Paper short abstract:

KISS boarding school - a laboratory project, a 'performativity of power' and a continuation of the colonial-brahmical system on indigenous people whose lives are forcibly entrenched in the everydayness of resource extraction, land theft, social assimilation and cultural annihilation.

Paper long abstract:

The policy of assimilation, mainstreaming or de-tribalising indigenous communities by placing their children in residential schools has been increasingly disproved and abandoned, most publicly throughout North America, Australia and Canada since the 1980s. In India, this history and its dangers are little known, with relatively little awareness of how they are being replicated among many of India’s Adivasi communities. Extraction education has evolved more slowly in India, but has now reached a larger scale than in any other country, with many similar manifestations to the ‘stolen generations’ model that has created outrage elsewhere.

The KISS residential school in Odisha, India for Adivasi children, symbolises the gruesome colonial legacy and is an important marker of how Adivasi communities are being systematically consumed under the globalised project of ‘mainstreaming tribal children’. Post liberalisation, also the same time around which KISS school started, many extractive corporations began operating residential schools for Adivasi children as a part of their CSR policies. These companies have a strategic interest in the lands that Adivasi communities inhabit. Today, schools like KISS not only receive large amounts of funds from companies which wrest control over tribal lands, but have emerged as nodal agencies for extractive corporations to socially engineer and organise Adivasi identities to suite and justify India's fastest growing 'development story'. Residential schools for Adivasi children, more particularly in mineral rich regions, has almost become a rite of passage to becoming a part of extractive society, and not a means for achieving social justice.