"Landrum has produced an excellent monograph on the history of the Flandreau and Pipestone schools. The book demonstrates how Dakota peoples embraced the educational process at these institutions as a means to confront banishment, displacement, and attempted erasure by the U.S. government during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."—John R. Legg, Middle West Review
"The Dakota Sioux Experience works well as a case study of federal Indian boarding schools and their impact on Native communities. Drawing from archived government reports, as well as personal correspondence, memoirs, and oral history interviews from former students, Landrum presents a detailed, balanced history of the schools’ construction, recruitment strategies, academic curricula, and vocational opportunities."—Rose Buchanan, Native American and Indigenous Studies
"This book is an important contribution to the growing literature on American Indians and boarding schools."—Elise Boxer, North Dakota History
"This book will appeal to scholars, historians, federal boarding school descendants, Dakota people, and all Native people."—Nancy F. Carlson, Nebraska History
“This study of the Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools is important because it covers the two schools in great depth while also linking various historical contexts and periods. This book will appeal to both scholars in the field and to descendants of the schools’ students. I especially appreciate Landrum’s inclusion of the specter of race science regarding student evaluations at the schools. She also has further clarified and added greater nuance to the discussion of the Puritan ‘praying towns’ and provided a valuable discussion of the self-pedagogy of the Five Civilized Tribes.”—Hayes P. Mauro, associate professor of art and design at CUNY’s Queensborough Community College and author of The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School
“Landrum’s work provides thorough institutional histories of the Flandreau and Pipestone boarding schools and explains how changing federal Indian policies impacted those who taught, administered, and attended them. She also includes a collection of personal reflections, some heartbreaking and some uplifting, by those who passed through those schools.”—Tim Garrison, professor of history at Portland State University and coeditor of The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies
