Civilization and sexual abuse: selected Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience

Abstract

This paper offers a contrastive analysis of Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience. Indian captivity narratives describe the ordeals of white women and men, kidnapped by Indians, who were separated from their families and subsequently lived months or even years with Indian tribes. The Native American boarding-school experience, which began in the late nineteenth century, took thousands of Indian children from their parents for the purpose of “assimilation to civilization” to be facilitated through governmental schools, thereby creating a captivity of a different sort. Through an examination of these two different types of narratives, this paper reveals the themes of ethnocentrism and sexual abuse, drawing a contrast that erodes the Euro-American discourse of civilization that informs captivity narratives and the boarding-school, assimilationist experiment.