Indian boarding school

Unstoppable: How Jim Thorpe And The Carlisle Indian School Football Team Defeated Army

In the autumn of 1912, the football team from Carlisle Indian Industrial School took the field at the U.S. Military Academy, home to the bigger, stronger, and better-equipped West Points Cadets. Sportswriters billed the game as a sort of rematch, pitting against each other the descendants of U.S. soldiers and American Indians who fought on the battlefield only 20 years earlier. But for lightning-fast Jim Thorpe and the other Carlisle players, that day’s game was about skill, strategy, and determination. Known for unusual formations and innovative plays, the Carlisle squad was out to prove just one thing — that it was the best football team in all the land.

Rattlesnake Mesa: Stories from a Native American Childhood

Chronicles the childhood of EdNah New Rider Weber as she is moved from her Pawnee home to live with her father on a Navajo reservation and then is again uprooted and placed in the Phoenix Indian School.

My Name Is Seepeetza

Her name was Seepeetza when she was at home with her family. But now that she’s living at the Indian residential school her name is Martha Stone, and everything else about her life has changed as well. Told in the honest voice of a sixth grader, this is the story of a young Native girl forced to live in a world governed by strict nuns, arbitrary rules, and a policy against talking in her own dialect, even with her family. Seepeetza finds bright spots, but most of all she looks forward to summers and holidays at home. This autobiographical novel is written in the form of Seepeetza’s diary.

Shi-Shi-Etko

Shi-shi-etko, a Native American girl, spends the last four days before she goes to residential school learning valuable lessons from her mother, father, and grandmother, and creating precious memories of home.

Shinchi’s Canoe

Forced to use only people’s English names and not speak to his siblings at school, Shin-chi holds fast to the canoe given to him by his father, hopeful that things will then improve for his family and the tribe he loves.

 

Sweetgrass Basket

In alternating passages, two Mohawk sisters describe their lives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in 1879 to educate Native Americans, as they try to assimilate into white culture and one of them is falsely accused of stealing.

Featured in Volume I, Issue 3 of WOW Review.