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:

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Michigan newspapers frequently mentioned the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School (MPIIBS) during its operation from 1893 to 1934. The school, constructed upon the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe’s Isabella County Indian Reservation and designed to facilitate assimilation of Indigenous children into white Christian-American society, was often treated as an attraction by surrounding communities; including organizations of day-trip campus tours, performances by student bands, and highly-anticipated sports matches between MPIIBS and regional schools. This critical analysis of discourse found within MPIIBS publications and local newspapers such as The Mount Pleasant Times, Isabella County Enterprise, Clare Sentinel, and Provemont Courier argues that rhetoric used in school publications informed and enforced relationships between newspapers, Indigenous students, and surrounding non-Indigenous communities of northern-central Michigan. Additionally examined are presences of paternalistic or settler colonialist rhetoric within newspapers that may have been intentionally utilized to create perceptions of paternalistic bonds formed by MPIIBS staff and non-Indigenous community members towards Indigenous students.