Learning to Write “INDIAN:”
The Boarding-School Experience
and American Indian Literature
by Amelia V. Katanski
Book Review by Mindy Erickson
April 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 selfdefinitions 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 Evolutionism
Imagined 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 Leap
Linguist & 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 Irony
At 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=165
16865
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/