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Paper short abstract:

Analyses publications of Michigan's Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School: the state's only federally funded and operated boarding school for Indigenous students (1893 - 1934). Also examined: the lingering effects of school policies built upon settler colonialism and state paternalism.

Paper long abstract:

The rural town of Mount Pleasant, Michigan serves as the former location of the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School, a federally established boarding school for Indigenous students. Created by the United States Congress in 1891 and active from 1893 to 1934, this boarding school claimed average yearly enrolments of around 300 Indigenous children. Designed to wholly assimilate these students into American culture, the school was integrated within the surrounding community, as many students entered the city’s workforce upon graduation. The school’s history is rife with accounts of abuse, neglect, mandated attendance and compulsive labour; deeply affecting the Saginaw Chippewa community’s cultural memory and history. This article draws on critical discourse analysis to explore ways in which paternalistic and colonial rhetoric used within materials such as annual school inspection reports, local newspapers, and other regional publications established particular power structures and created broader societal attitudes towards Chippewa students and their education within the surrounding community of Mount Pleasant and state of Michigan. The article will further examine lasting effects of these power dynamics and attitudes upon perceptions of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe within the state of Michigan today; particularly in the forms of local terminology, beliefs, and community-held stereotypes.