Signs of Power and Dominance: the Logic of Elimination in Mathematics at Indian Boarding Schools

The United States established a system of Indian boarding schools from the late 1800s through the 20th century. Previous scholarship documented how boarding schools aimed to forcibly assimilate Native children into white American society. However, no study has examined the mathematics curricula in the schools in relation to settler colonialism. Using the logic of elimination framework, we analyze primary documents to reveal how mathematics policies and curricula perpetuated settler colonial ideologies, values, and practices. We present major themes from our findings and argue that mathematics education at the Indian boarding schools worked in conjunction with the 1887 Dawes Act to open what settlers called surplus territory to white farmers and enforce capitalist notions of labor, land, and the natural world.