The last twenty years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on the history of American Indian institutional education. The field is enriched by macrolevel education policy studies, microhistories of individual schools, and tribal-specific studies on the impact of state- or missionary-sponsored educational initiatives. In To Win the Indian Heart Melissa D. Parkhurst provides the first comprehensive overview of one school’s musical complex, from the original design of western Oregon’s Forest Grove Indian and Industrial Training School in 1880 through its continued existence, under very different circumstances, as the present-day Chemawa Indian School. Parkhurst sheds new light on the changing uses of music in boarding schools, as well as on the significant changes in curriculum, student demographics, and purpose that have defined the existence of one of the few remaining American Indian boarding schools in the United States.
Forest Grove represented one of the earliest efforts by the US government to...
