Customer Reviews

Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools

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From 1880 to 1980 the families of Native Americans were cruelly disrupted by the United States and Canadian governments who forcibly removed children from their homes and relocated them in residential schools. The stated goal of this intrusive and brutal governmental program was to "kill the Indian to save the man". Half of the children died in this process of cultural remodeling refashioning aboriginal children into the clothing, hairstyles, attitdudes, and langauges of the larger white culture, and those who survived were often left permanently scarred resulting in alcoholism, suicide, and the transmission of trauma to succeeding generations down to the present day. A core contribution to Native American Studies curriculums and academic library reference collections, Ward Churchill (a Keetowah Cherokee and Professor of American Indian Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder) clearly lays out this unhappy chapter in Native American history with considerable detail and expertise in Kill The Indian, Save The Man: The Genocidal Impact Of American Indian Residential Schools.

I purchased this book for my college history class and I actually enjoyed it. It was very interesting to read and gave a lot of insight into the way Native Americans were treated by Americans. This could also be a good research material for anyone studying the assimilation of Native cultures to American lifestyles.

This book covers a facinating and underexamined area of US history. I was very much looking forward to reading it. The author clearly is extremely well-educated on this subject. The problem is -- he's boring. Ward Churchill writes like your typical college professor who turned you off history forever by being pedantic and uninspiring. I've worked as a book editor in the past and I have found that often the more education a writer has the worse his or her books are. Churchill seems to be underlining his scholarship with tediousness and seems to be over his head in information with no way to convey it in an readable manner. His editor should be fired for not making this book comprehensible to a wider audience. It isn't a doctoral thesis, for crying out loud. It's a disappointing treatment of what should have been an enlightening and educating experience. I wish I'd saved my money and hope, considering all the books Churchill has listed on Amazon, that he has, or will, learn to write well.