Item Detail
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22818
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0
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0
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English
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I Remember Placement : Participating in the Indian Student Placement Program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
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Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Bachelor's thesis
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This thesis focuses on a voluntary foster-care program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ('the Mormons'), which places Native American children into white Mormon foster homes for the school year. The program began in 1954 and still continues in modified form, but reached a peak in attendance in the early 1970s. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first chapters of the thesis provide a historical and doctrinal background of the program and discuss previous studies of the Placement program. The program was motivated by a particular aspect of Mormon doctrine which deals with Native Americans; the first chapter discusses this doctrine in some detail. The third chapter discusses my study of twenty-two interviews with Navajo adults who were participants in Placement as adolescents. I present their overall memories of experience, and then discuss four common themes in memories of Placement: race, social class, culture, and personal identity. The interviewees were at various stages of struggling with who they were and where was their place within both Mormonism and their Navajo communities--I focus on this ambivalence and apply their struggle for self-definition to a processual conception of culture. Finally, I use the interviews in a discussion of the uses of narrative in relating Placement memories. The final part of the thesis will deal directly with myself as author, my place in the research both insider to Mormonism and outsider to Navajo culture. I will discuss methodological and epistemological issues relating to this inside-outside position and demonstrate the possibility of 'inside' or 'involved' anthropological research." [Author's abstract]