On Teaching The Tempest in the Shadow of Unmarked Indian Residential School Graves
by Jamie Paris
Content Warning: This piece will discuss Indian residential schools in Canada. Conversations about the Indian residential school program are complex and painful, particularly for survivors and their relations. In Canada, there are resources including the Indian Residential School Survivors Society 24-hour crisis line at 1–800–721–0066, or the First Nations Health Authority.
This past year I struggled emotionally and spiritually while teaching William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In many ways, the text should have been easy for me to teach. I know the play, I know the scholarship, and I have taught it before. But this was my first time teaching The Tempest in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in my home territory, on the original lands of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, which are also the homelands of the Métis Nation. I wanted to teach the play with a pedagogy that is what Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews describes as “tangibly anticolonial.”
I have learned that in order to teach this play here, where many student readers are Indigenous, I must maintain a keen awareness of the intergenerational trauma inflicted by the Canadian Indian Residential School program. The fact that Prospero abusively educates Caliban while insisting that he is treating him with “humane care” (1.2.415) in the play reminded us of the ways that some educators at Indian Residential Schools could be physically, sexually, and spiritually abusive while, at the same time, claiming that they were doing God’s work. How many of our parents, grandparents, and extended family members were treated like Caliban by people who, like Prospero, felt entitled to do so?
As students read Prospero’s account of his (mis)education and (mis)treatment of the enslaved Caliban, they immediately considered the experiences of their relatives who had attended Indian residential schools. They discovered eerie parallels between Prospero’s words and the actions of clergy, administrators, and staff at these schools, which were the sites of horrific abuse. This piece is partly a response to the students in my class who rightly saw distressing connections between Prospero’s repeated declarations of treating Caliban humanely and the actions of those involved in the operations of Indian residential schools. Like Prospero, so many of them continue to insist on their innocence, even when detailed evidence proves that physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at the schools was enabled at all institutional levels.
This essay also responds to ongoing dialogues about the relationships between Shakespeare studies and Indigenous studies led by critics and artists such as Mojave poet and scholar Natalie Diaz, Akwesasne Mohawk scholar Scott Manning Stevens, and Mohegan scholar and theatermaker Madeline Sayet, who have not only modeled such conversations but also called for more. My teaching in Winnipeg has affirmed the need for these conversations to be responsive to the needs of local communities. I teach The Tempest in a way that is informed by intergenerational trauma. To engage in culturally responsive pedagogy, for me as an early modern scholar and a mixed-race (Black and Métis) person, means creating a space to talk about Prospero’s abusive teaching and, in turn, the sometimes-abusive role Shakespeare has been made to play in systems of colonial education.
Prospero attempts to change Caliban fundamentally by threatening him with torture, calling him racist names, and otherwise dehumanizing him with “stripes… not kindness” (1.2.413). Prospero’s words and actions are not unlike those of General Richard H. Pratt, the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which would serve as a model not just for the U.S. boarding school system but also for the Canadian system that was implemented soon after. Building on his claim that it was necessary to “kill the Indian to save the man,” Pratt explained his educational philosophy in starkly racist terms in an 1890 letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs:
If millions of black savages can become so transformed and assimilated, and if, annually hundreds of thousands of emigrants from all lands can also become Anglicized, Americanized, assimilated and absorbed through association, there is but one plain duty resting upon us with regard to the Indians, and that is to relieve them of their savagery and other alien qualities by the same methods used to relieve others.
Prospero’s methods are strikingly similar to Pratt’s. Prospero entraps Caliban in a “hard rock,” cordons him off from “the rest o’th’ island” (1.2.343), and pinches him in his sleep until his bruises are “as thick as honeycomb” (1.2.329), all in an attempt to make Caliban what he is not — to transform him into a person Pratt identifies as “assimilated and absorbed through association.” Prospero continues to insist that his pedagogy — obviously abusive and dangerous — is filled with pains “humanely taken” (4.1.211–213), a claim which resonates with Pratt’s call to “relieve” Indigenous children of their so-called “savagery and other alien qualities.”
The horrific lengths that educators in the Canadian Indian residential school program took to indoctrinate Indigenous students were further reified in the summer of 2021 when anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, in counsultation with members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, used ground penetrating radar to find 215 probable graves on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Since then, Indigenous and settler scholars have discovered more than 1800 unmarked graves at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools in Western Canada.
