- September 30, 2015
McNally Robinson Booksellers and the University of Manitoba Press invites you to celebrate the Winnipeg launch of This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States.
When: Wedneday, September 30, 7:00 pm
Where: McNally Robinson Booksellers (1120 Grant Avenue), Winnipeg.
Cost: FREE
Light refreshments will be served.
About the Book
At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the “Indian problem” in both Canada and the United States. 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, a variety of staff, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman factors 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.
Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harms caused by assimilative education. Inspired by the signing of the 2006 Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experiment offers a multi-layered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada.
About the Author
Andrew Woolford is a professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba and a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar Award.
