Terence Wride and Faculty Mentor: Michael Taylor, English Department

In hopes of permanently removing them from their Indigenous cultures and communities, from
1950 to 1984, thousands of Navajo and other American Indian children were sent to Brigham
City, Utah to attend the Intermountain Indian School, the largest of nineteen postwar federal
Indian boarding schools that remained in operation. Despite the deplorable tactics of a final
institutionalized attempt to “kill the Indian and save the man” through the federal boarding
school system, this project has celebrated the creative achievements of IIS students and their
ability to actively resist assimilation and preserve their Indian identities through the production
of sophisticated literary work from within the hostile boarding school environment.
Beginning as an archival recovery project within USU’s Special Collections Library, I was
unaware of the vast amount of student writings that have survived and surprised by the
considerable quality of the poetry and other writings found within the student produced literary
journals of the IIS. While naturally, a lot of the poems recovered were obviously written as
school assignments, my work has uncovered a vast archive that proves that creative writing was
used by many Intermountain students as an act of innovative defiance and artistic resistance and
the poetry reflects their struggle to maintain their Indian identities. I discovered that through
creative writing, students found ways to adapt and accommodate their traditional cultural values
to Western performance modes in powerful, though often alarming ways. In a wide range of
approaches and styles, the poems I have recovered address such topics as colonialism and the
federal government, nature, politics, love, the Vietnam War, religion, racism, loneliness,
separation and anxiety, tradition and culture, and understandably, one of the most recurring
themes has been the issue of maintaining their Indian identity within a hostile space that was
designed to strip them of it entirely.
Further, recognizing the creative literary voices of IIS students as powerful personal narratives,
the poetry of the students of the Intermountain Indian school also provides a more
comprehensive contextualization of the complex history of the postwar Indian boarding school
experience, supplementing current boarding school narratives by recognizing the boarding
school poetry of the students of the IIS as an achievement of cultural continuity and literary
achievement. Thus, my project has continually emphasized and celebrated these students’
writings as vital contributions to community-specific, as well as continental, Native American
narratives and literary histories.
With ORCA’s support, I have thus engaged in a recovery process that has yielded more than
1,500 poems that span more than three decades of the school’s existence. By reviving and
organizing these student writings into a comprehensive list that will be essential to future
publications and a critical anthology, my project’s scholarly outcome contributes to both the
contemporary field of Indigenous literary studies, as well as the contemporary Indigenous
communities affected by the school. Because the project’s underlying focus has been on
reconnecting these writings with the students, families, and communities from which they came,
the real power of this project came as Dr. Taylor and I began to reach out to the Navajo
community and the alumni of the Intermountain Indian School in order to understand what they
wanted done with the information and research that we have been collecting and analyzing.
With ORCA’s support, I was further able to travel to the Navajo Reservation as an invited guest
to present my research at an annual reunion of Intermountain alumni. Under a blue and white
tent that resembled a giant hogan, the Intermountain alumni, celebrated their time spent at a
place that sought to destroy that very community. They celebrated their educations which had
been designed to remove them from that land. Perhaps most surprisingly, the reunion was
completely conducted in the Navajo language, even though they were celebrating their time at a
place that tried to force them to abandon that very language.
And though the IIS was not justified in removing students from their families and subjugate their
cultures, despite the deplorable tactics of a final institutionalized attempt to systematically kill
the Indian through boarding schools, the Navajo community ended up finding a new family
while at Intermountain—one that continues to flourish and has created a place of cultural
continuity and resurgence, where they bring family and friends in hope for the future.
So, now that we have started finding former students that have expressed interest in this recovery
project and archives have further yielded—apart from poetry—artwork, and other artifacts, as
we’ve reached out to other scholars and community members, what started out as an archival
recovery project of poetry has since turned into an interdisciplinary collaboration. With the
support of ORCA, I was also able to travel to the Navajo Reservation where we met with the
director of the Navajo Nation Museum. The project has thus expanded into a museum exhibit
that will open in 2019 at the Navajo Nation museum in Window Rock, New Mexico then travel
to other museums, as well as a subsequent book that will be published between 2019 and 2020 in
both English and Navajo. Because of the cultural importance of my research, through ORCA’s
support I was also able to present my research alongside Dr. Taylor at the American Studies
Association’s Annual Conference in Chicago this past November. I hope to continue work on the
project as I pursue a master’s degree in American Studies and further become an active voice
within the contemporary field of Indigenous literary studies and perhaps most importantly
contribute scholarship and archival work in service of a historically oppressed and marginalized
community.
I am optimistic that by bringing these student literary works and other artistic achievements back
to the community from which they came and compiling them into a critical anthology that I will
be able to contribute to the cultural continuity of a resilient and creative community that refuses
to be silenced and also contribute to contemporary field of Indigenous literary studies so that
these American Indians students and other poets of resistance can be recognized and
academically accepted as the exceptional writers that they were.