"You Have Harmed Us": Structural Violence and the Indian School experience among the Port Gamble S’Kllalam community.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In 1855, the U.S. government signed the Treaty of Point No Point with the S'Klallam community. In exchange for fishing rights, the S’Klallam ceded 750,000 acres of land and accepted formal education. The Indian education system has enacted both symbolic and structural forms of violence among the S’kllalam, violence that has contributed to the long-term social and economic disenfranchisement of the community. The corrosive legacy of this system is captured in a statement by tribal member George Jones who declared, “you have harmed us with that boarding school removal, destroying families, destroying their lives...” Taking up Jones’s anger, this talk explores how the S’Klallam community has resisted, adapted, and persisted in response to American colonialism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on object-based interviews, I argue for the importance of counter-storytelling as a mechanism for unmasking systemic violence and a means of rejecting narratives of indigenous assimilation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reckoning with Violence   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 802