Hi everyone. As you know, I was going to work on the Indian boarding schools project. Unfortunately, I was not able to find data. All the people/libraries/organizations I contacted were very responsive, but regrettably, the information they provided was scarce. It turned out, I could not work on this project, because there was NO data to use/rely on. I have watched videos where Native Americans express their frustration about being the third generation of boarding school raised people, so I presumed that maybe I could track down at least a few families, but even that was not feasible. This kind of information is private. Do not misunderstand me, the information I need exists, but I would have to go to Washington DC to obtain it (most likely, no one even comprised it into a data set yet). I honestly did not expect this turn of events. To fight back frustration, I started to look for ideas in other people’s posts. That is how I learned Kat Vecchio found her data set on Github. So, I started browsing.

To be continued

At my other class we read Report of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth & Reconciliation Commission. That is how I found out that the little Native Americans in Maine are 5.1 times as likely to go to foster care than the non-native children. The Native Americans see it as the continuation of the genocide they have experienced from the Europeans. To them, foster care is a sequel to the Indian boarding schools.

Having come from a different part of the world I knew some common facts about Native Americans, but I did not know anything about their boarding schools. The latter were created to deal with “the Indian question”. Captain Richard H. Pratt established the first boarding school in Pennsylvania in 1879 with hope to “kill the Indian and save the man”. Europeans thought that if they teach the native children their ways (like religion, team sports, the notion of private property) and give them some education, there would be no need in eradicating the race. The main goal of the Indian schools was to assimilate the Natives with their Caucasian neighbors. It was done in the most hurtful ways. Children as young as six had to adapt to a new way of life: their hair was cut, clothes burnt, native language prohibited. At a boarding school everyone had to wear uniforms, accustom to a very rigid schedule, and speak English. For any kind of misbehavior the Indian children were severely punished. Physical and even sexual abuse was a rather frequent phenomenon in the Native American boarding schools. Since boarding schools for Indian kids were mandatory, the approximate number of their students reached 60000 in 1973. This leads us to believe almost every Indian family was impacted by the system. The mistreated students of the Native American boarding schools carried pain and resentment into their adulthood, which often resulted in substance abuse and poor parenting skills.

The truth commissions are created for those who need reconciliation. Having openly discussed their negative experiences, adults are trying to forgive the system and possibly become better parents to their kids. A loss of a child to foster care is a parent’s personal tragedy. For Native Americans it is also a tribal catastrophe, since their communities are too small and risk extinction without progeny. Everyone makes mistakes, and the Native Americans have as much rights for their children as any other racial group.

For my project, I would like to tell this story in a digital way. I plan on making some introduction about the purpose of the Indian boarding schools and illustrate the narrative with pictures. Then, I would like to use Neatline to map the schools across the States. When clicked on a certain school, a short history of it has to show up. To make it more complex, photographs of schools will be presented. Since there were about one hundred Indian boarding schools in the US, it is too big of an undertaking to map and describe all of them. Therefore, I will concentrate on the biggest or the most famous ones. The project should be accompanied with the Trail of Tears music at the background. If time permits, the project will develop with a narrative of Native American revival: schools, festivals, and modern culture. With happy Indian music, of course.

I am not sure about the data I will draw the information from. So far I have not found any collective sources I hoped to come across while doing research. It is possible I will be looking up every school separately and using my Zotero account to cite the sources.

Suggestions and any kind of help are highly appreciated:).

The Wind Map, mentioned by Professor Klein during her speech The Long Arc of Visual Display caught my attention. You can check out how the winds move across the United States at http://hint.fm/wind/ . Since the Professor alluded to it very briefly, I decided to find out what the map was for. It turns out, Wind Map is a personal art project of the two leaders of Google’s “Big Picture” visualization team, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas (creators of History Flow from our homework). Although Wind Map was designed for purely artistic reasons, people are trying to use it while studying birds migration tendencies, planning bicycle trips, and speculating on chemicals in the atmosphere (?!). This makes me think of Where’s the Beef piece, mentioned by Professor Klein as well. Digital Humanities does not have to answer questions right away; even if its projects seem unhandy at the moment, they might become very practical in future.

For more on Wind Map, go to http://www.bewitched.com/windmap.html .

I am a reader. Not exactly sure what it means by modern standards, but I call myself a reader because I like how books impact my brain. Be it a historical novel or Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, I savor words selected by the author and connections they create in my mind. Imagination is what I believe has been driving human civilization from the very beginning. To imagine is to be human. By reading, imagination ignites. I have a friend who prefers not to read interesting books while managing multiple projects at work since he knows it keeps his mind distracted to the point he hardly makes it to work. He says he loves to be in a different reality, but books sometimes imprison his brain in a very particular way. My friend confided to me that in his twenties he would sometimes call in sick and simply stay home with his book. It felt good, but also terrified him. Although I have never missed work because of a book, I often do not want to re-emerge from a different reality. The explanation to this phenomenon can be found in Moretti’s chapter three, Trees. Literature, especially novels, evolves and adjusts to the new realities of a certain generation. There is an innumerable variation of books to every person’s liking. If someone misses work because of a book, it means she found the one with the correct embranchment. Moretti’s tree schemes show there is an indefinite number of ramification in novels. If you were never enchanted by a novel you might not have found the right one for yourself yet. But if you did and you are totally immersed in a fictional world, maybe start analyzing why the book engages you this much. I think Maps, Moretti’s second chapter, would be the most helpful in this inquiry. Is it a circular or linear map of fictional reality that makes you want to come back? Having reduced the text to minimum elements, what geometric form arises by creating connections between the characters? Why is it happening and what meaning does it convey to you? Graphs, Maps, Trees provides its readers with an interesting analysis of connections between social/historical situation of a certain timeframe current to it novels, and with an interesting analysis of schemes novels unwittingly produce in human imagination. I think I received some of the answers from Moretti.