Colonial schooling on Indigenous land: Day schools, colonial colleges and Indigenous communities in the northeast

Delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, New Orleans, LA, Sept 2013

Abstract: In 1929 professors from Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, traveled to the Abenaki community of Odanak in Quebec. As a former Jesuit mission, the Abenaki had a long history engaging with European schooling and literacy. The professors were there to visit ‘Little Dartmouth,’ a century-old day-school founded by one of Dartmouth’s Abenaki students. This paper examines how Abenaki conceptions of territory shaped their decisions to engage with both French and English structures of education at the turn of the nineteenth century. It extends research on indigenous engagement with colonial schooling to include both its New England and New France contexts.