisions remains difficult to determine in the archaeological record, but excavations suggest that students developed their own currency comprising of clay tokens and beads in circumvention of school policies. Moreover, it seems likely that a student set fire to a dormitory and the school’s laundry, both of which stood on the girls’ side of campus.

The work of Owen Lindauer at the Phoenix Indian School dump site (Lindauer 2009) documented over 100,000 artifacts associated with turn of the 20th century life at the Phoenix Indian School which drew students from Navajo and Hopi communities throughout the American southwest. The school continued to operate until 1990, although excavations at the school’s dump mainly produced artifacts from the early 20th century. Lindauer argued that the artifacts from the dump revealed the use of military disciplinary practices at the school including the buttons from military style uniforms, but also indications of resistance. The appearance of manufactured objects adapted through traditional tool making techniques making them more appropriate for Native American craft practices suggests that students did not entirely embrace the emphasis on mechanized and industrialized production skills. The presence of non-local pebbles and clay effigies of animals and birds may hint at continued Native American religious practices at the school despite efforts at their suppression.

Davina Two Bears 2019 dissertation documented the Old Leupp Boarding School on the Navajo Reservation. The Old Leupp school functioned from 1909-1942 when it was converted to a Japanese Internment Camp and finally destroyed in the 1960s. Because the Diné consider excavation to be problematic, Two Bears developed an archaeological approach that drew on archival material, oral histories, and her own familiarity with the site. Consistent with the more conventional archaeological work by Lindauer and Surface-Evans, students at the Leupp School continued Diné practices associated with kinship and gender roles, cosmology, and language despite the sometimes violent efforts to suppress indigenous ways of life. Her work is especially significant because it both develops and relies on an archaeological practice that reflects indigenous understandings of material remains and presents a complex and nuanced understanding of the experience of childhood at the Leupp School. In this way, Two Bears work provides another significant example of Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance (2008) which we already saw deployed in Ann Elena Stinchfield Danis’s study of community on the Albany Bulb in the previous chapter (Danis 2020). Two Bears understood, for example, that the role of older girls protecting younger or small boys at the school and girls roles in pilfering additional food at night preserved Diné attitudes toward kinship and gendered practices outside of the formal structures of education practices. At the same time, she demonstrated how it was possible to subvert the expectations of contemporary archaeological practice with its interest in excavation and other materially invasive practices and by approach the archaeology of the Old Leupp school in ways that respect Diné attitudes toward the past while still preserving both trauma and stories of resistance.

The emphasis on resistance and survivance at Native American residential and boarding schools should not serve to paper over trauma and physical violence associated with these places. As recent work at the Brandon Indian Residential School in Brandon, Manitoba (Nicols 2016, 2020) and at the Kuper Island Industrial School in British Columbia (Simons, Martindale, and Wylie 2020) have shown, the existence of unmarked burials at these schools reflects the level of crass disregard for the lives of their students. Archaeologists working closely with First Nations communities have sought to make visible the horrible toll of these schools on students and families despite efforts to hide physical cost associated with colonialist practices. The violent dislocation of children from their families, the often inadequate provisions for their wellbeing and health, and the willingness to hide the failings of institutions claiming to prepare indigenous children for a better life reflected a system that required the appearance of control and domination. In these situations, archaeology becomes an approach that can provide a foundation for contemporary indigenous communities to understand and regain ownership over their own past and when possible and appropriate find closure and articulate terms for reconciliation.