It is likely that researchers will find thousands more unmarked graves in the coming months and years. Most of those buried in these graves are children whose deaths were covered up. Some of the children were even reported as runaways to their families. None of the families were given the closure of knowing what happened to their children, nor were they allowed the dignity of burying them and grieving with their community. For Indigenous students in my first-year course, Prospero’s pedagogy was not only one that is indicative of abuse; it specifically evoked settler colonial behavior in which the lives of Indigenous relatives are, like Caliban’s, neither cared for nor considered.
Caliban has an amazing knowledge of the lands he lives on. Still, he seems to have lost his language, his culture, and much of his spirituality. Caliban can be read as a victim of what Murray Sinclair, Anishinaabe judge and Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, calls a cultural genocide. A cultural genocide, according to Sinclair, involves the “destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group.” Such destruction, Sinclair explains, includes the seizure of land, the banning of languages, and the forbidding of spiritual practices. By the time The Tempest begins, Caliban has no family, no claim on the land that Prospero or his daughter will acknowledge and honor, no language other than the one given to him by his enslaver. He seems to own nothing of value; his labor is exploited; and his movements are constantly monitored or restricted.
As Patricia Akhimie reminds us in Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference, Prospero’s pedagogical orientation towards Caliban is not initially based on cruelty and domination. Prospero does not consider his actions to be inhumane because he does not see Caliban as fully human. As Miranda describes it, from her settler perspective, Caliban deserves no “more than a prison” because he is from a “vile race” (1.2.361, 357). He is, for his settler masters, a “born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.211–213). They want to assimilate Caliban as a useful laborer. At the same time, Prospero and Miranda see Caliban’s very nature as a problem that must be solved through violence, such that their abuse becomes a means of protecting their humanity from the uncivilizable Caliban.
Through a guided discussion, the students in my class made important connections between Caliban’s education and the residential school system. Like Caliban, the children in residential schools were expected to “serve in offices / That profit” the educational system, fulfilling tasks such as cleaning the school, cooking the meals, and serving the faculty (1.2.373–4). The sense of “profit” here is about power; Prospero and Miranda want to convert Caliban into a useful and happy worker who will help them without cursing at them, similar to the ways that the Indian Residential School program intended to convert Indigenous children into useful and happy workers who would labor for settlers and profit them. This desire to turn Indigenous Peoples into profitable subjects enabled and justified the use of physical, psychological, and spiritual abuse as corrective tools to compel obedience and extract labor.
The ending of the play is a tragedy that enacts Pratt’s vision of an ideally assimilated Indigenous person, willingly submitting to settler norms and thus rendered “productive” in a settler labor market. Caliban’s rebellion ends in his submission and a seeming recognition that he is powerless to resist Prospero’s “education.” Although the play capitulates to settler desires, what I hope to show Indigenous students is that we can and should resist the idea that Shakespeare is “settler property” in the same way that premodern critical race scholar Arthur Little, Jr. resists the idea that Shakespeare is “white property.” I want to empower both Indigenous and settler students to identify and read against colonial ideologies that surface in early modern texts. I want them to know that the power dynamics they are seeing in the play are not “in their head,” or even subtext. There is a clear connection between the way that Prospero justifies torturing Caliban and the way that settlers justified torturing children as a way of “relieving” them of their Indigenous identity.
Finally, my hope is that this piece helps to encourage early modern scholars, and especially scholars within premodern critical race studies, to engage in culturally responsive, intergenerational trauma-informed teaching about the emergence of settler supremacy as an ideology in early modern literature. Perhaps the questions and approaches I have outlined here will help settler scholars to think about what it means to be a settler educator teaching Shakespeare on Indigenous lands, and to consider the ways that they can do it without unintentionally reinforcing settler ideologies within their classrooms.
Jamie Paris (he/him) is a mixed-race scholar and an Instructor I in the department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media at the University of Manitoba. He primarily works in the field of premodern critical race studies, where his research focuses on the representation of whiteness in the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His secondary field is Canadian literature and culture, with a focus on non-dominative Black and Indigenous masculinities and intersectional feminist theory. Dr. Paris has published scholarly articles in Digital Studies, Canadian Literature, Renaissance and Reformation, Early Theatre, and the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. He is in the process of completing a book on whiteness and racial crossdressing in early modern drama for the Strode Series at the University of Alabama Press.
