1. The Iranian Revolution: The Islamic Revolution that reshaped the Middle East
2. Revolutionary Iran: A history of the Islamic Republic

I have just finished "All the Shah's Men", which went through Iran's 1906 constitutional revolution until Operation Ajax that brought down Mossadegh (so preferably not a book that spends a long time going through that). Instead, I wish to buy a book that goes through

1. the Shah's rule (perhaps not in that great detail compared to..)
2. the Islamic Revolution, of course

Does anyone have a book suggestion outside of the 2? Otherwise, have you read either? And if so, which one is better? Thank you!

I am Canadian and recently on the news, remains of 215 kids were found on site of a Residential School (215 children found buried near residential school). Canada has a dark history of "clearing the plains' of Indigenous People. Residential schools were meant to strip children from their culture and have them assimilate into white culture (Residential School System). However, many of them died in the schools and those who survived suffered from emotional and physical trauma.

Politicians and Indigenous groups are in the news saying what the current government is doing for reconciliation is not enough. It is a stretch to compare the Holocaust to Residential Schools but I am wondering, what did Germany do post WWII?

How did the Germans apologize to the Jewish community and then how did they both move on?

On May 27, 2021 the chief of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia, Rosanne Casimir, announced the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The mass grave, containing children as young as three years old, was discovered through use of ground penetrating radar. According to Casimir, the school left behind no record of these burials. Subsequent recovery efforts will help determine the chronology of interment, as well as aid identification of these students (Source).

For Indigenous peoples across the United States and Canada, the discovery of this mass grave opened anew the deep intergenerational wounds created by the respective boarding/residential school systems implemented in each colonizing nation. For decades survivors, and the families of those who did not survive, have advocated for investigation and restitution. They’ve proposed national movements and worked tirelessly to force national and international awareness of a genocidal past that included similar mass graves of Indigenous children across North America. Acknowledgment and reckoning in the United States and Canada has been slow.

As more information emerges over the coming weeks and months, Kamloops school survivors, their descendents, historians, and archaeologists will piece together the lives and experiences of these 215 children. Here we provide a brief introduction to the industrial/boarding/residential schools, and how similar children navigated their experiences in a deeply oppressive system. The violence enacted on these children was the continuation of a failed conquest that began centuries ago and manifests today with the disproportionate rates of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, especially women.

##Overview of Indian Boarding/Residential School Systems

Catholic missions during the 16th and 17th centuries routinely used forced child labor for construction and building maintenance. Missionaries saw “civilizing” Indigenous children as part of their spiritual responsibility and one of the first statutes related to education in the British colonies in North America was guidance to colonizers on how to correctly “educate Indian Children Held Hostage” (Fraser, p. 4). While the first US government-operated Indian Boarding Schools didn’t open until 1879, the federal government endorsed these religiously led efforts through the passage of legislation prior to assuming full administrative jurisdiction, beginning with the “Civilization Fund Act” of 1819, an annual allotment of monies to be utilized by groups who would provide educational services to Tribes who were in contact with white settlements.

The creation of the systems in both countries was predicated on the belief among white adults that there was something wrong or “savage” with the Indigenous way of being and by “educating” children, they could most effectively advance and save Indigenous people. By the time the schools began enrolling children in the mid to late-1800s, the Indigenous people and nations of North America had experienced centuries of displacement, broken or ignored treaties, and genocide. Understanding this history helps contextualize why it’s possible to read anecdotes about Indigenous parents voluntarily sending their children to the schools or why many abolitionists in the United States supported the schools. No matter the reason why a child ended up at a school, they were typically miles from their community and home, placed there by adults. Regardless of the length of their experience at a school, their sense of Indigeneity was forever altered.

It is impossible to know the exact number of children who left, or were taken from, their homes and communities for places known collectively as Indian Boarding Schools, Aboriginal Residential schools, or Indian Residential Schools. Upwards of 600 schools were opened across the continent, often deliberately in places far from reservations or Indigenous communities. Sources put the number of children who were enrolled at the schools in Canada at around 150,000. It’s important to stress that these schools were not schools in the way we think of them in the modern era. There were no bright colors, read-alouds and storytime, or opportunities for play. As we explain below, though, this does not mean the children did not find joy and community. The primary focus was not necessarily a child’s intellect, but more their body and, especially at the schools run by members of a church, their soul. The teachers’ pedagogical goals were about “civilizing” Indigenous children; they used whatever means necessary to break the children’s connection with their community, to their identity, and from their culture, including corporal punishment and food deprivation. This post from u/Snapshot52 provides a longer history about the rationale for the “schools.”

One of the main goals of the schools can be seen in their name. While the children who were enrolled at the schools came from hundreds of different tribes - the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children in Western New York enrolled Haudenosaunee children, including from those from the nearby Mohawk and Seneca communities as well as children from other Indigenous communities across the east coast (Burich, 2007) - they were all referred to as “Indians'', despite their different identities, languages, and cultural traditions. (The r/IndianCountry FAQ provides more information about nomenclature and Indigenous identity.) Meanwhile, only 20% of children were actually orphans; most of the children had living relatives and communities who could and often wanted to care for them.

##Similarities between Canadian and American system and schools

When I went East to Carlisle School, I thought I was going there to die;... I could think of white people wanting little Lakota children for no other reason than to kill them, but I thought here is my chance to prove that I can die bravely. So I went East to show my father and my people that I was brave and willing to die for them. (Óta Kté/Plenty Kill/Luther Standing Bear)

The founder of the United States residential/boarding school model, and superintendent of the flagship school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Richard Henry Pratt, wished for a certain kind of death from his students. Pratt believed by forcing Indigenous children to “kill the Indian/savage” within them they might live as equal citizens in a progressive civilized nation. To this end, students were stripped of reminders of their former life. Arrival at school meant the destruction of clothes lovingly made by their family and donning starched, uncomfortable uniforms and stiff boots. Since Indigenous names were too complex for white ears and tongues, students chose, or were assigned, Anglicized names. Indigenous languages were forbidden, and “speaking Indian” resulted in harsh corporal punishments. Scholars such as Eve Haque and Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner use the term “linguicide” to describe deliberate efforts to bring about the death of a language and they point to the efforts of the schools to accomplish that goal.

Perhaps nothing was as initially traumatic for new students as mandatory haircuts, nominally done to prevent lice, but interpreted by students as being marked by “civilization.” This subtle but culturally destructive act would elicit grieving and an experience of emotional torture as the cutting of one’s hair was, and is, often regarded as an act of mourning for many Indigenous communities reserved for the death of a close family member. This resulted in psychological turmoil for a number of children who had no way of knowing the fate of the families they were being forced to leave behind. By removing children from their nations and families, residential schools intentionally prevented the transmission of traditional cultural knowledge and language. The original hope of school administrators was to thereby kill Indigeneity in one generation.

In this they failed.

Over time, the methods and intent of the schools changed, focusing instead on making Indigenous children “useful” citizens in a modernizing nation. In addition to the traditional school topics like reading and writing students at residential schools engaged in skill classes like animal husbandry, tinsmithing, harness making, and sewing. They labored in the school fields, harvesting their own food, though students reported the choicest portions somehow ended up on the teachers' plates, and never their own. Girls worked in the damp school laundry, or scrubbed dishes and floors after class. The rigors of school work, combined with the manual labor that allowed schools to function, left children exhausted. Survivors report pervasive physical and sexual abuse during their years at school.

Epidemics of infectious diseases like influenza and measles routinely swept through the cramped, poorly ventilated quarters of residential school dorms. Children already weakened by insufficient rations, forced labor, and the cumulative psychosocial stress of the residential school experience quickly succumbed to pathogens. The most fatal was tuberculosis, historically called consumption. The superintendent of Crow Creek, South Dakota reported practically all his pupils “seemed to be tainted with scrofula and consumption” (Adams, p.130).

On the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho in 1908, Indian Agent Oscar H. Lipps and agency physician John N. Alley conspired to close the boarding school at Fort Lapwai so they could open a sanitarium school, a facility that would provide medical services to the high rates of tubercular Indian children “while simultaneously attending to the educational goals consistent with the assimilation campaign” (James, 2011, p. 152).

