Canadian residential school history teaches us much about student experiences and school activities, but also the system's ongoing legacy today. Jane Griffith's book, Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools, illustrates this well. Focusing on newspapers produced between 1887 and 1910 at schools in British Columbia (Kitamaat Home), Saskatchewan (Battleford and Regina Industrial Schools), Manitoba (Rupert's Land Industrial School), and Ontario (Shingwauk Home), Griffith puts forth an important argument that these publications were used to legitimize the schools’ operations, ultimately constructing a public-facing message about how students were to be successfully assimilated into Canadian society; therefore reinforcing ideas about time that situated First Peoples in the past and settler Canadians in the future. The book adds to the literature on residential school history by illustrating layers of student resistance, and cultural continuities within their home communities, despite the control and surveillance cultivated within the residential school system.

Recognizing that industrial training was a large part of the residential school experience, Griffith actively considers the role of students behind the printing and writing of these newspapers. With the exception of the school at Kitamaat—which was attended mostly by girls—the craft was usually reserved for male students, with their labor tied to expectations of eventual employment in the trade, though this outcome seldom occurred. Furthermore, student printers were often appropriated for exhibits, displays, or theatrical performances in an effort to showcase them as successfully assimilated into a settler Canadian future. Griffith frames this type of performance using the concepts of “beforing” and “aftering” (139). What she means by this is that, instead of thinking of the before/after effects of the schools dichotomously, the newspapers—and school administrators—manipulated settler narratives of time and space to appeal to readers’ desires for Indigenous content that seemed authentic, but firmly in the past, while also framing the school's work as legitimizing a Eurocentric future for the country.

The book's theoretical strength is found in a blending of scholarship on Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies. This is most apparent in Griffith's chapters on how newspapers used language—Indigenous languages and English—to evaluate students’ “success.” While students’ first languages were often banned, newspapers attempted to control Indigenous languages by representing and appropriating them on their own terms. Griffith often uses Shingwauk Residential School's principal, Edward Francis Wilson, to illustrate this point. An amateur anthropologist, Wilson sought to learn Anishinaabemowin and traveled extensively throughout North America in order to study the continent's linguistic diversity. Though sometimes Wilson, and the Shingwauk school, dominate her discussion, Griffith's careful reading of the articles Wilson published in the school's papers calls our attention to the way they reveal continuities and resistances in Indigenous language practices. In doing so, Words Have a Past reminds us about the resiliency of Indigenous students and their home communities in resisting the assimilationist future that the schools often presented to readers through their newspapers.

The newspapers, through their content and circulation, were important political tools in constructing concepts of place through association with Canadian, British, and American identities. Both words and images were used in the newspapers to legitimize the school's physical presence and their work as an extension of empire, maintaining a narrative that justified settler society's right to occupy Indigenous spaces. As such, Words Have a Past suggests that the study of newspapers challenges the tendency to think of the Canadian and American boarding school systems as inherently separate. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is a key American example. By cross-publishing articles and critiquing each other's national approaches to Indian policy, residential school newspapers reveal institutional and colonial relationships that stitched together Canadian and American policies. Put another way, these newspapers were situated in the social and political climate of late nineteenth century Canada, navigating carefully between Canadian, British, and American influences.

Overall, the book is framed in response to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Griffith does a masterful job demonstrating the importance of this history to issues in the present day. In the sixth chapter specifically, Griffith calls attention to how the newspapers help us better understand many of the subjects addressed in the commission's final report. The chapter tackles ceremony, treaty, the role of parents and overseers, fire, health, and death. In this part of the book, Griffith identifies parallels between the commission's findings and the content of the newspapers; her analysis is useful for further understanding and cataloguing student experiences at the schools.

Even though the church was flagged frequently in the commission's final report as responsible for developing the schooling system, Griffith has little to say about the role of religious organizations in fostering this print culture. She mentions that newspapers were circulated in Sunday Schools, yet it is unclear to what extent religious topics were addressed within them, especially in relation to the system's assimilationist agenda. Overall, it would have been helpful if the church had been addressed more directly in discussions of settler authority and oversight. Griffith's readings of the newspapers are significant, yet readers are sometimes left to draw their own conclusions about the newspapers’ content and its influence.

Despite these minor critiques, Words Have a Past marks an important step in the study of residential school history by drawing our attention to newspapers as important historical sources, and the printing trade as an influential part of some students’ experiences. Further, in anchoring the book within critical Indigenous and Settler Colonial studies, Griffith provides a direction for scholarship on residential schooling that challenges approaches that situate the system wholly in the past; as a result of her conclusions, Griffith explicitly calls for justice and restitution—especially as it relates to language reclamation—for survivors and their communities. This is an essential read for those studying the residential school system, settler colonialism, history of media, and Canadian history.