continuing oppression in new or familiar ways

For some reason, I originally thought that the group paper had to be represent some extraordinary finding and be incredibly complex with some ten and twenty archival documents. Yet, I was reassured when the papers we read were very specific to a few archival items and were able to make a sound and comprehensible point. I really enjoyed these two papers for their specificity, ability to connect their argument and archival documents with historical contexts, and their clear use of theory. The paper titled “Assimilation Reborn….” did a very nice job at showing the historical situation and relationship of Indians and was a crucial aspect of their argument, showing that an explicit and implicit cultural hierarchy continued to manifest in the minds of educators at the time. Their finding is not surprising and unexpected but is important because it gives documented proof to another side of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 deployed in action by white Americans on a ground level. Although it is not explicitly stated in the paper titled “Before and After…..” their archival documents come a few years after the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 and yet their findings also show that a view of cultural pluralism is not practiced although there was a change in policy .But this is not their main argument, rather from my understanding it is that a new relationship of power was being created that reinforced the need for a new Indian identity by making the students themselves feel as if they were in control of creating this new identity for a fantasy Indian family.

This point reminds me of something I learned or that was argued by a professor here at Soka about slaves in Brazil. In Brazil and in this one particular town there were far more slaves than non-slaves and they could have simply revolted and taken control. This never happened because of a hegemonic structure. The slaves had rankings where some slaves had power and command over other slaves and if they were good slaves would be better off than others. I believe there was also a process where slaves could become free. In this way, some slaves thought they were in power or could gain power and therefore were “’the vehicles of power, not simply its point of application’,” but really there oppression was only being reinforced by this process and where true resistance became hard to imagine. A power structure was created within the slaves’ relationship with other slaves and therefore they were kept in their place. I think this similar process is happening within the Indian students, but what they were receiving was this hidden curriculum that “inculcated in each student a desire to voluntarily identify with the before/after narrative and become ‘useful, healthy, and happy.’” I think there is a relationship there…