They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School

"This book is the oldest one on the list. I put it there for a reason. We have all these books now focused on Native people themselves and Native actors, whether in relation to historical episodes, or contemporary life—what everyday Native people are doing, what everyday Native people are saying, finding Native people in archives that have been overlooked. We’ve got this explosion of Native perspectives, which is super exciting. But this book is from 1994 and it’s by a scholar who’s already trying to do that. In her case, it’s the story of a Native American boarding school. She makes the point that if you look at all the American documents, the bureaucratic forms that accompany the creation and maintenance of a boarding school, you’re going to be able to tell one kind of story. But she wanted to talk to the people who went to the school. She calls the people who were formerly students a ‘living archive’ that has been untapped. She interviews former students of the Chilocco school and juxtaposes their perspectives with the story that can be told through American documents. Since this book in 1994, there’s been a series of ongoing historical accounts of boarding schools that now emphasize student perspectives. And that means everyday people’s perspectives, even children’s perspectives. I wanted to put this in because I think it shows there were hints of this process for quite some time. And now we’re seeing how it’s coming to fruition. In some ways, the boarding school records are classic colonial documents. They talk about how much things cost, about how many students there are. It’s report after report after report: this many students taking English, this many students who are ill, this many students who learn how to farm this many acres. It’s bureaucratic, numerical. You hardly know the names of anyone. And even when names are recorded they are often misspelled. People’s family information is missing, even though we know they have families back on the reservation. There’s inaccurate information about people. So, one of the things she’s trying to do is basically say, ‘there’s so much more we can know.’ One of the things that comes out in the book is that students talk about the culture they created together at school, because they were brought together from different reservations, across tribal lines. They met people from tribal nations they had never had contact with before and they created their own student culture. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Students connected in a number of ways, sometimes through forms imposed by the school administration, like learning to play an instrument in the school band. But at other times, students created their own spaces to be together, during times of recreation, meals, evenings or downtime in which they learned to speak to one another in their new common language: English. They start to share things with each other about their experiences. Boarding schools became important networks for people. So when people went back home, they might write letters, and give news about what happened on their reservations. The fact that people gained literacy and connections provided a format for pan-tribal activism later. And that’s a story you would never see in the government documents, which are basically trying to get everyone to be disconnected from their Native communities."