Letters
1. Hallaquah, January 1880, n. pag.
2. Hallaquah, January 1881, n. pag. Jackson was a student at Earlham College in Indiana at this time. According to Earlham College Libraries Friends Collections and College Archives, Jackson was the first Native American to attend the college. It is worth noting that Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), also known as Zitkala-Ša, attended Earlham College from 1895 to 1897.
3. Susan Longstreth was a Quaker from Philadelphia and devoted benefactor of federal boarding schools, including the Seneca Indian School. Although letters to benefactors were commonplace in boarding school newspapers, this letter is particularly noteworthy because Longstreth had supplied funding and materials so that Jackson and her two female classmates, Ida Johnson and Lula Walker, could found the Hallaquah in December 1879. There is no way of determining just how the letter came to be published in Carlisle’s Eadle Keahtah Toh, which was edited by Pratt and Marianna Burgess, who oversaw all the publications in the Carlisle Printing Office. It is possible that Jackson herself submitted the letter for publication or Longstreth did (Carlisle’s literary society was named after Longstreth, which suggests her close affiliation with the school).
4. Jackson opens her letter by explaining that she had completed her examinations at Earlham College, earning grades in the mid-80s and 90s. By representing herself as a successful college student, Jackson’s letter supported school authorities’ practice of publishing letters by “model students” for other students to emulate and to demonstrate the success of their educational programs. Indeed, in her letter Jackson authorizes herself as what school authorities deemed an exemplary educated Indian girl—civilized and adept at writing in English.
5. A review of John B. Gough’s lecture on temperance appeared in the January 1881 edition of the Hallaquah.
6. Huldah Bonwill was also a benefactor of federal boarding schools.
7. Eadle Keahtah Toh, April 1881, n. pag.
8. School News, June 1880, n. pag.
9. Editorial comment.
10. School News, February 1881, n. pag.
11. Luther Standing Bear (Land of the Spotted Eagle, 234) recounts a conversation he had with his father, Chief Standing Bear, when his father visited him for the first time at Carlisle. Standing Bear credits his father, “the man who had been the greatest influence” in his life, with inspiring him “to learn all I could of the white man’s ways.”
12. Years later, when reflecting back on his experiences at Carlisle, Standing Bear underscored the ultimate destructiveness of the school’s efforts to transform Native American children: “But the change in clothing, housing, food, and confinement combined with lonesomeness was too much, and in three years nearly one half of the children from the Plains were dead and through with all earthly schools. In the graveyard at Carlisle most of the graves are those of little ones” (Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle, 234). Illness and death were common at federal boarding schools; see Trafzer et al., Boarding School Blues, 20–21.
13. An English-only policy was strictly imposed on students at federal boarding schools from the 1880s until the 1930s. Students were often severely punished for speaking Indian languages. At Carlisle, Pratt and other school authorities sought to enforce the English-only policy by praising students who conformed to it and representing those students as role models in the pages of the school’s newspapers. Carlisle’s School News contains numerous letters like Standing Bear’s and short compositions that stress the importance of speaking only English at school. For more on the English-only policy, see Adams, Education for Extinction; Spack, America’s Second Tongue; and Trafzer et al., Boarding School Blues.
14. School News, April 1882, n. pag.
Editorials
1. Walker was the first and only male editor of the Hallaquah. The Oklahoma Historical Society maintains the most comprehensive run of the Hallaquah, December 1879–May 1880 and January 1881–November 1881.
2. Due to insufficient federal funding, the Seneca Indian School failed “to provide the children with healthy living conditions” and was prone to outbreaks of highly contagious diseases like scarlet fever, measles, typhoid fever, and malaria (Bieloh, “Bad Water,” 58, 60).
3. According to the tribute written by the matron, Lucy Grey was seventeen years old when she died. She moved to Indian Territory from Kansas two years before her death. When she was twelve years old she converted to Christianity (Hallaquah, August–November, 1881).
4. The Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, houses an extensive collection of Carlisle Indian Industrial School publications, including the School News.
