This Benevolent Experiment gave me initial cause for concern. The title suggests that the boarding schools were compassionately assimilating Indigenous youth, an oxymoron which made me question the author's understanding of the missions which the schools employed; in order to survive in the “new world” indigeneity had to be removed, at all costs. It soon became obvious, however, that the author understood the costs, as he explained his genocide studies background, from which he derived his goal to address the collective harm – as opposed to individual consequences – that genocide caused and continues to cause in Canada and the USA.

The book holds two main strengths for scholars of Indigenous studies: the specific analysis of four boarding schools, and an exploration of the variations of the boarding school experiences in Canada and the USA. For those of us who want to delve deeper into individual boarding school institutions and the actors and “things” which interact with those institutions, the author delivers a thematic exploration of the four schools – Albuquerque Indian School and Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico, and Portage la Prairie Indian Residential School and Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba. The analysis of the schools adds to the growing literature on institutions – Carlisle, Chilocco, Flandreau School, Haskell Institute – while not duplicating other thematic boarding school histories; these are not stories about the schools, or the students in them, but instead are examples of the differences in boarding schools and the reasons why each boarding school is unique.

The author provides insights into the uniqueness and variations in boarding school experiences, by employing his own theoretical framework: settler colonial mesh. The mesh can be perceived as layers of netting, built up from the microsocietal level, through the meso and macro levels. The local actors – human and nonhuman – create the micro- level net. This includes the students themselves, the school staff, and the local community, as well as nonhuman influences such as illness, food, and land (chapters 4 through 7). The mesh layers build up, and combine with the macrosocietal level, such as government policies aimed at solving “the Indian problem”; the policies in both countries are explained in depth in chapter 3. The author explains how these actors allowed, at times, individual and collective resistance, while simultaneously containing education within a framework of assimilation. I struggled with this theory, trying to visualize how the net would allow for agency or normalcy in the boarding schools. The best I could devise was the scene from the end of Finding Nemo, when the fish, caught in a big net, synchronize efforts, and push the net down in a successful effort to break free. This collective effort – which is arguably shown in the book through the variations in the New Mexico schools – shows how a community can change policies, thus allowing for variations in boarding schools. However, I struggled to see how the theory explained individual agency – which the book gives plenty of examples of – unless people simply slipped through a hole in the mesh net. While this new approach to Indigenous education theory allows for students to visualize the controlling system of assimilation in the boarding schools on multiple levels, I am not yet convinced. I felt that it did not allow for complexities, to the same extent as Lomawaima and McCarty's theory of the safety zone – which, although applied to US Indigenous education, could effectively be applied to all Indigenous policies enacted on the micro, meso, and macro levels.Footnote ¹

A main weakness – which could very well be a strength to others – was the amount of background information given before the analysis of the schools began. While the background information (literature review, theory, methods) in the introduction may be necessary for the uninformed reader, there is nothing new for students and scholars of Indigenous studies. The subsequent chapters on genocide, and education policy for Indigenous peoples, set out the framework for the future chapters, but fall somewhat short in their task, as they both contain too much information for an introduction, and not enough detail for a comprehensive background.

The book ends on a strength, however. The penultimate chapter – “Aftermaths and Redress” – is a must-read for all undergraduate students taking courses in Indigenous studies, focussing on the broader sociocultural consequences of the boarding school histories, and bringing that historical context and indeed the conversation into the present day. In the last few pages, the author states that education is not the way forward, and yet, if we taught our children that despite the genocide, Indigenous people are still here, fighting for our environment, then perhaps we could break free of the mesh on the micro, meso, and macro levels.