Emergence Geographies during the Boarding School on the Rosebud Reservation, South Dakota.

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boarding And Residential Schools: Healing, Survivance And Indigenous Persistence", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the US federal government sought to fundamentally reconfigure the cultural geography of Sicangu (Brulé) people through the creation of the Rosebud reservation and the imposition of Western education. In this talk, I use archival evidence and oral histories shared by Rosebud tribal members, to document the ways Sicangu people practiced survivance—a combination of resistance and cultural persistence—in the face of government-direct assimilatio. Drawing on Laura Harjo’s (2019) concept of emergence geographies, I discuss how Sicangu people spatialized their futurity by asserting autonomy over federally funded day schools along with associated facets of the built environment and settlement patterns on the reservation. By highlighting the capacity of Indigenous societies to engage in culturally grounded forms of innovation, Harjo's concept of emergence geographies provides a critical approach rooted in Indigenous ontology for archaeologists and communities reckoning with the historical trauma of the boarding school era.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Boarding And Residential Schools: Healing, Survivance And Indigenous Persistence   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow