US Federal Off-Reservation Boarding Schools and Ethnocide’s Benevolent Perpetrator

The United States federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools of the twentieth century have been the locale for ethnocide and cultural genocide of the Native American population. While in any critical discussion of mass atrocity crimes, such as genocide and ethnocide, the question of the perpetrators always ranks central, not much attention has been paid to the perpetrators of ethnocide who operated in these off-reservation boarding schools. Furthermore, scholarship has focused on perpetrators in genocide but has not spent much time considering the definitional nuances between perpetrators in ethnocide and genocide. In this paper, I highlight an additional perpetrator type that applies specifically to ethnocide, which is an addition to existing perpetrator typologies. This benevolent perpetrator, who is specific to ethnocidal crimes, can for instance be found in United States federal off-reservation Indian boarding schools between 1878 and 1934. Paying attention to these perpetrators and considering them as a unique type, will allow for furthering and developing our understanding of ethnocide, perpetration and complicity, and assimilation practices in off-reservation boarding schools. Furthermore, this discussion is embedded in the debate about the applicability of the terms genocide and ethnocide in a settler-colonial context.