Breaking Boundaries: Activism and Acculturation at Chemawa Indian School

In his analysis of the Outing Program at Sherman Institute, Whalen argues that Indigenous youth, through their experiences in the school’s outing programs, were able to expand their worlds and thus their prospects, appropriating opportunities that were not intended in these manual training programs. I expand on Whalen’s idea of cultural survival in my analysis of the Outing Program at Chemawa Indian School by engaging in a specific gendered lens of perspective of this work-focused assimilationist policy in the 1920s. Through my investigation of the Outing Program at Chemawa, I argue how boys and girls experienced and self-advocated differently within the Outing Program as the intentions and deeply rooted cultural assumptions about Indigenous boys and girls varied. The Outing placements of Indigenous girls was to assimilate them into a colonizing paradigm of European gender norms that heavily dictated their existence as low or unpaid laborers in homes as wives, mothers or domestic servants. Whereas the Outing placement of Indigenous boys was to train them for specific skill sets in manual labor fields in forestry, agricultural and various trades as income workers. The ways in which girls versus boys were able to resist these colonizing and assimilating forces and engage cultural survival was also different. Indigenous girls were strapped with the double burden of taking on a European image of unpaid wife and mother while trying to survive in an economic system that afforded them and their communities minimal financial security. Indigenous students at Chemawa had to navigate the intense racism permeating rural and urban spheres of work. The double bind for female students was the additional barrier set before them because of sexist perceptions of their abilities and value as workers. Where student responses diverge between males and females is reflected in how they navigated these extremely challenging circumstances.