Education at the Edge of Empire engages with scholarship on Indian education and boarding school historiography. John R. Gram shifts the narrative of boarding schools to contested spaces that are not necessarily “off the reservation” or completely removed from Indigenous communities. Although he focuses on Pueblo boarding school students near their home communities, he indicates how government officials and school staff buttressed the walls between the schools and Indigenous homes. He also examines the influences of other nongovernment agents and historical figures in contestations over Pueblo education and what it meant between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Gram connects the school representatives, students, families, communities, religious leaders, and even those whom he calls the “Romantics” in this web of boarding school histories.
Gram embraces the term integration, especially in his chapter “The Integration of Worlds.” Indigenous scholars such as Marsha Small have critiqued the use of “integrate”...
