Sometime in the late nineteenth century, the Haskell Institute's school newspaper, The Indian Leader, reported a minor scandal. As one of twenty-six federally operated industrial schools intended to foster the assimilation of Indigenous children through vocational education, Haskell operated a printshop that produced the school newspaper. Consequently, it was likely that a young Indigenous person had set the type for a story about a Fourth of July parade in Kansas in which a young man had dressed up in red face paint and “attracted a great deal of attention and some excitement among the small children.” On first reading, anyone familiar with contemporary Indigenous studies might think they know where this story is headed: someone at an Independence Day celebration, likely a Euro-American person, had donned red face paint to “play Indian”, an all-too-common kind of performance in this period of American history. However, instead of buckskins or feathers, this particular performer had donned “horns and tail” in the costume not of an Indian, but of a devil. In one of the most illuminating portions of Jane Griffith's Word's Have a Past, she reveals that this was the costume of what was known as a “printer's devil.” As Griffith explains, “The term means both a young printing assistant, as well as an invisible scapegoat for errors” (p. 57). In fact, this rouged reveler was none other than one of the Indigenous boys working in Haskell's printshop.

This is but one of many compelling stories detailed in Griffith's book, which is a discursive analysis of six newspapers from five Canadian residential schools between 1887 and 1910, including the Shingwauk Industrial Home in Ontario, Rupert's Land Industrial School in Manitoba, Kitamaat Home in British Columbia, and the Battleford Industrial School and the Regina Industrial School in Saskatchewan. While scholars often regard these productions as one-dimensional pieces of propaganda intended to compel their readers to support the schools, Griffith suggests that these turn-of-the-century newspapers were complicated places that also served as repositories and as sites of resistance.

Griffith argues that newspapers at these schools performed a variety of functions. Printed as showcases for the school's success, to solicit donations, and to reward financial contributions, Griffith explains that “The goals of teaching any boarding school trade were threefold: 1) to demonstrate boarding school success to outsiders; 2) to offset costs; and 3) to teach employable skills, a goal loaded with rhetoric about self-sufficiency and assimilation” (p. 25). Nevertheless, printshops and newspapers used Indigenous labor to represent the school's settler colonial mission to an audience both within and beyond the school walls. Employees at the schools, policymakers in federal offices, and an interested public were the intended audience; yet Indigenous students, parents, and alumni were also “unexpected” readers as well. In this way, Griffith engages in a methodology she calls “reading with the grain,” wherein she attempts to reconstruct how these newspapers were sensible to their contemporary audiences. “Rather than seeking the ‘hidden meaning’ behind newspapers, I seek to understand what newspapers, on their surface, tell us [emphasis in original]” (p. 21). Through this method, Griffith shows how residential school newspapers were a means for Euro-American educators to disseminate a number of representations about Indigenous people that served to both rationalize and affect settler colonialism through schooling.

Words Have a Past covers three areas in which the authors of school newspapers manipulated language to eliminate Indigenous culture: language, time, and space. For example, Griffith argues that school newspapers described student's progress in learning to speak, read, and write in English as an inevitable part of their imagined political, cultural, and linguistic disappearance at the turn of the century. “According to school reports and newspapers, English language acquisition just happened, without any violence required,” Griffith observes (p. 72). This language construction, she argues, was a clever way for newspapers to peddle a tale that removed Euro-American agency from the violence of Indigenous displacement and dispossession. Embedded in the technology of schooling, English-language newspapers were therefore a part of a larger pedagogy of what Griffith calls “Indigenous language theft” shrouded in the language of benevolence and uplift. By centering rhetorical practices in newspapers, Griffith is able to exhaustively detail Euro-American representations of Indigenous people to show how newspapers not only reported the cultural erasure of boarding schools but also affected that erasure.

However, this enumeration of literary devices, tropes, and representations would benefit from additional contextualization as readers seek to understand the connection between the rhetorical habits of newspaper authors and their readers’ experience. At one juncture, Griffith calls attention to a literary device wherein a writer for the newspaper at the Kitamaat school adopted the first person, “as if to mimic the child/newspaper's ability to speak for itself.” Griffith argues that this toggling between third and first person gives the newspaper agency—at the same time that “children of boarding schools were often denied their humanity, the newspaper's is freely granted” (p. 59). Without deeper explanation of how this shift in grammatical personhood affected actual Indigenous engagement with the newspaper, this analysis lands as little more than discursive irony.

Moreover, while the book is billed as a comparative study of newspapers in Canadian and US schools, no American newspaper is included in her archive. Instead, excerpts such as Haskell's printer's devil make cameo-like appearances throughout, rather than through sustained engagement. Instead, most of the comparative work is accomplished through tracking Shingwauk Indian school superintendent Edward Francis Wilson's trip to the United States and his amateur ethnography of Indigenous languages gleaned from American boarding school students. When Griffith thickens the context of how these newspapers were actually read and by whom, she breaks new ground, such as in the seventh chapter when she treats the “cross-border consultations” of figures such as Wilson and Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. By following the publication and reproduction of stories from boarding school papers in the United States, into Canada, and back again, Griffith provides strong evidence for an important and overlooked aspect of transnational system-building for Indian schooling through newspapers.

Interrogating the story of Haskell's anonymous printer's devil offers a tantalizing invitation for what additional historical inquiry on industrial school newspapers might look like. What does it mean for our understanding of Native agency in printshops that the Haskell Indian Leader itself reported the printer's devil and his antics? Was this coverage of one of their own a way for the students to smuggle the shenanigans of one of their friends into the official organ of the school? Or was the boy demonstrating his insider knowledge of the printing trade, eager to demonstrate it with pride to a Euro-American audience? Answering these questions would place Indigenous students’ engagement with printing, vocational training, and their school newspapers at the center of such a history. Words have a past, yet the rhetoric of assimilation is but one element in the way Indigenous history is ultimately written.