Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890–2020 by Samantha M. Williams University of Nebraska Press, 2022 (review)

Reviewed by: Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890–2020 by Samantha M. Williams University of Nebraska Press, 2022 Michael P. Taylor (bio) Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival: A History of the Stewart Indian School, 1890–2020 by Samantha M. Williams University of Nebraska Press, 2022 WITH U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR Secretary Deb Haaland's 2021 creation of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a long-awaited opportunity arrived for increased national attention to and acknowledgment of boarding school histories and their intergenerational legacies. Soon after Secretary Haaland's announcement, K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Child published pieces in the Washington Post challenging readers to recognize that the genocidal project of federal Indian boarding schools continued the long-standing strategy of removing Indigenous Peoples from their home communities and lands. As they have been doing since the 1990s, Lomawaima and Child set the discursive tone for the emerging era of reconciliation in the United States. By documenting the entangled histories of U.S. settler colonialism that came to a head in the creation and decades-long administration of boarding schools, historians and Indigenous studies scholars have the urgent responsibility to assertively engage, and thereby shape, public discourse and policy with Indigenous communities and leaders. It is the duty of scholars to imagine and develop what reconciliation and healing might look like for Indigenous Peoples in the United States. This long-view approach to boarding school histories is what Samantha M. Williams does so well in her 130-year history of the Stewart Indian School, Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival. Williams refuses to tell an oversimplified story of the school or a reductive history of the students, alumni, and survivors. This willingness to represent the complicated, even contradictory, experiences and attitudes toward Stewart emerges out of an ethical obligation to the relationships Williams developed with the families, administrators, and community members that shaped the Stewart Indian School then and now. In so doing, Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival joins a growing body of locally specific and collaborative boarding school scholarship that traces the continuation of assimilationist education agendas into the late twentieth century, including such important works as Clifford E. Trafzer, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, and Lorene Siquoc's The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue (2012), Kevin Whalen's End Page 135 Native Students at Work (2016), and Farina King, Michael Taylor, and James Swenson's Returning Home (2021). What makes Assimilation, Resilience, and Survival such an important contribution to boarding school histories is the Stewart Indian School's position as being among the first schools created and one of the few remaining in operation. Stewart's unique longevity allows Williams to guide readers from the origination of boarding schools through each era of assimilation, protest, reform, termination, relocation, self-determination, and reclamation. Divided into five chapters organized around important reinforcements of or shifts in Indian policy, Williams moves fluidly between national, tribal, and school-specific contexts. Though the book is primarily about the Stewart Indian School, with ample images, tables of data, and survivor testimonies, readers are introduced to the boarding school system in its entirety, demonstrating that at its core—even in the most progressive eras—the system was designed to forever remove Indigenous children from their homelands, communities, and cultures. Williams prioritizes direct stories of Stewart students and survivors without pushing a singular narrative or argumentative agenda. When she shares a student or survivor's experiences of harsh discipline and abuse, she validates the stories by referencing national data of student abuse and neglect. At the same time, when she shares positive student experiences, she commends the teller's resilience, never questioning the authenticity of the teller's experience, but she also never allows such testimonies to be apologetic for the larger assimilationist system. In our current era of growing political, communal, and interpersonal division, Williams strikes a vital historiographical balance between agency and accountability, holding space for multiple truths at the same time without losing sight of the underlying boarding school agenda whose posterity continue to work against the self-determination of Indigenous families, communities, and nations. As comprehensive and well-crafted as Williams's book is, it compels me to think more about...