News from School: Language, Time, and Place in the Newspapers of 1890s Indian Boarding Schools in Canada

Though few documents remain showing exactly how English was taught at Indian boarding schools (a term that includes both residential schools in Canada as well as their counterpart in the U.S.), some schools produced newspapers. Newspaper production at boarding schools occurred for almost 100 years and in diverse regions across both Canada and the U.S.

In this dissertation, I focus on five newspapers produced at four nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools in Canada, arguing that these documents and the printing programs that produced them afford a rare glimpse into language instruction in situ. They feature writing by teachers and students as well as audiences that included community members, governing bodies, and parents.

These newspapers participated in an assimilative agenda but, I argue, also feature ways in which students resisted as well as resignified and repurposed English for their own needs. Despite the schools agenda to erase Indigenous languages, promoting what Andrea Bear Nicholas calls linguicide, students demonstrated in school newspapers their ability to maintain Indigenous languages and learn English. And while much research suggests a separation between boarding schools in Canada and boarding schools in the U.S., these newspapers reveal evidence of both commonalities and communication across the border, particularly as the two systems began. Through school newspapers, this dissertation aims to contribute to what Dwayne Donald calls excavating the colonial terrain.

This research analyzes school newspapers as complex evidence of the disciplinary techniques driving discourses of settler colonialism as well as Indigenous students resistance and responses. By investigating their multiple purposes and audiences, I argue nineteenth-century school newspapers both represented and attempted to constitute language, time, and place for readers and served as a testament to linguicide. Yet even within the tightly controlled narrative of the newspaper, students resisted in their own ways and used newspapers to articulate something of their own experiences and strategies of survivance. This research asks how we might come to understand these documents in a post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission (but not post-truth and reconciliation) Canada today.