Time in the School Newspapers of Late 19th-Century American Indian Boarding Schools (United States) and Indian Residential Schools (Canada)

• In Event: Inequality and the Construction of Schooling in the 19th Century

Abstract

As Bruno Latour argues, “it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting” (1993, p. 76). In other words, time is a construct. The school newspapers of late nineteenth-century American Indian (U.S.) and Indian Residential Schools (Canada) did just that, creating a past, present, and future for readers, who included clergy and school staff but also students and parents. Timelines in these newspapers are the fantasies of settler colonialism—that Indigenous peoples were in the past and the future is reserved for settlers. Using newspapers from 10 archives across North America, this paper examines both how the newspapers constructed time and how survivors pushed back against colonial narratives of temporality.

Author

• Jane Griffith, York University