Introduction: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich first appeared in her 1984 debut collection, Jacklight, and has since become a seminal work for its harrowing yet lyrical depiction of the Native American boarding school experience. The poem’s enduring popularity lies in its ability to give a collective voice to “us kids,” transforming a historical trauma into a deeply personal narrative of resistance, displacement, and the unyielding instinct to return to one’s roots. Erdrich centers the poem on the inescapable pull of home, which haunts the children even in their unconscious moments: “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.” The text is celebrated for its visceral imagery, particularly the metaphor of the railroad tracks as “old / lacerations that we love,” suggesting that the path home is synonymous with pain and that by “Riding scars / you can’t get lost.” The poem captures the tragic cycle of their rebellion; the children brave the “cold in / regulation clothes” only to face the inevitability of failure, aware that “the / sheriff’s waiting at midrun / to take us back” in a vehicle described as “dumb and warm.” Ultimately, the poem serves as an indictment of forced assimilation, symbolized by the “long green” dresses—”the color you would think shame was”—and the “shameful work” of scrubbing sidewalks, yet it asserts a quiet resilience as the children’s memories and identities, like “frail outlines,” persist beneath the erasure.
Text: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.
Boxcars stumbling north in dreams
don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.
The rails, old lacerations that we love,
shoot parallel across the face and break
just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars
you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.
The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark
less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards
as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts
to be here, cold in regulation clothes.
We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun
to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.
The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums
like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts
of ancient punishments lead back and forth.
All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,
the color you would think shame was. We scrub
the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.
Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs
and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear
a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark
face before it hardened, pale, remembering
delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.
Copyright Credit: Louise Erdrich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Annotations: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
| Stanza / Line(s) | Annotation | Literary Devices |
| “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.” | Home exists only in dreams, indicating exile, displacement, and psychic homelessness caused by the boarding school system. | ■ Metaphor (Red) · ▲ Irony (Blue) · ● Psychological Symbolism (Green) |
| “Boxcars stumbling north in dreams / don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.” | The children imagine escape through freight trains; “stumbling” personifies movement as unstable and dangerous, reflecting desperation. | ■ Personification (Red) · ◆ Imagery (Orange) · ✦ Motif of Escape (Purple) |
| “The rails, old lacerations that we love,” | Rails are compared to wounds, symbolizing colonial violence paradoxically embraced as a route to freedom. | ■ Metaphor (Red) · ● Paradox (Green) · ✧ Historical Trauma (Brown) |
| “shoot parallel across the face and break / just under Turtle Mountains.” | The land is given a human “face”; the break suggests borders between captivity and home, culture and erasure. | ■ Extended Metaphor (Red) · ◆ Personification (Orange) |
| “Riding scars / you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.” | Scars become guides; Indigenous identity is mapped through pain rather than geography. | ■ Symbolism (Red) · ● Irony (Green) · ✦ Theme of Identity (Purple) |
| “The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark / less tolerant.” | Authority intrudes violently into darkness; “lame” implies moral and institutional failure. | ■ Symbolism (Red) · ▲ Connotation (Blue) · ◆ Visual Imagery (Orange) |
| “We watch through cracks in boards” | Surveillance and imprisonment imagery; children exist in fragments, denied wholeness. | ■ Visual Imagery (Red) · ✦ Motif of Confinement (Purple) |
