My first day in school was a very trying one. I had, in the primary room, boys and girls ranging from five to fifteen, some of whom could speak English, but others had no command of the language. I asked the children what had been the lesson of the previous day and no one volunteered to tell. After a long silence one little girl had courage enough to tell me that they had not had any school, although they had entered the first of September.
On Saturdays and Sundays the parents came to see their children. Their coming was heralded by the barking of the many dogs that always follow the train of an Indian team.
On Saturdays the children were dressed in clean dresses and their hair tidily combed for the occasion. What a contrast they were to the parents, who came wearing their gaily colored blankets and shawls, moccasins on their feet, and the fathers often with their hair in long braids. The fathers and mothers often painted their faces in vivid red and yellow. Yet these same parents were willing to send their children to school, and were anxious to have them get the things they themselves had not had the opportunity of getting. They all congregated in the girls’ sitting room and enjoyed themselves visiting their children. On the floor one would perhaps see an old grandmother squatting and smoking her pipe filled with Indian tobacco, “kinnikinic.”
Our school children celebrated the Holidays in much the same way people would in any community. However, many of the parents looked on, not knowing what was being said, but paternal pride showed itself when their children took part in the school program.
The children enter school the first of September and remain until about the middle of June, with an occasional visit home on Saturday. They have lessons only two hours and a half daily, devoting the rest of the time to industrial work. When the mild Chinook winds begin to blow, and Mother Nature begins to waken the sleeping buds and flowers, the Indian child gets the wanderlust. He longs for that home, humble though it may be, and for that pony of his which has been idle all winter, and which has fattened on the bunch grass, severe as the winter may have been on the range. The Blackfeet have many horses and we are not surprised to learn that the boys learn to ride almost as soon as they are able to walk. These spring days are days of worry to the teacher. Sometimes, when she goes to her schoolroom, only girls are to be seen, as the boys have decided to round up their ponies, or those who have not the courage to go home are off drowning ground squirrels. Indian police are sent out to various homes to round up the truants. Sometimes they manage to get them back in two or three days, but more often it takes ten.
The teacher who enters the Indian Service is called upon to do many things besides actual academic work. One fall when school opened I had to assume the duties of matron for a month. This was a most trying time, as in the case of the Blackfeet children many came back to school fresh from a summer of camp life, and not always as clean as one would like to have them. Then there were homesick children to cheer; the arranging of details in laundry, sewing room, kitchen, dining room and buildings; the getting of sleepyheads out of bed every morning; keeping a watchful eye on those who tried to evade work; taking care of sick and children, doctoring trachomatous eyes; and many other duties.
Another time I was the children’s cook for three weeks. One would hardly expect that accomplishment in a teacher, but Hampton does expect it of her graduates, and I knew what my training had been. One thing I remember very vividly in those three weeks of experience, and that was what the children said, “Miss Bender sure can cook good beans.”
I got the parents interested in the field-day sports which were held in the spring. Then, with the aid of a supervisor and the principal, we got the parents to donate $84 to purchase basketballs, footballs, a baseball outfit, and indoor games to be used when the weather was severe and the children had to be confined in small playrooms. Up to this time they had had nothing in the way of games, and consequently the boys had spent much of their time sneaking off to the school dairy herd and breaking calves to ride.
I became well acquainted with some of the parents and visited them in their homes. Some had comfortable homes that were orderly and neat, but the majority of them had only one room, no floor but the dirt, and two windows, those usually with an eastern exposure. Many of the homes are excellent breeding places for trachoma and tuberculosis.
This brings me to the horrors of trachoma and my observation of it among the Plains Indians. It is a disease that without medical attention gradually impairs the sight until blindness results. Upon the examination of one hundred and fifty children in our school, forty-three were found to be afflicted with trachoma. The Government sent out specialists about three years ago, and they found that, out of the Indian population of 300,000, 50,000 had trachoma.
