Logics of Immersion: Lake Mohonk and the U.S. Colonial Boarding School

Abstract

This chapter situates the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples (1883–1916) and its advocacy of immersive education for racialised groups within the United States’ evolving empire. It does so by considering the evolution of the American-run state and parochial boarding schools in their enmeshed “national” and “colonial” formats and analysing how the discursive circuitry of the conferences promoted boarding schools as a key iteration of “race management” and progressive reform. The essay contends that the annual meetings ultimately produced a status quo wherein immersive education, in its attempts to sever and remap a child’s sociolinguistic ties, was viewed as an expedient means of resolving real and imagined challenges of cultural heterogeneity—both in the nationalising continental empire and the indeterminate spaces of new far-flung colonies. Boarding schools, reformers contended, served as ideal vehicles for promoting qualified inclusion into the ranks of American citizenry or the emerging subordinate nationalisms in overseas territories.