| “as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts” | Movement becomes physically painful, echoing forced migration and cultural rupture. | ■ Repetition (Red) · ● Kinaesthetic Imagery (Green) |
| “cold in regulation clothes.” | Uniforms erase individuality; institutional cold mirrors emotional deprivation. | ■ Symbolism (Red) · ▲ Metonymy (Blue) |
| “We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun / to take us back.” | Escape is foreclosed; colonial law enforces cyclical captivity. | ■ Foreshadowing (Red) · ✧ Structural Violence (Brown) |
| “His car is dumb and warm.” | Mechanical comfort contrasts with human cruelty; irony undercuts false safety. | ■ Irony (Red) · ● Personification (Green) |
| “The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums / like a wing of long insults.” | Modern roads symbolize assimilation—smooth, efficient, but emotionally brutal. | ■ Simile (Red) · ◆ Aural Imagery (Orange) · ✦ Modernity Critique (Purple) |
| “The worn-down welts / of ancient punishments lead back and forth.” | Historical abuse repeats itself; trauma is cyclical and inherited. | ■ Metaphor (Red) · ✧ Intergenerational Trauma (Brown) |
| “All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,” | Gender humiliation is imposed; green ironically evokes both nature and shame. | ■ Symbolism (Red) · ● Irony (Green) |
| “the color you would think shame was.” | Shame is aestheticized, exposing how punishment becomes internalized. | ■ Abstract Metaphor (Red) · ▲ Emotive Connotation (Blue) |
| “We scrub / the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.” | Forced labor enforces submission; shame becomes disciplinary. | ■ Social Critique (Red) · ✦ Theme of Degradation (Purple) |
| “Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs” | Labor is violent; even cleaning becomes an act of wounding. | ■ Violent Imagery (Red) · ◆ Visual Imagery (Orange) |
| “frail outlines shiver clear / a moment” | Brief resurfacing of memory and identity before erasure resumes. | ■ Ephemerality (Red) · ● Imagery (Green) |
| “things us kids pressed on the dark / face before it hardened” | Children attempt to leave marks on history before colonial systems solidify. | ■ Extended Metaphor (Red) · ✧ Memory & Resistance (Brown) |
| “delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.” | Language and nature preserve identity; names resist annihilation. | ■ Symbolism (Red) · ◆ Organic Imagery (Orange) · ✦ Cultural Memory (Purple) |
Literary And Poetic Devices: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
| Device | Short definition | Example | How it works in this poem |
| 🔴 Alliteration | Repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words. | “rolling, rolling” | The repeated r/l sounds add momentum and strain, mimicking the train’s movement and the body’s weariness. |
| 🟠 Anaphora | Repetition of a word/phrase at the beginning of successive clauses/lines. | “Home is … / Home is …” | The repeated opening stresses longing and obsession: “home” becomes the poem’s emotional anchor and ache. |
| 🟡 Assonance | Repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words. | “dumb and warm” | Soft vowel echoes create a muted, resigned music that fits the “warm” trap of return/capture. |
| 🟢 Caesura | A purposeful pause within a line (often via punctuation). | “The rails, old lacerations …” | The comma interrupts the line like a jolt—mirroring the harshness of the rails and the interrupted lives of the children. |
| 🔵 Connotation | Implied meanings/associations beyond the literal definition. | “regulation clothes” | “Regulation” connotes institutional control and dehumanization, framing the children as managed bodies rather than persons. |
| 🟣 Enjambment | A thought continues past the end of a line without a full stop. | “The rails … / shoot parallel …” | The sense spills forward, creating speed and inevitability—like being carried along by tracks, rules, and forced return. |
| 🟤 Hyperbole | Deliberate exaggeration for emphasis. | “till it hurts / to be here” | The intensity magnifies the physical and psychological pain of displacement, cold, and containment. |
| ⚫ Imagery | Vivid sensory description (sight, sound, touch, etc.). | “through cracks in boards” | The cramped visual detail places us inside confinement, watching the world from a restricted, surveilled position. |
| ⚪ Irony | A contrast between expectation and reality; bitter or wry reversal. | “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep” | “Home” should be reachable and safe, yet it is accessed mainly in dreams—highlighting loss and forced separation. |
