Teaching the History of Residential Schools Through Graphic Novels: A Critical Multiliteracies Approach

Introduction

Though the Boarding School experience was a documented trauma for Indigenous communities, families, and individuals, it is not prominently or comprehensively featured in K-12 classrooms or curricular standards. Most students in the U.S. have vanishingly few opportunities to learn about indigenous people or cultures, and that “Only four states—Arizona, Washington, Oklahoma and Kansas—include content about Indian boarding schools.” (Landry, 2018). Even teachers committed to discussing Boarding School experiences or other critical themes in history may not feel prepared to facilitate these discussions or may fear consequences if they do, given larger trends of teachers’ hesitancy to broach controversial topics (Cassar et al., 2023; Nganga et al., 2020; Stanford, 2022). Focusing on forced Boarding School experiences, this chapter considers how a critical multiliteracies approach to teaching graphic novels can facilitate pre-service teachers’ critical awareness of literacy and history pedagogy while prompting them to challenge their own and their students’ biases. After outlining the critical history of Boarding Schools, the chapter will introduce the graphic novel Sugar Falls (2021), a text which documents Elder Betty Ross’ residential school experience. Then, the chapter will propose multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996)—an approach to critical literacy which responds to inequities inside and outside the classroom—as a pedagogy which can facilitate critical dialogue. Finally, the authors will model a critical multiliteracies analysis of Sugar Falls (2021), reflecting on how engaging in such a reading can help teachers and students deepen their understanding of Indigenous Boarding Schools. The chapter will argue that a multiliteracies approach to teaching graphic novels like Sugar Falls can provide pre-service teachers with tools for facilitating their own students’ critical literacies.

The chapter will address the following questions:

• 1)

  What themes and events should an historical analysis and narrative about the Native American Boarding School experience include?

• 2)

  How can a multiliteracies reading of the graphic novel Sugar Falls facilitate a critical awareness and analysis of the text and history?

• 3)

  How can pre-service teachers engage in critical multiliteracies readings to challenge bias and engage in transformative dialogue with their own students?

The Critical Theme: A History Of Boarding Schools

To contextualize the graphic novel, this chapter will begin with a historical analysis of the Indian Boarding School experience. The destructive experiences and enduring effects of Indian Mission Board Schools have been well-documented in media and books (Adams, 2020; Child, 1998;Lajimodiere, 2019; Lajimodiere, 2021; Lewyn, 2017). The forced assimilation policies of the United States government in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had deep, dark, and bloody roots that extended back into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Hain-Jamall, 2013; Reyhner & Eder, 2017; Trafzer et al., 2006;). Beginning in the era of contact and encounter, religious and secular Euro-Americans often employed schools and missions to transform, deculturate, and “civilize” what they saw as “barbarous” others. Euro-American schools of this period sought to instill moral, intellectual, and personal discipline in children through rote practice and coercive physical and verbal punishments. In contrast, child-rearing and educational practices in Indigenous contexts were often communal and focused on adaptive survival strategies to negotiate a hostile and unpredictable natural world (Hain-Jamall, 2013). Indigenous children learned by watching and mimicking their kin and community members; from a young age, they played-acted adult roles, listened intently to their elders' moral-laden and historical stories, and rarely suffered the punishments meted out to Euro-American counterparts.