Carmen Ganser Illinois State University

They Called It Prairie Light is a well-documented study of the experiences had by the students of the Chilocco Indian School predominantly during the 1920s and 1930s. It is an important body of work that will perhaps remain definitive for this particular school. K. Tsianina Lomawaima's methodology consists mostly of oral interviews conducted with over fifty alumni and several employees of the school. Because of the time period discussed in her book, perhaps the heyday of the school's history, many of the participants of the interviews may not be alive to date, thus the information gathered in this book represents a fixed body of work. The records kept by the school and the Bureau of Indian Affairs resist this story being told. These interviews hold the story of the children who resided at the school.

This text reveals the contemporary historiographical context it was written in. At the beginnings of American Indian scholarship, much like women's history and African-American history, many texts described the passive victim state in which these oppressed groups were held. However, the last two decades propelled scholarship of oppressed groups, in the United States and throughout the world, into a state of agency. More and more studies reveal that rather than being victims of the dominant class, these groups resisted and made changes within and outside of the systems that acted against them.

Lomawaima's book describes the little acts of resistance that the Chilocco children participated in which kept them from being completely indoctrinated into a system that maintain their repression. The adults remember times when they built stills for the production of liquor, disregarded the required undergarments during dances, and went home to their families knowing more about Indian traditions and practices than before they went to school.

The information in this text is valuable to an American history classroom. It demonstrates to students how Indian children were treated as an ethnic group in the early twentieth century. It also shows them how children their own age lived their lives in a situation that is much different than their own. It allows them to understand the uniqueness of the Indian schools established to educate and produce workers out of Indian children. The text describes both the repression of the system put in place to "better" the lives of Indians and how these Indians both resisted and accepted this repression.

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