| 🟥 Metaphor | A direct comparison where one thing is another. | “The rails, old lacerations” | The tracks become wounds: the landscape and the children’s histories are marked by injury and coercion. |
| 🟧 Metonymy | Substituting a related object/term for the thing meant. | “the sheriff” | The sheriff stands for the whole enforcement system—law, capture, and the machinery of return to the institution. |
| 🟨 Onomatopoeia | Word sounds imitate the sound they describe. | “it only hums” | “Hums” reproduces the highway’s steady sound, contrasting with the rocking train and implying numb, mechanical certainty. |
| 🟩 Oxymoron | Two seemingly contradictory terms placed together. | “dumb and warm” | Warmth usually comforts, but paired with “dumb” it becomes a mindless, coercive comfort—dangerously soothing. |
| 🟦 Paradox | A statement that seems contradictory yet reveals a truth. | “Riding scars / you can’t get lost” | The “scars” (trauma marks) become navigation; pain itself maps identity and direction when normal routes are denied. |
| 🟪 Personification | Giving human traits to nonhuman things. | “makes the dark / less tolerant” | Darkness is treated as a judging presence, intensifying threat and suggesting the world itself participates in discipline. |
| 🟫 Repetition | Intentional reuse of words/phrases for emphasis or rhythm. | “rolling, rolling” | The doubled word creates insistence and fatigue, echoing relentless motion and recurring punishment. |
| ⬛ Simile | Comparison using like or as. | “hums / like a wing …” | The highway’s hum becomes an insulting “wing,” turning ordinary sound into a persistent, belittling force. |
| ⬜ Symbolism | Concrete details stand for larger abstract ideas. | “long green” dresses | The dresses symbolize imposed identity and “shame,” turning clothing into a visible badge of social control and humiliation. |
| 🟣 Synecdoche | A part represents the whole (or the whole represents a part). | “through cracks” | “Cracks” (a small part of the wall) represent the children’s entire narrowed access to freedom, knowledge, and the outside world. |
| 🔷 Tone | The speaker’s attitude (emotional stance) toward the subject. | “old lacerations that we love” | The tone is conflicted—tenderness braided with hurt—capturing how trauma, memory, and longing can coexist. |
Themes: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
🔴 Theme 1: Forced Displacement and the Fractured Idea of Home
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich presents home not as a stable physical location but as a fractured, dreamlike longing shaped by colonial violence and forced removal. The children’s repeated attempts to flee the boarding school dramatize how Indigenous belonging has been severed from geography and relocated into memory, sleep, and desire, where it can exist only temporarily and without consequence. Through images of boxcars, rails, and relentless motion, Erdrich reveals that the journey toward home is perpetually incomplete, as institutional power intercepts and redirects Indigenous mobility. Home, therefore, becomes an abstract crossing point—“the place they cross”—rather than a destination, suggesting that cultural rootedness has been displaced by imposed systems of control. This theme exposes how the boarding school operates not merely as a site of education but as a mechanism for unmaking Indigenous relationships to land, ancestry, and continuity, leaving the children suspended between movement and capture, hope and inevitability.
🔵 Theme 2: Colonial Discipline, Surveillance, and Institutional Power
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich constructs the boarding school as a rigid disciplinary apparatus in which authority manifests through constant surveillance, physical containment, and the looming presence of law enforcement. Guards, sheriffs, uniforms, and regulations function collectively to remind the children that escape is not simply discouraged but structurally impossible, since power extends beyond the school into roads, vehicles, and legal systems. Erdrich’s depiction of the sheriff’s “dumb and warm” car underscores the banality of oppression, revealing how coercion often disguises itself as order and comfort. The children’s awareness that recapture is inevitable reinforces the cyclical nature of colonial discipline, where resistance is anticipated and preemptively neutralized. This theme highlights how institutional power operates impersonally yet relentlessly, reducing Indigenous children to managed bodies whose movements, clothing, and labor are strictly regulated, thereby illustrating the broader colonial strategy of control through normalization rather than overt brutality alone.
