Full Description
In Agents of Survivance Anne Ruggles Gere complicates and enriches established accounts of the Indian boarding school era and what preceded it by looking closely at the largely ignored Indigenous women teachers in these schools. Focusing on Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, Angel DeCora, and Ella Deloria, Gere shows how these and many other Indian women teachers subversively resisted assimilation with tribal presence, relationality, connection to land, rejection of victimhood, and maintenance of cultural traditions, art, and languages. Their vulnerable positions in schools directed by Euro-Americans necessitated that their contributions be subversive, nearly invisible. Despite this, they developed policies and practices that were passed to Indian students who in turn became teachers of the next generation of Indian students, and many of their innovations inform contemporary movements toward sovereignty for Indian education.
Indispensable for future research, Agents of Survivance includes two appendixes drawn from Bureau of Indian Affairs records documenting dozens of Native women teachers, as well as Native women who worked in boarding schools doing laundry, kitchen work, dormitory cleaning, and sewing.
Contents
1. The Emergence of Indian Education
2. Indigenous Women Teachers
3. Winnemucca, Word Warrior
4. The Peabody Institute
5. Alice Callahan, Child of Removal
6. Alice Callahan and Relational Survivance
7. Angel DeCora and "Indian Art"
8. Angel DeCora's Art of Survivance
9. Ella Deloria and Indian Progress
10. Ella Deloria's Temporal Imagination
11. Legacies of Survivance
12. Toward Educational Sovereignty
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Indigenous Classroom Teachers
Appendix 2: Indigenous Staff Members
Notes
Bibliography
Index