When the treatment of trachoma began I was called on to treat all cases with bluestone. There was a marked improvement in all the cases that we had treated for over six months. I do not know how soon they would have been pronounced cured, as I left in March, having received a transfer to the Fort Belknap Reservation. Here the conditions were even worse. Someone told me that this was “the one-eyed reservation,” and it seemed almost true. Here we had fifty children enrolled, and all but six had trachoma. I cite these instances because I feel so strongly these problems that are confronting our people, and they are problems that we can all help to remedy, whether our vocation in life is that of a teacher, carpenter, nurse, or a blacksmith. If you cannot get a doctor to treat this disease, be interested enough to treat the cases in your own community.
Think of it! Nearly 30% of all Indian children are in danger of becoming blind. Nearly 17,000 Indian boys and girls are in danger of complete blindness.
We may talk about demanding our rights, but unless we are willing to assume responsibilities we cannot presume to make such a demand. The missionary field for service and for consecrated workers is broad. What a wonderful opportunity for some of our young men to become doctors, fitted to cope with trachoma and tuberculosis. Without medical attention thousands of men and women will not be self-supporting, and they will be deprived of their usefulness.
We need strong Christian workers in the “Indian Country.” A number of the Indians are Christians, but the teacher who works among them sees the horrors of the grass dance, sun dance, the medicine lodge, and the use of mescal.
My white friends say, “Let them continue these old dances, they are so picturesque.” Is there any picturesqueness when a performer in the sun dance drops dead from exhaustion? Such a scene I witnessed up at Glacier National Park, where the Indians were dancing day and night for the benefit of guests at this summer resort. The day when the sun dance and medicine dance played an important part of their religious rites has passed. This form of religious ceremony has deteriorated with the advance of civilization, and we need to give the Indian Christianity and not paganism.2
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to a number of people who have helped to make this collection possible.
This recovery project builds on my dissertation. I thank my dissertation advisor, Miles Orvell, for encouraging me to pursue this book project. I also thank the other members of my dissertation committee, James Salazar and Sue-Im Lee, for their guidance.
To my editor at the University of Nebraska Press, Matt Bokovoy, who offered unwavering support for this project, I am truly grateful. Many thanks to Heather Stauffer, Joeth Zucco, Sally Antrobus, and everyone else at the press for their help. I also thank Hilary Wyss, Cari Carpenter, and the anonymous readers for their thoughtful feedback at various stages of this project.
Many thanks to my colleagues at SUNY College at Old Westbury. I am especially grateful to the Campus Professional Development Committee for awarding me generous funding to complete this project.
Various librarians and archivists assisted me with my research queries. I thank Barbara Landis and the staff at the Cumberland County Historical Society, Maggie Dittemore and the staff at the John Wesley Powell Library of Anthropology, Jenny C. Freed at Earlham College’
s Lilly Library, Mallory Covington at the Oklahoma Historical Society, and Lin Fredericksen at the Kansas Historical Society.
I thank Bridget Chapman and Tatum Petrich for their comments on drafts and for cheering me on throughout the writing process.
And, finally, I thank my family for their encouragement and support. I also thank Matthew McCahill, my husband and best friend, for always believing in me and for making me laugh. I am so lucky to have him in my life.
Notes
Introduction
1. The Seneca Indian School has had several names, including the Wyandotte Mission; the Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Industrial Boarding School; and the Seneca Boarding School. The school was founded in 1871 in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, under the auspices of the Society of Friends. Children between the ages of four and eighteen attended the school, which initially offered a curriculum through the fourth grade, later expanding to the eighth and ninth grades in the 1920s. Classes began in spring 1872, with fewer than fifty students. The low enrollment reflected the resistance among Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandot parents to sending their children away to boarding school. In 1876 the government began to assume a more active role in Indian education, and it oversaw all the missionary schools in Indian Territory, including the Seneca Indian School (Bieloh, “Bad Water,” 58). Due to recruitment efforts and increased pressure by the federal government, the enrollment increased to more than 135 by 1885 (Gibson, “Wyandotte Mission,” 140). Over time the school earned a reputation for its “steady stream of dedicated and competent administrators and teachers” and for its success in transforming so-called “savages” into students. Unlike other church-sponsored schools that failed, the Seneca Indian School thrived, resulting in its nickname as the “Marvel of the Wilderness” (Gibson, “Wyandotte Mission,” 140).