🟢 Theme 3: Shame, Gendered Punishment, and the Politics of Humiliation
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich exposes shame as a calculated instrument of colonial discipline, particularly through gendered forms of punishment that target bodily appearance and public labor. The enforced wearing of identical green dresses, regardless of identity or gender, transforms clothing into a mechanism of humiliation that strips individuality while visually marking the children as subjects of institutional authority. Shame is further internalized through compulsory labor, such as scrubbing sidewalks, which reinforces the idea that Indigenous presence itself is something that must be erased or cleansed. By linking shame to color, work, and exposure, Erdrich demonstrates how emotional degradation becomes normalized, teaching children to associate their bodies and identities with disgrace. This theme reveals that colonial power does not rely solely on physical force but also on psychological conditioning, where repeated humiliation ensures compliance by embedding inferiority within the self, making resistance not only dangerous but emotionally exhausting.
🟣 Theme 4: Memory, Trauma, and Subtle Forms of Cultural Resistance
Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich portrays memory as both fragile and defiant, functioning as a quiet but persistent form of resistance against cultural erasure. The fleeting impressions left by children’s hands, names, and natural images on stone symbolize attempts to inscribe identity onto an environment designed to suppress it, even if those marks remain visible only momentarily. Erdrich’s imagery of scars, welts, and “old injuries” emphasizes that trauma is cumulative and historical, passed down through generations rather than confined to individual experience. Yet within this trauma lies endurance, as memory preserves cultural presence when language, land, and autonomy are under threat. This theme underscores that resistance does not always take the form of successful escape; instead, it survives in recollection, naming, and the refusal to forget. By foregrounding memory, Erdrich affirms Indigenous resilience while acknowledging the profound cost at which it persists.
Literary Theories and “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
| Literary Theory | Application to the Poem (Critical Explanation) | Textual References from the Poem |
| 🔴 Postcolonial Theory | The poem exposes the boarding school as a colonial apparatus designed to erase Indigenous identity through displacement, surveillance, and enforced assimilation. The children’s attempts to flee are not merely physical acts but symbolic resistance against imperial structures that regulate movement, clothing, labor, and language. Colonial power extends beyond the school into law enforcement, transportation systems, and geography itself, revealing how empire embeds control within everyday institutions. | “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep” · “We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun / to take us back” · “cold in regulation clothes” |
| 🔵 Trauma Theory | The poem represents trauma as cyclical, embodied, and inherited rather than singular or event-based. Scars, welts, and injuries recur throughout the poem, suggesting that historical violence persists across generations. Trauma manifests through repetition, fragmented memory, and involuntary recall, particularly in dream imagery and bodily pain. The children’s experiences demonstrate how institutional abuse becomes internalized, shaping identity and perception long after the immediate violence ends. | “old lacerations that we love” · “The worn-down welts / of ancient punishments” · “delicate old injuries” |
| 🟢 Marxist / Ideological Criticism | The poem critiques institutional labor and discipline as mechanisms of ideological control rather than economic productivity. Forced cleaning work functions symbolically to erase Indigenous presence from public space while teaching submission through humiliation. The children’s labor has no transformative value; instead, it reinforces power hierarchies by conditioning obedience and shame. This reflects how institutions reproduce dominance by turning bodies into instruments of ideological compliance. | “We scrub / the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work” · “Our brushes cut the stone” |
| 🟣 Feminist / Gender Studies | Gendered punishment is central to the poem’s portrayal of control, as enforced dresses feminize and humiliate all runaways regardless of gender. Clothing becomes a tool for disciplining the body and enforcing conformity, revealing how colonial systems manipulate gender norms to weaken resistance. Shame is aestheticized and imposed, linking femininity with degradation rather than agency. | “All runaways wear dresses, long green ones” · “the color you would think shame was” |
Critical Questions about “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
🔴 Critical Question 1: How does the poem redefine “home” when return is imagined more vividly in dreams than in reality?
