Jane Griffith. Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 328 pp.

Abstract

American Indian or Filipino peoples to a significant degree" and calls for further work in that area (p. 18). While the narrative includes testimony from Native students like Luther Standing Bear, Zitkála-Šá, and several Carlisle graduates who returned as faculty, the vast majority of the text focuses on white teachers' expressed, often racist opinions about their students. In addition, Eittreim uses the word Sioux to refer to the students from Oceti Sakowin Oyate. The term means "enemy" and was weaponized against Lakota and Dakota peoples during the Plains Wars to present them as irredeemably fierce, whereas Lakota and Dakota mean "ally" and "friend." The use of this term is unfortunate, since Eittreim shows throughout that she cares deeply about probing imperial narratives. However, the end result is imbalance. Without a significant counterbalance of student accounts, especially from Filipino students whose voices are entirely absent from their chapters, Teaching Empire tends to neglect the impact of institutional white supremacy teachers enacted against their students. Examining curricula used in these classrooms may have helped to shed further light on engagement between teachers and their students and given greater context to the claims teachers made about their work in their letters, diaries, and memoirs. Teaching Empire makes a crucial contribution to the scholarship of empire and education history by putting its full analytical focus on the teachers who sought to enact US empire through their classrooms at Carlisle and in the Philippines. Scholars will find this book a useful framework from which to build deeper inquiry into these systems of erasure, the specific classroom materials and curricula that shaped those experiences, and the enduring legacy of late nineteenth-century paternalism in both education and policy.