Overview

In Agents of Survivance Anne Ruggles Gere complicates and enriches established accounts of the Indian boarding school era and what preceded it by looking closely at the largely ignored Indigenous women teachers in these schools. Focusing on Sarah Winnemucca, S. Alice Callahan, Angel DeCora, and Ella Deloria, Gere shows how these and many other Indian women teachers subversively resisted assimilation with tribal presence, relationality, connection to land, rejection of victimhood, and maintenance of cultural traditions, art, and languages. Their vulnerable positions in schools directed by Euro-Americans necessitated that their contributions be subversive, nearly invisible. Despite this, they developed policies and practices that were passed to Indian students who in turn became teachers of the next generation of Indian students, and many of their innovations inform contemporary movements toward sovereignty for Indian education. Indispensable for future research, Agents of Survivance includes two appendixes drawn from Bureau of Indian Affairs records documenting dozens of Native women teachers, as well as Native women who worked in boarding schools doing laundry, kitchen work, dormitory cleaning, and sewing.

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9781496244987

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Reviews

""Agents of Survivance breaks new ground in terms of primary source engagement and represents a monumental contribution to the field. Anne Ruggles Gere does well in discovering a litany of women who have mostly been overlooked in previous literature. I know of nothing comparable.""--Hayes Peter Mauro, author of The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School ""The research Anne Ruggles Gere has compiled includes long-overlooked material that provides an enlightening look into the post-Civil War environment for Indian women teachers. It also shows how the women's creativity challenged the schools' assimilationist purposes. I believe that Gere's material will be appreciated as new and important by specialists in Indigenous history, especially those with an interest in Native American feminism.""--Martha Louise Hipp, author of Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

Author Information

Anne Ruggles Gere is Gertrude Buck Collegiate Professor of Education Emerita and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English Emerita at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880–1920 and coeditor of Renovating Rhetoric in Christian Tradition, among other books.

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