White School Administration

History of the American West
Essay on To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920
Due:

In his book To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920, historian Clyde Ellis explores the experiences of Kiowa students and white school administrators at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School in Oklahoma in the late-nineteenth century. This close case study of one boarding school offers a window onto the confusing transition that young native peoples were forced to endure with the onset of the reservation system. Ultimately, Ellis concludes that boarding schools such as Rainy Mountain “simultaneously failed and succeeded.”

Write an essay in which you coherently discuss Clyde Ellis’s analysis of the Rainy Mountain Boarding School. Your essay should address the initial enthusiasm of white reformers for the Indian boarding school movement, the most important challenges that school administrators faced, the attitudes among the Kiowa toward Rainy Mountain, and the mixed legacies of the boarding school program.

Guidelines:

1. Your essay must be clearly written and well organized. It should be at least four pages—but not more than five pages—in length, double-spaced, using a 12-point font and one-inch margins.
2. Your opening paragraph must indicate the full names of the book and author.
3. Your essay should be free of spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors. If you are uncertain about grammar and punctuation rules, consult the “Guidelines for Effec
4. tive Historical Writing” that I have posted to Canvas. Papers with careless misspellings, ungrammatical punctuation, or other basic writing problems will be substantially penalized. Do not use the first-person voice, contractions, slang, or other informalities in your essay.
5. Be sure to use supporting quotations throughout your essay. These must be integrated into your own prose in a grammatical way, as noted in the “Guidelines for Effective Historical Writing.”
6. You need to properly use footnotes in your review, but only when you are quoting directly from the author. Follow the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines, which can be found here: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html
7. Every paper submitted must have a cover sheet with the book and reviewer information presented in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS as shown below. Your name should only appear on the cover page.
8. Do not consult any outside materials for this assignment. The essay must be entirely your own original work. If you have any questions about what constitutes an act of plagiarism, discuss your concerns with me before submitting the paper. I consider instances of plagiarism a severe breach of student ethics. Students found to have submitted papers that were not entirely their own original work will receive no credit for the assignment and be reported to the Office of Student Affairs.
   Late Papers: Unexcused late work will be penalized one full grade per day.