By Kai-Arne Zimny

It was long after mid­night. I was sit­ting in a fan­cy bar, killing time while wait­ing for my train home. I’d been at Com­ic Con in Berlin that week­end and had a free­bie with me, its pack­age promi­nent­ly fea­tur­ing the image of a clum­si­ly drawn car­toon char­ac­ter with a yel­low dog. I con­sid­ered keep­ing it in my bag, giv­en that this was some­thing you’d expect to see in the hands of a preschool­er, cer­tain­ly not in this set­ting dom­i­nat­ed by high heels, suave suits, and classy cock­tails. How­ev­er, upon sit­ting down, I proud­ly put the car­toon on the counter. Instead of tak­ing my order, the bar­keep­er set his gleam­ing eyes on the boy and his dog, smiled from ear to ear, and said only two words: Adven­ture Time.

What fol­lowed was a free whiskey for me and a pas­sion­ate dis­cus­sion about a car­toon show fea­tur­ing a twelve-year old boy named Finn and his mag­i­cal dog, Jake, who live in a can­dy king­dom. You might say this sounds like a sto­ry made for lit­tle kids. Actu­al­ly, it sounds like a sto­ry made ‘by’ lit­tle kids. But the very adult bar­keep­er told me in absolute earnest­ness that Adven­ture Time’s (2010 – 2018) final season’s finale, which he’d just seen and which had its pre­miere in Ger­many on that very day, had moved him to tears. Now why is that?

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By Maria Moss

The book’s cov­er says it all: It shows Apache stu­dents on their arrival at Carlisle Indi­an School in Penn­syl­va­nia, an off-reser­va­tion school thou­sands of miles away from the stu­dents’ homes in the south­west­ern Unit­ed States. The pho­to­graph at the bot­tom depicts the same stu­dents three years lat­er in 1889. What a dif­fer­ence! Where­as in 1886, the chil­dren were wear­ing shawls, robes, and pon­chos and had their hair done in dif­fer­ent styles – some even wear­ing hats – in the pho­to­graph below, every­one is dressed alike in what seems to be grey, woolen, very tight clothing.

The “Amer­i­can Indi­an prob­lem,” Arnold Kru­pat writes in his most recent book, Changed For­ev­er: Amer­i­can Indi­an Board­ing-School Lit­er­a­ture, per­mit­ted “only two solu­tions, exter­mi­na­tion or edu­ca­tion. Exter­mi­na­tion was cost­ly, some­times dan­ger­ous, and, too, it also seemed increas­ing­ly wrong.” The alter­na­tive was board­ing or off-reser­va­tion schools. Although count­less books and doc­u­men­taries describe the board­ing school sys­tem, rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle is known about how the chil­dren them­selves felt about their new envi­ron­ment, their dai­ly chores and school rou­tines. Kru­pat reme­dies this short­com­ing by plac­ing excerpts of those board­ing school nar­ra­tives in the appro­pri­ate cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal context.

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