ABSTRACT
This chapter centers Indigenous peoples’ voices in an exploration of white women’s roles in the historical exploitation and attempted genocide of Native American peoples. White women colonizers mobilized white supremacist ideologies and politics, positioning themselves as “saviors” and harbingers of civilization, often obliterating the possibility of establishing alliances with Indigenous women. In service to settler colonialism and to protect themselves against their own oppression, white women tried to exploit, subordinate, and annihilate Native American cultures and peoples. In this chapter, the roles white women played in the operation of Indigenous boarding schools are used to illustrate their active participation in settler colonialism and genocide. Also featured are examples of the continuous resistance of Native students and their families to the violence and erasure of the boarding school system. This chapter disrupts white supremacist settler-colonial paradigms and narratives to hold white women settlers to account for their participation in boarding schools, and most importantly, it illustrates Native American survivance in the face of attempted annihilation.
