Education as a settler prison: Janne Lahti, ‘Prisoners of Education: Chiricahua Apaches, Schooling, and the Lived Experience of Settler Colonial Inclusion’, in Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jensz (eds), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 123-143 | settler colonial studies blog

Education as a settler prison: Janne Lahti, ‘Prisoners of Education: Chiricahua Apaches, Schooling, and the Lived Experience of Settler Colonial Inclusion’, in Daniel Gerster, Felicity Jensz (eds), Global Perspectives on Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Palgrave, 2022, pp. 123-143

21Nov22

Abstract: After decades of conflict, the US federal government forcedly removed all Chiricahua Apaches from their homelands in the Southwest in 1886 and took most of the youngsters and children from their parents to Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. There these prisoners of war became students—prisoners of education—cut off from their own kin for years and subject to forced assimilation. Schooling was the next step of settler colonial Indigenous elimination. This chapter looks at the tensions of inclusionary and exclusionary practices in settler colonial education by tracking the Chiricahua Jason Betzinez’s lived experience from Arizona to Pennsylvania and Oklahoma. It examines how as he moved across the continent he moved between Apache and white educational systems that worked in isolation from each other. Carlisle was to bring the Chiricahuas to the settler society on the terms of that settler society as Indigenous students were to adhere to certain inclusionary practices, to eat, dress, talk, and behave likes whites. Inclusion also meant altering the Chiricahua relationship to the land, on how they understood and approached land by working it. Yet, the students still also remained excluded as prisoners of war and racialized subjects—not citizens—of the settler regime.

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