Dread Nation (Dread Nation #1)(104)

However, when I attended a master’s program at a nearby university some years later I was able to visit the Carlisle Historical Society and learn the truth about Indian schools and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in particular: how they broke up families, erased Native culture, victimized vulnerable children, and hired out students for backbreaking labor to nearby farms and households in a system that was eerily reminiscent of chattel slavery.

This exploitative school system became the basis for the fictional combat school system in the alternate historical timeline of Dread Nation. Because if well-meaning Americans could do such a thing to an already wholly subjugated community in a time of peace, what would they do in a time of desperation?

I encourage everyone to read further on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the American Indian boarding school system as a whole. I’m including a list of books I found helpful and that I have seen recommended by Native scholars, who most certainly know better than I:

Archuleta, Margaret L., Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences. Phoenix: Heard Museum, 2000.

Child, Brenda. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2000.

Ellis, Clyde. To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Hyer, Sally. One House, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School. Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Happy reading.

Always,

Justina Ireland, 2018