The Head, the Heart, and the Hands: Hampton, Carlisle, and Hilo in/as Circuits of Transpacific Empire, 1819-1887.

Abstract

The topic of federal American Indian Industrial boarding schools has inspired one of the most abundant historiographies in American Indian History. Yet, as my dissertation demonstrates, a wide and critical gap exists in the framing and historicization of this profoundly influential chapter of indigenous history, federal policy, and U.S. settler-colonialism. The established narrative of Indian industrial boarding schools situates their origin at an abandoned Army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. This dissertation, "The Head, the Heart, and the Hands: Hampton, Carlisle, and Hilo Industrial Schools in/as Circuits of Transpacific Empire, 1819-1887” establishes new spatial, temporal, and political boundaries for the creation of the U.S. federal Indian boarding school system. This dissertation disrupts disciplinary bounding and locates Indian boarding schools in particularly charged intersections of Pacific Island and American Indian histories. Understanding them as such creates space for scholarship that interrogates American Indian boarding schools with a broader, more accurate, and more forceful critique. This work aims to make a critical intervention in the theorizing of the federal Indian boarding school system, one that substantively elucidates the impact of Native peoples upon one another and the federal policy makers who would profoundly shape the lives of generations of Indian families. This dissertation also aims to illuminate ways in which federal Indian education facilitated indigenous dispossession and U.S. settler-colonialism. Further, I hope my work honors the experiences of my family members, who attended Michigan’s Mt. Pleasant Indian Industrial School and went on to contribute much beauty, wisdom and love in our home communities—Bay Mills Indian Community and Walpole Island First Nation. Tribal oral histories about boarding schools, as well as the legacy of silence, inspired and motivated my work.