Punishing settlers: Laura Lee Honsig, How Empire Punishes: Land, Loss and Assimilation through Genoa Indian School, 1884-1934, MA dissertation, University of Wien, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Punishing settlers: Laura Lee Honsig, How Empire Punishes: Land, Loss and Assimilation through Genoa Indian School, 1884-1934, MA dissertation, University of Wien, 2025

10Mar25

Abstract: This masters thesis looks at the history of a residential Indian boarding school in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century. This work examines punitive configurations — sedimented practices and ideologies of punishment as well as their contextualization — at Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School from the mid 1880s to the early 1930s. Genoa School’s digitized archive forms the source base for this thesis and grounds the analysis in the concrete details about school life contained therein. Looking at punishment in this way shows that even the pluralistic, humanitarian and benevolent approaches to assimilation that emerged in the reform era were based in the interwoven supremacist logics of racialization, penality and settler colonial expansion. The theoretical intervention of the work draws on the methodological approaches of micro-spatial and global history in order to connect empirical findings to the broader social processes of Indian assimilation, American settler colonial empire, and the penal system. Given that these histories are often considered separately, the conceptual framework of punitive configurations becomes particularly useful as a way to analyze how settler and expansionist logics developed in and through penal institutions, including the boarding school. Indigenous resistance and survival are central to this story, both despite and because of the extraordinary and everchanging violence of indigenous elimination on the North American continent.

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