Title: Week 9 Overview and Inquiry
Course: The American West: Power, Place, and Memory > Section: Week 9 · October 19–23, 2026: Reservations, Allotment, Education, and Indigenous Persistence

WEEK 9 · INQUIRY MODULE

Week 9: Reservations, Allotment, Education, and Indigenous Persistence

How did assimilation policy try to reorganize Indigenous land and family life, and how did Native people survive and reshape it?

Dates: October 19–23, 2026

Focus

- Reservation policy and the Dawes Act
- Boarding schools and child removal
- Religious movements, resistance, Wounded Knee, and persistence

Before class

1. Read: American Yawp, chapter 17 selected sections.
2. Open and inspect the linked primary-source collection(s). Record one source, one context question, and one limitation.
3. Scholarship lens: Katrina Phillips, Staging Indigeneity (2021), selected excerpt.

Primary-source portals

- Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
- National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition Digital Map

Tuesday/Thursday meeting plan

Date | Status | Plan
Tuesday, October 20 | Class | Reservation policy, allotment, kinship, and settler governance.
Thursday, October 22 | Class | Boarding-school records, child removal, archival harm, Indigenous persistence, and data sovereignty.

Reading & Reasoning Check 7 due Friday, October 23.

After class

Deliverable: Reading & Reasoning Check 7.

- I can answer the weekly inquiry with a contestable claim.
- I can name at least two pieces of evidence and explain their limits.
- I can identify an interpretation that my evidence supports, complicates, or challenges.