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The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation

Kachur, Curtis
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1510234437881951

Abstract Details

2017, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, English/Literature.
Starting in the late 1880s, the U.S. government decided that it was time to solve the on-going “Indian problem.” The government was concerned about how Indians were not adapting into mainstream society, were remaining on isolated reservations, and continued practicing their non-modern and uncivilized tribal cultures. Since Indians on reservations stood by the side of the road while modernity and capitalism passed them by, the U.S. government devised strategies to enforce complete assimilation by opening boarding schools, enforcing compulsory attendance laws, and taking young children away from their families. The key to changing the next generation of Indians was to target the domestic home and Pratt believed all Indian children needed to become white was an education. The early boarding school era from 1879 to 1930 banned Indian children from speaking their tribal languages, practicing their tribal cultures, and had strict militarized rules that taught them to value white modernity. However, not all Indian children accepted assimilation and many students began to rebel against the school’s authority by finding private moments away from adult supervision. In To Show What an Indian Can Do, Bloom expresses how “Boarding school students clearly showed the capacity to take advantage of spaces wherever they could find them to play. When confined within the walls of an Indian boarding school, one must take advantage of any chance to escape” (xxi). Indian students took advantage of extracurricular activities and found avenues of escape where they could retain their pan-Indian identities. Students could resist assimilation by joining clubs, art classes, or athletic programs. This argument analyzes how sports were a strategy to resist assimilation by examining how student athletes devised ways to retain their pan-Indian identities and how they made private spaces on campus their own.
Jolie Sheffer, PhD (Advisor)
Vibha Bhalla, PhD (Committee Member)
109 p.
American History; Literature; Native American Studies; Native Americans
Indians; Native American; Boarding Schools; Assimilation; Resistance; Sports

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kachur, C. (2017). The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1510234437881951

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kachur, Curtis . The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation. 2017. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1510234437881951.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kachur, Curtis . "The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1510234437881951

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1510234437881951
6,874
© 2017, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation by Curtis Kachur is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.