Survivance at the Old Leupp Boarding School Site on the Navajo Reservation, Arizona, USA

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.

As a Diné (Navajo) archaeologist I aim to decolonize the field of archaeology by researching my tribe’s history for the benefit of the Navajo people and others. The Old Leupp Boarding School was a federal Indian boarding school in operation on the southwest Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, USA from 1909-1942. It was a school meant to assimilate Navajo children into Euro-American society in the early twentieth century, but it was also reused as a Japanese Isolation Center by the United States War Department in 1943 during World War II. Today, Old Leupp exists as a historical archaeological site with potential for community based, collaborate, Indigenous archaeological or heritage projects. For this paper, I begin to explore this dual history and stories of survivance embedded at the Old Leupp Boarding School regarding the assimilation of Navajo children, as well as the imprisonment of Japanese American citizens in the early twentieth century.

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