Indeed, the high fatality rates at residential/boarding schools became a source of hidden shame for superintendents like Pratt at Carlisle. Of the forty students comprising the first classes at Carlisle ten died in the first three years, either at school or shortly after returning home. Mortality rates were so high, and superintendents so concerned about their statistics, schools began shipping sick children home to die, and officially reported only those deaths that occured on school grounds (Adams p.130).

When a pupil begins to have hemorrhages from the lungs he or she knows, and all the rest know, just what they mean... And such incidents keep occurring, at intervals, throughout every year. Not many pupils die at school. They prefer not to do so; and the last wishes of themselves and their parents are not disregarded. But they go home and die… Four have done so this year. (Annual Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Crow Creek, 1897)

Often superintendents placed blame on the Indigenous families, citing the student’s poor health on arrival, instead of the unhealthy conditions surrounding them at school. At Carlisle, the flagship residential/boarding school for the United States and the site of the greatest governmental oversight in the nation, the school cemetery contains 192 graves. Thirteen headstones are engraved with one word: Unknown.

##Specifics about the Canadian system

We instil in them a pronounced distaste for the native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origins. When they graduate from our institutions, the children have lost everything Native except their blood. (Quote attributed Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin, early advocate of the Canadian Residential School System)

A summary report created by the Union of Ontario Indians based on the work and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada lays out a number of specifics including that the schools in Canada were predominately funded and operated by the Government of Canada and Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United churches. Changes to the Indian Act in the 1920s make it mandatory for every Indian child between the ages of seven and sixteen years to attend such schools and in 1933, the principals of the schools were given legal guardianship of the children the schools, effectively forcing parents to give up legal custody of their children.

A good resource for learning more about the history of the schools is the Commission’s website.

##Specifics about the American system

The American system was intended to further both the imperial and humanitarian aspects of the forming hegemony. While Indians were often in the path of conquest, elements of the American public felt that there was a need to “civilize” the Tribes in order to bring them closer to society and to salvation. With this in mind, education was deemed the modality by which this could happen: the destruction of a cultural identity that bred opposition to Manifest Destiny with the simultaneous construction of an ideal (though still minoritized) member of society.

It is not a coincidence that many of the methods the white adults used at the Indian Boarding Schools bore a similarity to those methods used by enslavers in the American South. Children from the same tribe or community were often separated from each other to ensure they couldn’t communicate in any language other than English. While there are anecdotes of children choosing their own English or white name, most children were assigned a name, some by simply pointing to a list of indecipherable scribbles (potential names) written on a chalkboard (Luther Standing Bear). Carlisle in particular was seen as the best case scenario and often treated as a showcase of what was possible around “civilizing” Indigenous children. Rather than killing off Indigenous people, Pratt and other superintendents saw their solution of re-education as a more viable, more Christian, approach to the “Indian Problem.”

##Resistance and Restitution As with investigations of similar oppressive systems (African slavery in the American South, neophytes in North American Spanish missions, etc.), understanding how children in residential/boarding schools navigated a genocidal environment must avoid interpreting every act as a reaction or response to authority. Instead, stories from survivors help us see students as active agents, pursuing their own goals, in their own time frames, as often as they could. Meanwhile, some graduates of the schools would speak about the pleasure they found in learning about European literature, science, or music and would go to make a life for themselves that included knowledge they gained at the school. Such anecdotes are not evidence that the schools "worked" or were necessary, rather they serve as an example of the graduates' agency and self-determination.

