Re-Writing/Righting History Through Storytelling: Memory, Identity, and Trauma of Forced Child Removal in Contemporary Indigenous Fiction

The history of American Indian boarding schools had been mostly unknown until a few decades ago. A recent upsurge of writings on this topic across the United States of America and Canada has brought to light the inside perspective, making the damaging effects of the cultural reprogramming through education that affected thousands of Indigenous children for over a century visible and clear. This thesis explores the issues of alienation, trauma, memory, and identity crisis resulting from the forced removal of Indigenous children and their exposure to mainstream education in off-reservation boarding schools during their formative years. It analyses Debby Dahl Edwardson’s novel My Name is Not Easy (2011) and three nonfictional texts – K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s They Called It Prairie Light (1994), Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton’s memoir Fatty Legs (2010), and Laura Tohe’s No Parole Today (1999). All of these texts re-write/right the history of the boarding-school era by emphasizing the assimilation policy as the central component of Indian residential schools’ programme. They reveal not only the negative but also the positive side of the students’ experience as well as the fact that these schools frequently became sites of resistance and resilience in which the disciplinarians’ rules were subverted and Native identity maintained through students’ mutual support, friendship, and solidarity. Although the students sometimes managed to claim the power of the boarding schools for themselves and even though, despite the government’s efforts to destroy their connections to the tribal communities, many of them returned from school even stronger and with the knowledge of many new skills, effects of the boardingschool trauma and discrimination are felt even today as the lingering issues of depression, suicide, and substance abuse continue to plague Native communities. The final part of this paper looks into those issues and explores the possibility to alleviate them by incorporating cross-cultural knowledge and Indigenous teaching methods in contemporary mainstream school curricula.

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