Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States

Andrew Woolford (Univ. of Manitoba), Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2015).

"At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the 'Indian problem' in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the 'Indian problem' as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the 'solution' of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences."

—Publisher's Description