Surviving captivity meant selectively accommodating and resisting, sometimes moment to moment, throughout the day. The most common form of resistance was running away. Runaways occurred so often Carlisle didn’t bother reporting missing students unless they were absent for more than a week. One survivor reported her young classmates climbed into the same bed each night so, together, they could fight off the regular sexual assault by a male teacher. At school children found hidden moments to feel human; telling Coyote Stories or “speaking Indian” to each other after lights out, conducting midnight raids on the school kitchen, or leaving school grounds to meet up with a romantic partner. Sports, particularly boxing, basketball, and football, became ways to “show what an Indian can do” on a level playing field against white teams from the surrounding area. Resistance often took a darker turn, and the threat of arson was used by students in multiple schools to push back against unreasonable demands. Groups of Indigenous girls at a school in Quebec reportedly made life difficult for the nuns who ran the school, resulting in a high staff turnover. At a fundraiser, one sister proclaimed:

de cent de celles qui ont passé par nos mains à peine en avons nous civilisé une” [of a hundred of those who have passed through our hands we have civilized at most one].

Graduates and students used the English/French language writing skills obtained at the schools to raise awareness of school conditions. They regularly petitioned the government, local authorities, and the surrounding community for assistance. Gus Welch, star quarterback for the Carlisle Indians football team, collected 273 student signatures for a petition to investigate corruption at Carlisle. Welch testified before the 1914 joint congressional committee that resulted in the firing of the school superintendent, the abusive bandmaster/disciplinarian, and the football coach. Carlisle closed its doors several years later. The investigation into Carlisle would form the basis for the Meriam Report, which highlighted the damage inflicted by the residential schools throughout the United States.

While most of the schools closed before World War II, several stayed open and continued to enroll Indigenous children with the intention of providing them a Canadian or American education well into the 1970s. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 changed policies related to Tribal and family involvement in child welfare cases but the work continues. These boarding schools have survived even into more recent times through rebranding efforts under the Bureau of Indian Education. The “Not Your Mascot” movement and efforts to end the harmful use of Native or Indigenous imagery by the education systems can also be seen as a continued fight for sovereignty and self-determination.

##The Modern Murdered and Missing Indigenous People Movement Today, Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada confront the familiar specter of national ambivalence in the face of disproportionate violence. In the United States, Indigenous women are murdered at ten times the rate of other ethnicities, while in Canada Indigenous women are murdered at a rate six times higher than their white neighbors. This burden is not equally distributed across the country; in the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan the murder rates are even higher. While the movement began with a focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, awareness campaigns expanded to include Two-Spirit individuals as well as men.

The residential boarding schools exist within the greater context of an unfinished work of conquest. The legacy of violence stretches from the swamps of the Mystic Massacre in 1637 to the fields of Sand Creek to the newly discovered mass grave at Kamloops Indian Residential School. By waging war on Indigenous children, authorities hope to extinguish Indigeneity on the continent. When they failed violence continued anew, morphing into specific violence against vulnerable Indigenous People. Citizens of Canada and the United States must wrestle with the violent legacy as we, together, move forward in understanding and reconciliation.

##Further Resources and Works Cited

• Online archive through Dickinson College for Carlisle Indian Industrial School

• MMIW website

• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

• Native Justice Movement

• Adams, D. (1995) Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928

• Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2014). The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 320–338.

• Burich, K. (2007) "No Place to Go": The Thomas Indian School and the "Forgotten" Indian Children of New York.

• Child, B. (2000) Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940

• Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An indigenous peoples' history of the United States (Vol. 3). AskHistorians AMA with Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese, who adapted the book for younger readers

• Fraser, J. (21014) The School In The United States: A Documentary History.

• Glenn, C. (2011) American Indian/First Nations Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present, Macmillan.

• James, E. (2011). “Hardly a family is free from the disease:” Tuberculosis, health care, and assimilation policy on the Nez Perce Reservation, 1908-1942. Oregon Historical Quarterly, 112(2), 142–169.

• Kenny, M “Photograph: Carlisle Poem- Who Is This Boy?”

• MacDonald, D. B., & Hudson, G. (2012). The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, 45(2), 427–449.

• Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879-1986. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1999. cited in Young, B. (2015). "Killing the Indian in the Child": Death, Cruelty, and Subject-formation in the Canadian Indian Residential School System. Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 63-76.

• Spring, J. (2007) Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: a brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States

• Trafzer, C. and J. Keller, eds. (2006) Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences

Podcast recommendations:

• All My Relations‘s episode, Protect Indigenous Women

• “Stuff You Missed in History Class” episode, Basketball comes to Fort Shaw Indian School