Welcome Back to School! (and our podcast) After a much needed break from research, writing, and talking about kind of bummer stuff, we are back and ready to do all these things again. We welcome all of our listeners back with a series about school lunch.
Our series begins with Native American Boarding Schools which parents were forced to send their children to in order to assimilate to White/European culture. From there we examine how the idea of the American Melting Pot used public schools as a tool to assimilate immigrant children. Then we will move on to redlining, integration, the Black Panthers, and the Soul Food movement in schools. Which will bring us to where we are now: the healthy school lunch movement, the Hunger-Free kids act, and COVID’s impact on school lunch.
With our first installment, we follow the history of Native American education by colonists, churches, and the U.S. government. Off-reservation boarding schools became very popular after the Civil War as a way to forcibly assimilate indigenous cultures. We look at how this movement created generational trauma for students and their families, changed their diets in harmful ways, and taught skills that were useless in their own culture.
We’re glad to be back and excited for this deep dive as we enter our second year of working on this podcast. Thank you to each person who has followed us and continues to support our work. We couldn’t do this without you.
Sources for E 17: School Lunch Part 1
THE BOARDING SCHOOL LEGACY: TEN CONTEMPORARY LAKOTA WOMEN TELL THEIR STORIES by Kathie Marie Bowker
Butter Pecan Pod 