Learn the true stories of Indian boarding school students and their families in this moving nonfiction book for young readers, filled with acts of hope and resistance. During the boarding school era, Native children were taken from their families to attend boarding schools, a devastating policy that threatened the wellbeing of Native people and their cultural practices. Far from home, students suffered from illnesses, poor living conditions, homesickness, and the suppression of their Native languages. With a special focus on the Haskell Institute in Kansas, the Flandreau School in South Dakota, and the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, this in-depth history offers an unfiltered look at letters written by parents, children, and school officials that reveal how profoundly entire families were affected. Their accounts are also filled with precious memories of friendship, football, and love. In Our Own Words is a powerful record of the rebellion and hope of young Indigenous people in the face of segregation and disastrous assimilation policies spanning 1870 to 1940.
Authors
Brenda J. Child is Northrop Professor and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, and former Chair of the Department of American Indian Studies. She is the author of several books in American Indian history including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (1998), which won the North American Indian Prose Award; Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (2012); Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education (with Brian Klopotek, 2014). Her 2014 book My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation won the American Indian Book Award and the Best Book in Midwestern History Award. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian-Smithsonian and past-president of the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association. Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota where she is a member of a committee writing a new constitution for the 12,000-member nation.
