Investigating Relationships Between Women in the Native American Residential School System Using Gale’s Scholarly Resources for Learning and Research

Emma Ascott, “U.S. Indigenous boarding schools to be investigated.” Indian Life, vol. 42 (2), 2021, Gale General OneFile

By Ellen Woodley, History Graduate

When I started writing my dissertation, I was told by every supervisor to “start with your primary sources” and mould your dissertation around the sources you find. It became clear to me that the primary sources are the real root of your dissertation; the historical grounding from which your creative ideas bloom. Having an interest in Native American history, I chose to focus my dissertation on exploring the relationships young women had within the assimilationist boarding school system of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Within this, I investigated the relationships students had with their maternal role models at home, their teachers, and their peers and how these were determiners of their broader experiences as Native women at school. Boarding schools were set up by Captain Richard Pratt in 1879 in order to assimilate young Native American children into nonindigenous life. Pratt’s resounding sentiment around the boarding schools was that the ‘savagery’ these children had been taught could be unlearnt and therefore boarding schools had the potential to ‘kill the Indian and save the man’. Within the system, abuse and Tuberculosis were rampant but the boarding schools survived on a culture of silence which means very rarely were the truthful experiences of children published in sources I could use in my dissertation. While this proved to be an issue for me, this case study will demonstrate how Gale Research Complete and Archives Unbound assisted me in providing sources for a dissertation plagued by historical silence.

Proving your topic is historically relevant

An integral part of writing the introduction to your dissertation is proving that the topic you have chosen to study is historically relevant. This often means proving the topic still has historical value in the modern-day, thus your research can shed light on contemporary themes or issues. In the late 2010s, the bodies of boarding school students were found under various historic educational institutions in the USA and Canada. This motivated a scholarly interest in discovering what secrets the residential school system has been able to hide from public investigation. Gale Research Complete assisted me in finding press coverage that proved the abuses of the system still prevailed in public and academic consciousness. With Gale Research Complete I was able to simply search in the key terms US Indigenous Boarding School’ and set the publication date to between 2018 and 2021. Gale Research Complete found documents in a magazine, academic journal and newspaper format which made it easy for me to refine exactly what I was looking for.

Screenshot of Gale Research Complete search bar and result list, showing source type (Magazines, Academic Journals and News)

I chose an article from a 2021 edition of Indian Life magazine detailing how nearly 1,000 bodies had been found in mass graves on the grounds of a Canadian residential boarding school as well as how Deb Haaland, the Secretary of the Interior, had pledged to investigate similar abuses within the United States. Being able to cite such a recent article gave me the impetus to argue in my introduction just how integral it is that we investigate all aspects of the residential school system to do justice both to its survivors and victims.

Using primary sources from Archives Unbound

 The University of Bristol has access to Gale’s Archives Unbound, within which I found a source that became central to my dissertation. Archives Unbound is so easy to navigate as the content (niche archival collections) has been helpfully split into sixteen broad topics of study, including Native American Studies which stood out to me immediately. Within this topic, Gale provides access to the ‘Meriam Report on Indian Administration and the Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the U.S.’ published between 1928 and 1943. The boarding school system was reformed in the 1920s after the Meriam Report was published and because I was using personal narratives from women who attended in the 1880s as well as in the 1920s, it was important for me to express that I recognised how the system differed between these two periods. I had previously searched for the Meriam Report online and although it is widely accessible, I found it hard to access the full text. So it was great to find that Archives Unbound had access to the entirety of the Report which consists of 24,382 documents! Such a large number of documents seemed overwhelming to me at first however the Term Frequency tool made it possible for me to see when education was discussed within the report at periods that fit in with the timeline used in my thesis. Gender historian Julia Laite once wrote that those who ‘listen in’ only hear what they are expecting to find but those who truly ‘listen’ will be able to access meaningful, and sometimes unexpected, historical narratives and voices. The fact that Gale provides access to the full text of important documents like the Meriam Report means that I was not just mining through the parts other people had deemed useful but was able to truly listen to new and unusual points about the residential boarding school system which had previously been ignored.

Ending the historical silence around Indigenous women

Tackling a thesis on the residential boarding school system posed several issues, most starkly being that this was a system that thrived on a culture of silence. Yet, with the resources provided by Gale and the functions such as the Term Frequency tool, I was able to find meaningful new sources as well as focus on new parts of wellstudied documents. I used personal narratives written by women who survived the boarding school system as my key primary sources but the resources I found on Gale’s platforms supported the brave voices of these women throughout the whole process. The Gale resources helped me theorise that the voices of women in the boarding school system hold historical importance and the building and breaking of female relationships within the system was a central determiner of their experiences. Around a topic so veiled in historical silence, Gale assisted me in proving that it is integral we continue to investigate the abuses of this system by finding and formulating new perspectives. In my case, this involved bringing to the foreground female voices, emotions and relationships and as a result creating a new lens for historical discovery.