2. Here I borrow a term from an editorial in which the editors of the Hallaquah announced the death of their beloved fellow “Indian school-girl editor” Lucy Grey. I use the terms “Indian,” “Native American,” and “Native” throughout the introduction and annotations as well as in the author profiles, as these are the terms most often used by the writers themselves. I use the term “indigenous” to refer to a broader pan-tribal identity. I also identify writers by their tribal affiliation whenever possible.
3. Arizona Jackson (Wyandot) and Lula Walker (Wyandot) founded the Hallaquah with Ida Johnson (Wyandot?) and were associate editors for the first three issues; Jackson, Walker, and Johnson assumed the editorship in the March–April 1880 issue. Lula Walker was an older sister of Bertrand N. O. Walker, who later published poetry under his Wyandot name Hen-toh and animal stories in Tales of the Bark Lodges (1919).
4. See Batker, Reforming Fictions; Kilcup, Native American Women’s Writing; Washburn, “New Indians”; Littlefield and Parins, American Indian; and Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction. See also Hoxie’s edited collection Talking Back to Civilization, which contains several essays that appeared in the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians (later renamed the American Indian Magazine).
5. See Stanciu, “‘That Is Why I Sent You,’” and Zink, “Carlisle’s Writing Circle.”
6. Gaul echoes Wyss’s view in her work on Catharine Brown’s letters. She writes, “Those critics who tend to see Brown as a passive tool of the missionaries neglect to recognize the ways that her simple act of writing was an assertion of agency, a way to create certain effects or acts” (Gaul, Cherokee Sister, 35). Those effects or acts, as Gaul further explains, were “geared toward making arguments that will change minds on politicized issues surrounding Cherokees’ status in the United States and lead to increased donations to missions, both of which would benefit the Cherokees in strategic ways” (35).
7. Bonnin’s final editorial appeared in the Winter 1919 issue of the American Indian Magazine. After she left the magazine it underwent a number of changes under the editorship of Thomas L. Sloan (Omaha). As Hazel W. Hertzberg explains, the new American Indian Magazine was a marked departure from its predecessor under the editorship of Parker and Bonnin: “None of the signed articles were written by Indians. It was not to be, like its predecessor, a magazine of Indian opinion written largely by Indians, but rather a magazine about Indians written mostly by whites, and yet at the same time the official publication of the Society” (Hertzberg, The Search, 190). Publication of the magazine ceased with the August 1920 issue.
8. As the scholarship of Brooks, Cohen, and Round shows, alphabetic literacy, writing, and print culture played constitutive roles in early indigenous communities. Networks of print were established in enough indigenous communities by the 1880s “to support a new generation of Native writers and alphabetically literate activists” (Round, Removable Type, 224). This new generation, which includes the boarding school students and prominent Native American public intellectuals featured in this collection, transformed the tools of the boarding school by engaging in literacy and print practices that were already being produced and consumed in indigenous communities. The work of Brooks, Cohen, and Round encourages us to see federal boarding schools as one key site within extensive networks of print culture that gave rise to a new generation of Native American writers, editors, and printers at the turn of the twentieth century.
9. For more on the pan-tribal networks that early twentieth-century Native American public intellectuals cultivated and maintained through their work in the Indian Service and the Society of American Indians, see Hertzberg, Search for an American Indian Identity, and Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals.
10. See Francis Paul Prucha’s discussion of “the friends of the Indian” in Americanizing the American Indians. As Prucha explains, “the friends of the Indian” was a group of white reformers who dominated late nineteenth-century Indian policy and “with an ethnocentrism of frightening intensity, they resolved to do away with Indianness” (Prucha, Americanizing, 1).
11. For more on Pratt’s educational program for adult Indian prisoners at Fort Marion, see Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club.
12. For exemplary scholarship on the founding of Hampton Institute, see Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, and Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited.
