Learning to Write “INDIAN:”The Boarding-School Experienceand American Indian Literature

by Amelia V. Katanski

Book Review by Mindy EricksonApril 20, 2010

ED 403

Claiming Identity

The subject of this book is how Indian writers are staking a claim to continued tribal identity and connection to land, history, and language through the telling of boarding-school stories, while examining how American Indian boarding-school students developed complex self-definitions and turned their ability to read and write in English to their own uses.

Solving the Indian “Problem” The United States was still at war with

Indians when the federal government began sending them to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s.

General Richard Pratt of the United States Army founded the first of these schools.

He based it on an education program he had developed for a group of seventy two Indian prisoners of war in Florida’s Fort Marion prison.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Founded in 1879, it served as a model for government Indian boarding schools until its closure in 1918.

Enrolled more than 10,000 students over 39 years. Separated from their native cultures, students prepared

for work in industrial and manual labor. Indian names were replaced with new white names. Students were prohibited from speaking their native

languages. Instructed in Christianity, students were fed, clothed, and

housed under strict military discipline.

The School

General Richard Henry Pratt “In Indian civilization,

I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”

“Kill the Indian and

save the man.”

The Hampton Institute

Carlisle’s program was based on the Hampton Institute’s program of industrial training for former slaves. Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded in 1868 by General Samuel Armstrong. He was interested in moral training and a practical, industrial education for southern blacks. American Indian Students attended there from 1878 to 1923.

“Before” and “After” Led by Carlisle, the literacy curricula of the schools

consisted of academic literacy, social literacy, religious literacy, and domestic literacy to replace their native culture, creating “before” and “after” scenarios.

“Friends of the Indian” A group of white church leaders, social reformers and

government officials who met in 1883 at Mohonk Lake, New York, to chart a new, more humane course of action.

They proposed to remold Native Americans into mainstream citizens.

Their goal was literally to civilize and assimilate their savage heathen brethren, by industrial training, instilling regard for private property, exposure to Christianity, and literacy in the English language.

They hoped to use the process of social evolutionism to create a future where Indians would be entirely assimilated into white European American culture.

Social EvolutionismImagined a hierarchical

relationship among races.

Accompanied by a ‘replacement’ model of identity, claiming education would transform students as they ‘progressed’ from tribal ‘savagery’ to Western ‘civilization.’

Federal boarding school enrollments grew from 6,200 at 60 schools in 1885 to more than 17,000 in 153 schools by 1900. By 1932 nearly one-third of Indian children were in boarding schools: a total of about 24,000. The Chemewa Indian School still exists in Oregon.

William LeapLinguist & Author of American Indian English

Indian student varieties of English were “codes under construction.”

Codes created on the basis of language they had acquired in their tribal communities.

Codes which they were learning from their teachers.

Codes they were learning from each other.

The Codes These codes reflected ancestral

language patterns and tribal cultural continuance.

Making use of them, students generated a wide-ranging literary response to their educations.

Writing to claim their voices, cultures, nations, and history.

This is how they learned to write “Indian.”

What else is learning to write “Indian?”

The process by which students were taught literacy in English at the boarding schools: literally learning to write the word “Indian.”

They thought of themselves not as “Indians” but as Ojibwe, Cherokee, Sioux, Oneida, Crow, Apache, Navajo, etc.

Another way of learning to write “Indian”

Schools were generators of a pan-tribal identity. Students from different tribes met, recognized shared

values and experiences of injustice crossing the boundaries of tribal nations.

They developed a sense of themselves as “Indian” that did not cancel out their tribal affiliations.

Rhetorical Sovereignty

This is “the inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and languages of public discourse.

In learning to write “Indian,” boarding school students transformed the English language itself by telling their stories and building literary forms to create their own tradition, thereby achieving “rhetorical sovereignty.”

Irony

This centrality is ironic, since the schools’ agenda was intended to eradicate Indian cultural identity, which would include the elimination of any sort of identifiable American Indian literature.

Further IronyAt the same time Indians were being stripped of their culture in boarding schools. William Frederick Cody “Buffalo Bill” was capitalizing on representing his encounters with Indian culture.

Representative Indians

Representative Indians were those individuals chosen as examples of the success of assimilation to kill off indigenous cultural attributes.

Two students from Carlisle, who also became teachers there, and whom Pratt considered to be Representative Indians, were Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), and Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa).

Repertoires of Identity As a means of survival, students developed

repertoires of identity, blending cultures by incorporating old and new ways.

Storytellers did not lose the stories as boarding school educators hoped.

What they did was use the representational tools they acquired to adapt new methods of telling and recording the ancient stories, developing repertoires of representation.

Students found ways to speak their own languages, eat their own foods, and exercise tribal religious practices.

Laura Tohe

Dine (Navaho) woman who attended government boarding schools

Speaks the Dine language, values her tribal culture, and sees herself connected to other boarding school students as a “survivor.”

English professor at Arizona State University.

“Letter to General Pratt” by Laura Tohe

“I voice this letter to you now because I speak for me, no longer invisible, and no longer relegated to the quiet margins of American culture, my tongue silenced. The land, the Dine, the Dine culture is how I define myself and my writing. That part of my identity was never drowned; it was never a hindrance but a strength. To write is powerful and even dangerous. To have no stories is to be an empty person. Writing is a way for me to claim my voice, my heritage, my stories, my culture, my people, and my history.”

Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) A student and teacher at

Carlisle. Doctor at Pine Ridge

during Wounded Knee. Married a white woman

superintendent of schools for Native Americans.

In Indian Boyhood, he uses coup tales, naming stories, hunting and war stories, and educational stories: “Indian” forms of life-telling.

Zitkala-Sa Chose her own Indian name to

write under, rather than using the name Gertrude Bonnin.

Raised on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota by her mother.

Little is known about her white father.

Her autobiographical writings are hybrid essays which follow the structure of traditional trickster tales, placing her in the position of the wanderer who traverses worlds.

Francis La Flesche Described as 150% Indian—well

versed in both Indian and white cultures.

Member of the Omaha tribe. Believed Indian culture was

vanishing. The Middle Five, first published

in 1900, is an account of his life as a student in a Presbyterian mission school in northeastern Nebraska about the time of the Civil War.

N. Scott Momaday His mother was one quarter Cherokee and

chose to attend Haskell Institute rather than living the life of a Southern belle.

A member of the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma. Won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969. Known for saying: “I sometimes think the

contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.”

Wrote The Indolent Boys, set in 1892, about three young Kiowas who ran away from boarding school after a severe beating and perished in an unexpected winter storm as they traveled home.

Leslie Marmon Silko

Several of her relatives attended Indian Boarding Schools.

Member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe.

Her grandfather graduated from Sherman Institue, an Indian School in Riverside, California.

Her book Storyteller, which includes boarding school stories, has been described as a Native American Roots.

Sources

Bear, Charla. “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.” http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865

College of Arts & Sciences. American University, Washington, D.C. William Leap, professor. http://american.edu/cas/faculty/wlm.cfm

Moon, Carl. Photographer of Native Americans. Website: www.carlmoon.com/pratt-rich.jpb and www.carlmoon.com/school.htm

Tohe, Laura. Navajo poet, playwright, librettist, scholar. Website: http://www.lauratohe.com/