Presenter: Eva Bertoglio
Mentors: Kevin Hatfield, History; Jennifer O’Neal, Special Collections
Oral Presentation
Major: Humanities
My paper will examine the construction of white femininity amongst Indian boarding school pupils from the 1870s to the 1920s. This paper argues that female boarding school pupils at Warm Springs were subject not only to general forces of assimilation but also to specifically gendered constructions of white femininity in a Victorian context by their teachers and school culture. I will demonstrate this through the gender-segregated instruction, school rules about dress and attire, oral histories of former boarding school pupils and Warm Springs tribal members, and photographs which highlight how white femininity was performed and idealized to the pupils. Oral histories show how many women left the boarding schools with the ambitions of housewifery and domesticity rather than community leadership or traditional lives, which I argue is due to the cultural reprograming the boarding schools were founded on. The reclaiming of the boarding school as a space for cultural education by the tribal community will be examined as a mechanism to destabilize some of the gendered forces which were instilled upon school-age women for sixty years. This research will show how female students at Warm Springs had their culture and traditional roles destabilized and replaced with a white feminine ideal which had long-term consequences for tribal reintegration.