“America the Ugly”: Remembering the Intermountain Indian School’s Student Poets as Indigenous Literary Activists

• In Event: Decolonial Pedagogies: From the Reservation to the Street

Abstract

In January 1950, five hundred Navajo students travelled to Brigham City, Utah to enter the Intermountain Indian School, the largest post-WWII U.S. federal Indian boarding school. This paper turns to the student-produced poetry of the school in order to (re)connect these poets to the much larger tradition and history of Navajo literature and literacy while also analyzing the ways through which these students turned to poetry as an avenue of activism and resistance against dominant ideologies and industries of unilateral U.S. assimilation.

Over the past decade, such scholars as Brenda Child (Ojibwe) and Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke/Creek Nation) have begun to increase the field’s interest in and access to re-narrating the American Indian boarding school experience from diverse Indigenous perspectives. Such projects have often prioritized the oral, written, and photographed histories of school survivors, as well as the stories of students’ descendants. This paper argues for the importance of supplementing these re-emerging narratives through the original stories that boarding school students produced as students. Throughout the twenty-five years of the Intermountain Indian School, for example, students produced an annual yearbook, a monthly newspaper, and at least thirty-one collections of student poetry. And this body of neglected Navajo literature is profoundly powerful in its ability to maintain and convey the students’ cultural identities through forms of literary resistance. While this year’s annual meeting calls for conversations centered on “pedagogies of dissent,” this paper highlights Navajo students’ ability to transform an institutional space of pedagogical genocide into a platform of poetic protest.

Author

• Michael P Taylor, Brigham Young University