UC San Diego

This thesis examines off-reservation boarding schools and national archives as particular colonial formations. Employing experience as a methodology, it recounts research undertaken relative to a boarding school journal, using it as a conduit through which to comprehend the relationship between these institutions and settler colonialism. While integrating the journal in its argument, this thesis also refuses disclosure of the contents of the journal, instead centralizing the idea that boarding schools and archives exist as intimately related colonial institutions. Boarding schools have come to shape understandings of Native peoples within the US imaginary at the same time that archives continue to maintain that formation across time and space by providing "evidence" and/or "proof" of the boarding school as an "authentic" Native experience. These institutions function to sustain a relationship between contemporary understandings of Native sovereignty and self-determination struggles and knowledge production, examining how these institutions are always already bound up within the logics of settler colonialism. As a consequence, these institutions actively inform contemporary social discourse and political possibilities for Native peoples, confining them within the terms of US settler colonial jurisdiction. It examines colonial epistemologies' impact on the comprehensibility of Indigenous peoples' struggles in order to imagine alternative epistemologies in methodology and knowledge production that may work in service to those struggles