5. The former motto was “Tahenan upi qa ounkiya biye,—Come over and help us.” As Phillip H. Round explains, “Come over and help us” was the motto of the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, which depicted a Native American calling to Europe for help (Round, Removable Type, 66).
6. The first issue of Talks and Thoughts appeared in March 1886. Its twenty-one-year run ceased with the July 1907 issue. Students wrote all the content. Unlike the editors of the Hallaquah and the School News, the editors of Talks and Thoughts did not write recurring editorials that appeared on an editorial page, but they did contribute their own content to the paper and were responsible for editing and printing it.
The February 1891 issue of Talks and Thoughts is the earliest issue that I have been able to locate, and it is available online through the UC San Diego Library, Special Collections and Archives Online Journals, http://roger.ucsd.edu/record=b2425214~s9. To my knowledge, no complete run of Talks and Thoughts exists. Only five libraries maintain issues of Talks and Thoughts. The New York Public Library houses the most comprehensive but incomplete collection of the paper; it is available in print form, from June 1891 through 1907.
7. Talks and Thoughts, January 1892, 1.
Essays
1. School News, June 1880, n. pag.
2. School News, September 1880, n. pag.
3. School News, October 1880, n. pag.
4. Pratt’s “Florida Boys” were a group of fifteen men in their twenties who accompanied Pratt from Fort Marion to Hampton and then to Carlisle. Their names, according to Fear-Segal, were the first listed in Carlisle’s student record files, and Pratt relied heavily on these students for vital support during the school’s first year (Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 25). Roman Nose traveled to reservations to recruit students, as he recounts in his autobiographical essay “Roman Nose Goes to Indian Territory,” which appeared in the October 1880 issue of the School News.
5. For more on the experiences of and ledger book drawings by the Fort Marion prisoners, see Glancy, Fort Marion Prisoners.
6. School News, December 1880, n. pag.
7. School News, January 1881, n. pag.
8. School News, February 1881, n. pag.
9. Roman Nose’s disparaging remarks about the Native American children’s traditional dress suggest he has been influenced by school authorities like Pratt into denigrating Native cultures. His remarks parallel how he was represented by school authorities in other Carlisle newspapers. For example, commentary about him in the June 1890 issue of the Red Man (3) reads: “Henry C. Roman Nose, one of the Florida prisoners, from Cheyenne Agency, who came to Carlisle when the school first opened in 1879, and remained two years, says he lives in a square tent covered with duck. It is his own. He has never worn Indian dress since he went back, and is now serving the Government as tinner, the trade he learned at Carlisle. He receives $20 a month.” As this commentary suggests, Roman Nose continued to practice the lessons of Carlisle even after he returned to the reservation. This was an especially important message to send other students and parents, as school authorities were highly concerned about the number of students who would “return to the blanket” and resort to their Indian way of life after leaving school. Roman Nose continued to wear the clothes of civilization and practiced civilization’s two major teachings: self-sufficiency and hard wo
rk. He also lived in a tent—not a tepee—and owned it during the Dawes era, when the government aimed to break up reservations and tribal communities by making Indians into farmers, Christians, and individuals.
10. School News, March 1881, n. pag.
11. School News, August 1880, n. pag.
12. Talks and Thoughts, June 1891, 1, 4.
13. Talks and Thoughts, April 1892, 4.
14. Talks and Thoughts, November 1893, 1.
15. Talks and Thoughts, January 1895, 6.
16. Talks and Thoughts, May 1896, 3.
17. Lee entered Hampton in 1894, not 1893. See his essay “Transition Scenes,” this volume, where he notes that he came to Hampton in 1894.
18. Talks and Thoughts, April 1896, 7.
19. Talks and Thoughts, November 1896, 4.
20. Talks and Thoughts, February 1897, 2–3.
21. Talks and Thoughts, March 1899, 3.
22. Talks and Thoughts, May 1904, 4.
23. Talks and Thoughts, December 1904, 4.
24. Talks and Thoughts, February 1905, 3.
25. Carlisle Arrow, May 7, 1909, n. pag.
26. Red Man, February 1911, 252–54.
27.Use of “cooler” may have been an error.