13. It is worth noting that the founding of Carlisle marked a shift away from the heavy emphasis on Christian teachings at missionary schools to the federal government’s approach to Native American education. After the Civil War, missionary schools were phased out as the federal government gained more control over the education of Native Americans. Christianity was still important to Pratt’s model but was not its primary focus. Rather, his educational program focused on teaching Native American students English as well as the character-building habits of discipline, work, and cleanliness.
14. According to Littlefield and Parins (American Indian, 320): “The apprentice printers received a full course in composition and as much experience as possible in the job, stone, and press work. They were taught layout, operation and management of the equipment, as well as management of the steam engine and boiler that drove the machinery.” This training prepared many apprentice printers to enter the printing trade and the publishing industry.
15. Letters served multiple and often competing purposes in federal boarding schools as well as early missionary-run boarding schools, as demonstrated in the scholarship of Wyss, English Letters; Gaul, Cherokee Sister; and Child, Boarding School Seasons. For boarding school students and their families, letters were important communication and community-building tools. Parents of federal boarding school students who were not able to write in English would often write letters to their children with the aid of the agent or missionary (Adams, Education for Extinction, 251).
16. In Individuality Incorporated, Joel Pfister explains the shift that occurred after Pratt was forced to resign from Carlisle. Assuming the position of Indian commissioner in 1905, Francis Leupp defined himself against Pratt’s intent to eradicate Indian cultures: “I like the Indian for what is Indian in him. . . . Let us not make the mi
stake, in the process of absorbing them, of washing out whatever is distinctly Indian” (qtd. in Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 23). From the moment Pratt left Carlisle until it closed in 1918, the school reflected the government’s shift toward pluralism and exhibited an increased acceptance of Indianness, especially through its encouragement of the study of Native artistic traditions.
17. As Littlefield and Parins explain, the Red Man “was first published as Eadle Keahtah Toh, meaning ‘big morning star,’ which appeared in March 1880 as a four-page, three column monthly” printed at Carlisle. In 1888 the name of the school newspaper was changed to the Red Man. It was merged with the Indian Helper in 1900 to form the Red Man and Helper (Littlefield and Parins, American Indian, 318–19).
18. Due to the poor condition of the June 1907 issue of Talks and Thoughts, I could not transcribe and reprint Bender’s essay in full.
19. For more on the myth of the vanishing Indian, see Dippie, The Vanishing American.
20. In her well-known preface to Old Indian Legends (1901), Zitkala-Ša asserts that the oral tradition “strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind” (Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories, 5–6).
21. Advertised as “a magazine not only about Indians, but mainly by Indians,” the Indian Craftsman (later known as the Red Man) was established in February 1909 to serve as an outlet for a developing art-craft printing department at Carlisle. As Littlefield and Parins explain, Angel De Cora, a Winnebago, and William Deitz (Lone Star), a Sioux, both of whom taught in the school’s native arts department, directed the magazine’s art work, while Edgar K. Miller, formerly an instructor of printing at the Chilocco Indian School, directed the new printing shop. The Indian Craftsman was modeled after Gustav Stickley’s illustrated magazine, the Craftsman, and contained articles about Indian affairs and news related to the school as well as student writings. Many of the stories and legends written by students and published in the Indian Craftsman (and later the Red Man) were reprinted by newspapers and magazines in the East. It also contained photographs and illustrations by De Cora, Deitz, and their students. Their artwork contributed considerably to making the magazine “a showpiece of Indian printing” (Littlefield and Parins, American Indian, 315). In fact, as Littlefield and Parins note, the magazine became so popular that the publishers of Stickley’s magazine demanded that Carlisle change the name of its newspaper, which it did in February 1910, to the Red Man. Much of the magazine remained the same, although over time more emphasis was placed in the content on the possibilities of Indian citizenship, farming and agricultural “progress” of the Indian, and vocational training. In 1917 the Red Man ceased publication and then merged with the Carlisle Arrow to form the Carlisle Arrow and Red Man (Littlefield and Parins, American Indian, 314–15).
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