Review by Choice Review
Riney has provided a solid, balanced description of the Rapid City Indian School. Readers looking for horror stories as emphasized in Public Broadcasting's "In the White Man's Image: The Annihilation of a Culture" will not find them here. In a topical approach that draws on 39 linear feet of school records and interviews, Riney reveals parents affecting the treatment of their children, teachers trying, and discipline that was not brutal. Children had good and bad experiences. The real tragedy of the boarding schools was the racist assumption that Indians should be educated to be Christians and to accept menial jobs. Constant underfunding created unbalanced diets and poor conditions that precluded all but the most gifted students from moving beyond the vocational expectations of the larger society. Recent studies by K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Sally Flyer, Clyde Ellis, Brenda Child, and Devon Mihesuah combine with Riney's work to describe the boarding school experience as banal rather than vicious, limiting rather than wantonly destructive, and part of the larger pattern of misguided, poorly funded paternalism that characterized American Indian policy through the 1930s. All levels. G. Gagnon; University of North Dakota
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