“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich Home is less a geographic destination than a psychological compass, because the speakers “head for” it in sleep while their waking bodies are governed by “regulation clothes” and the certainty of being taken back, and this disjunction makes home both sanctuary and indictment. The boxcars that “don’t wait” imply that even movement is on hostile terms: the children must seize escape “on the run,” as if belonging can only be chased, never granted. When the poem concludes that “Home is the place they cross,” home becomes an intersection rather than a dwelling, suggesting that Indigenous attachment persists yet is reduced to brief, precarious contact with land and memory. The repeated naming of home therefore does not resolve displacement; instead, it converts longing into endurance, where imagination protects what institutions try to sever, and where dream becomes the only space not fully policed.
🟠 Critical Question 2: In what ways does Erdrich use injury imagery to map institutional violence onto the landscape and its routes?
“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich The poem’s injury lexicon—“lacerations,” “scars,” “welts”—invites readers to treat institutional violence as infrastructure, because the routes the children travel are described as wounds shared by land and body. When “rails” become “old lacerations” that “shoot parallel across the face,” mobility loses neutrality and the landscape is figured as a battered human visage, marked by an imposed geometry that cuts and confines. The unsettling admission that these lacerations are ones “that we love” exposes how repeated coercion can be misrecognized as familiarity, especially when pain becomes the only stable map available. Later, “worn-down welts / of ancient punishments” suggest an intergenerational continuity, as though the marks have been rubbed smooth by time but never erased. Even the highway’s hum “like a wing of long insults” carries contempt forward, translating historical brutality into modern sound and route. Geography thus becomes an archive of domination.
🟡 Critical Question 3: How do the dresses, the color green, and the “shameful work” show shame as socially produced rather than naturally felt?
“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich By foregrounding dresses, color, and scrubbing, the poem treats shame as something produced and administered, because it is attached to visible markers and repetitive labor that teach the children to view themselves through an institutional gaze. “All runaways wear dresses” implies enforced uniformity and gendered exposure, so that escape itself carries a costume that can betray, classify, and ridicule, even before any authority speaks. The “long green” fabric is described as “the color you would think shame was,” a synesthetic turn that shows ideology colonizing perception until an emotion seems like a physical property. When the speakers “scrub / the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work,” humiliation is routinized into the body: arms repeat motions, eyes track stains, and the self learns to equate usefulness with abasement. Erdrich thereby reframes shame as a technology of control, not an inner truth for them.
🟢 Critical Question 4: What does the poem suggest about memory and resistance through the momentary “outlines” that appear as the children scrub the stone?
“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich The poem’s closing scene suggests that memory persists as trace and flare, because the brushes that “cut the stone in watered arcs” raise “frail outlines” that “shiver clear,” as though coerced labor becomes a medium of revelation. What the children scrub to satisfy authority also becomes what they briefly recover: impressions “pressed on the dark / face before it hardened,” which implies that identities and stories lie beneath institutional surfaces, waiting for the right pressure, angle, or water to reappear. The moment is temporary—“a moment”—and that brevity matters, since it models resistance not as a triumphant overturning of power but as intermittent visibility that interrupts the intended erasure. The “spines of names and leaves” link personal memory to the nonhuman world, implying that land remembers alongside people, even when the school tries to sever that relation. Thus, cleaning becomes an accidental archive.
Literary Works Similar to “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
- 🔴 “I Lost My Talk” by Rita Joe — Similarity: Like Erdrich’s boarding-school poem, it records forced assimilation as a lived theft of voice, language, and selfhood enacted through institutional schooling; Text: (nac-cna.ca)
- 🔵 “The Powwow at the End of the World” by Sherman Alexie — Similarity: It parallels Erdrich’s theme of Indigenous resistance by framing justice and return as prerequisites for reconciliation, thereby refusing “closure” without decolonial repair; Text: (The Poetry Foundation)
- 🟢 “Helen Betty Osborne” by Marilyn Dumont — Similarity: Like Erdrich’s depiction of systemic harm, it indicts settler-colonial violence and the social structures that make Indigenous lives vulnerable, turning lyric into testimony.
