Customer Reviews

Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 (North American Indian Prose Award)

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Thoroughly enjoyed this book and fully appreciate why it received this year's American Indian Prose Award.

Cobb has approached what is clearly, to her, a personally significant topic in a manner that is sensitive far beyond her personal views. The history of the United States' treatment of American Indians is complex and troubled. Cobb, relying on both archival research and personal interviews with women who attended the Bloomfield Academy when the school was under federal administration, has provided a fresh and compellingly complicating perspective on Indian boarding schools, a specific facet of this history. Most significantly in her work, she has highlighted, through these women's own voices, the contemporaneous perspective of natives directly impacted by the United States' varying policies. What emerges is a well-documented story of Native self-direction, self-identification, and, above all, survival and hope for the future. Her final chapter, especially, poignantly brings this point home. Rather than overtly ideologize her topic, Cobb has allowed the story primarily to tell itself.

This book is a genuine contribution to contemporary research of Native history.

Book has some history of the school .I was looking for genealogy info as i had 3 generations of women in my family attend Bloomfield.As the title suggests i was looking for my grandmothers story. Very few personal stories of Bloomfield & the students..more so a history of the Nation , not Bloomfield Academy's students.