Prairie Edge Book Review

Agents of Survivance: Indigenous Women Teachers in the Boarding School Era
Author: Anne Ruggles Gere

Anne Ruggles Gere’s Agents of Survivance: Indigenous Women Teachers in the Boarding School Era is a powerful and necessary reframing of one of the most painful chapters in Indigenous history. Rather than centering the familiar narrative of boarding schools as instruments of cultural destruction, Gere turns her attention to the Indigenous women who taught within those institutions, women who, despite the constraints of federal policy and the violence of assimilation, carved out spaces of cultural continuity, care, and resistance.

The book’s central argument is both bold and deeply humane: Indigenous women teachers were not passive participants in a system designed to erase their people. They were active agents of survivance, a term grounded in Gerald Vizenor’s work, describing Indigenous presence, resistance, and continuance. Gere shows how these women used their positions to protect children, preserve language, and subtly undermine the rigid expectations of the boarding school system. In doing so, she restores complexity to lives too often flattened by historical narratives.

Drawing on archival records, letters, photographs, and oral histories, Gere reconstructs the experiences of Dakota, Ojibwe, Cherokee, and other Native women who entered the classroom not simply as employees, but as cultural caretakers. She highlights how these teachers navigated the contradictions of their roles: enforcing school rules while quietly teaching tribal values; following federal curriculum while slipping in Indigenous knowledge; living within institutions of discipline while offering warmth and protection to children far from home.

One of the book’s strengths is its refusal to romanticize the boarding school era. Gere does not shy away from the brutality of the system, the punishments, the forced labor, the suppression of language, the separation from family. But she insists that within these oppressive structures, Indigenous women found ways to assert agency. Their work, she argues, complicates the narrative of total domination and reveals the cracks through which culture survived.

The historical photographs included in the book deepen its impact. They show young girls walking in uniform lines, women standing outside school buildings, teachers posed with their students. Gere reads these images with care, revealing what is often overlooked: the subtle gestures of connection, the quiet dignity of Indigenous women who refused to let their identities be erased.

For educators, historians, and Indigenous readers, Agents of Survivance offers a vital corrective. It reminds us that survivance is not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes it is found in the everyday acts of teaching, comforting, correcting, and encouraging, the small, steady gestures that keep a people alive. Gere’s work is both scholarly and deeply emotional. It honors Indigenous women whose contributions have long been overshadowed by the larger boarding school narrative. In bringing their stories forward, she expands our understanding of resistance and reminds us that even in the harshest conditions, Indigenous women have always found ways to protect their communities.

Price: $75.00 • Publisher: University of Nebraska Press • Pages: 328

The post Prairie Edge Book Review first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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