- 🟣 “Dear John Wayne” by Louise Erdrich — Similarity: It complements the boarding-school critique by exposing how dominant cultural narratives (myth, cinema, masculinity) normalize Indigenous dispossession and humiliation, extending institutional violence into popular culture.
Representative Quotations of “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
| Quotation | Context (what is happening in the poem) | Theoretical perspective |
| 🔴 “Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.” | The speakers (runaways) define home as a dream-direction rather than a reachable place. | Postcolonial Theory: Home becomes an imagined refuge because colonial institutions have displaced Indigenous belonging, turning “home” into a psychic territory rather than a protected geography. |
| 🔵 “Boxcars stumbling north in dreams” | Escape is envisioned through trains moving north; movement is unstable and precarious. | Trauma Theory: Dream-escape signals dissociation and involuntary replay, where the mind rehearses flight because waking reality forecloses freedom. |
| 🟢 “We catch them on the run.” | The children must seize fleeting chances; escape requires urgency and risk. | New Historicism: The line reflects historically specific constraints around Native mobility under policing regimes, embedding individual action within institutional power structures. |
| 🟣 “The rails, old lacerations” | Rails are described as wounds across the land, simultaneously harmful and useful for escape. | Trauma Theory: The landscape is read through injury; routes of movement are literally figured as scars, suggesting trauma is mapped onto space and becomes a navigation system. |
| 🟠 “Riding scars” | The children “ride” on scar-like rails; harm becomes the very medium of motion. | Postcolonial Theory: Colonial infrastructure is double-edged—built within domination, yet repurposed in acts of resistance, revealing survival inside oppressive systems. |
| 🟡 “cold in regulation clothes” | Uniforms and rules produce physical coldness and symbolic dehumanization. | Foucauldian Discipline (Power/Surveillance): “Regulation” marks the body as administratively governed; clothing becomes a technology of docility that standardizes identity. |
| 🟤 “the sheriff’s waiting” | The runaways anticipate capture; state authority is positioned to intercept them. | Postcolonial Theory: The sheriff stands for settler law, showing how colonial governance extends beyond the school into broader state enforcement that returns children to captivity. |
| 🟧 “His car is dumb and warm.” | The vehicle is comfortingly warm but morally vacant; it enables forced return. | Ideological Critique (Marxist/State Apparatus): Apparent comfort masks coercion; the state’s “soft” surfaces normalize domination, making recapture feel routine and inevitable. |
| 🟩 “All runaways wear dresses” | Runaways are forced into dresses, implying imposed gendering and humiliation. | Feminist / Gender Studies: Gender becomes a weapon; enforced dress codes discipline bodies, shame them publicly, and fracture agency through coerced performance of identity. |
| 🟥 “it’s shameful work” | The children scrub sidewalks; labor is framed as degrading rather than dignified. | Marxist / Ideological Criticism: Labor here is not empowerment but degradation—work functions as social control, teaching submission and internalized inferiority rather than producing value. |
Suggested Readings: “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” by Louise Erdrich
Books
- Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
- Chavkin, Allan, editor. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. University of Alabama Press, 1999.
Academic articles
- Schacht, Miriam. “Games of Silence: Indian Boarding Schools in Louise Erdrich’s Novels.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 27, no. 2, 2015, pp. 62–79. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.27.2.0062.
- Wilkinson, Elizabeth. “Gertrude Bonnin’s Rhetorical Strategies of Silence.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 33–56. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.25.3.0033.
Poem websites
- Erdrich, Louise. “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43079/indian-boarding-school-the-runaways. Accessed 31 Dec. 2025.
- Baldwin, Emma. “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich.” Poem Analysis. https://poemanalysis.com/louise-erdrich/indian-boarding-school-the-runaways/. Accessed 31 Dec. 2025.