Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
79. Did Indigenous children lose their religion in US residential boarding schools?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Zara Surratt [+]
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, PhD candidate
Zara Surratt is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the religious history of the American West, the intersections of race, disability and religion, ideas of embodied difference, and religion and children.
Description
Residential boarding schools were a central component of Federal Indian policy after the Civil War. This essay examines how institutions tried and failed to annihilate their pupils’ religion and replace it with an industrial Christian ethic, and demonstrates that students creatively interacted with this instruction in dynamic and unexpected ways.