S1E11 Native Women Writers and Colonial Domesticity at the Federal Indian Boarding Schools

In this presentation, we'll look at some writings of American Indian women who encountered the colonial, domestic education propagated by federal Indian schools and white women reformers who lived and worked in Indian communities throughout North America. We'll see how these Indian women writers altered the course laid out for them by these reformers and teachers, for in learning to practice the rituals of domesticity they also learned to write about those domestic rituals and sentimental values in syncretic ways.

Dr. Amanda Zink is Associate Professor of English at Idaho State University where she teaches courses in ethnicity, indigeneity, sexuality, gender, and intersectionality in literature. Her research and teaching focuses on American literatures from the margins, with particular emphasis on American Indian literature from the late-19th century to the present. Her first monograph came out in 2018 from the University of New Mexico Press and is titled Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950. With the support of an IHC Research Grant, she is currently compiling an anthology of literature written by students at the Indian boarding schools in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.

Watch the video here.