Wash Away Your Sins: Indigenous and Irish Women in Magdalene Laundries and the Poetics of Errant Histories

Abstract

The history of Magdalene laundries in Ireland is well-documented. Magdalene laundries also existed in the U.S., but their existence and impact are less widely known. In 1914, several young Indigenous women were sent from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to the House of the Good Shepherd in Reading, Pennsylvania as punishment for perceived behavioral infractions. Placing Indigenous and Irish women's experiences of forced confinement into conversation with one another, this article calls for a more capacious understanding of the legacy of the U.S. federal boarding school system and the carceral institutions that comprised the settler apparatus.