28. Red Man, September 1911, 15–16.
Short Stories and Retold Tales
1. Talks and Thoughts, September 1892, 1.
2. Talks and Thoughts, March 1892, 4.
3. Talks and Thoughts, April 1892, 1, 4.
4. Talks and Thoughts, March 1893, 1. This story is unsigned but is attributed to Hand in Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 131.
5. Talks and Thoughts, April 1893, 1, 7.
6. Talks and Thoughts, February 1893, 1.
7. Talks and Thoughts, March 1893, 2.
8. Talks and Thoughts, July 1895, 3, 7. What incidents at Sleepy Hollow are meant is not known.
9. Talks and Thoughts, September 1895, 1.
10. Talks and Thoughts, April 1903, 4. This story is unsigned but is attributed to Bear in Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 7.
11. Talks and Thoughts, May 1903, 4. This retold tale is unsigned but is attributed to Bear in Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 7.
12. Talks and Thoughts, February 1905, 1. This story is unsigned but is attributed to Bear in Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 8.
13. Indian Craftsman, January 1910, 24–25.
14. Red Man, April 1910, 47–48.
15. Talks and Thoughts, January 1904, 4. This story is unsigned but is attributed to Bender in several sources, including Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 10.
16. Talks and Thoughts, April 1904, 1, 4. This legend was told by Bertha Mountain Sheep and written by Anna Bender. Mountain Sheep (Crow) attended Hampton from 1903 to 1908 (Brudvig, Hampton).
17. Talks and Thoughts, November 1904, 1, 4. This legend was told by Bertha Mountain Sheep and written by Anna Bender.
18. Red Man, November 1910, 131–32.
19. Carlisle Arrow, June 7, 1912.
20. Red Man, October 1910, 78–79.
21. Red Man, January 1911, 204.
22. Red Man, January 1911, 206–7.
23. Red Man, January 1913, 208.
24. Red Man, June 1913, 467–68.
Francis La Flesche
1. Morning Star, May 1886, 3.
2. Originally in the Southern Workman, October 1900, 554–56. Reprinted in La Flesche, Ke-ma-ha: The Omaha Stories, 3–8. This story was included in a collection of stories La Flesche wrote for young adult readers. The collection Ke-ma-ha was not published until 1995 (Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 293).
3. Southern Workman, November 1905, 587–94.
4. Southern Workman, August 1913, 427–28.
Carlos Montezuma
1. Although linguistically distinct, the Apaches and Yavapais were close neighbors and were often regarded as a combined tribal entity.
2. Indian Helper, October 14, 1887.
3. Red Man, February 1898, 1–2.
4. Red Man and Helper, May 16, 1902.
5. Red Man and Helper, September 19, 1902.
6. Red Man and Helper, November 14, 1902.
7. Red Man and Helper, October 16, 1903.
Charles Alexander Eastman
1. Southern Workman, December 1888, 128.
2. Red Man, February–March 1899, 9.
3. Red Man, December 1899, 2.
4. Red Man, May 1900, 4.
5. Red Man, June 1900, 2.
6. Red Man, June 1900, 8
7. Southern Workman, April 1903, 225–27.
8. Reader: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1903, 539–42. A similar version of this essay, “The Indian in Literature,” appeared in Oglala Light, May 1903. That version was unavailable to reprint here.
9. Southern Workman, May 1911, 273–78.
10. Red Man, December 1914, 133–40.
Angel De Cora
1. Southern Workman, June 1897, 115–16.
2. Editorial note reads: “Paper read by Miss Angel De Cora, instructor in native Indian art, Carlisle School, Pennsylvania, before the Department of Indian Education at the annual convention of the National Educational Association, held at Los Angeles, Cal., July 8–12, 1907.”
3. Southern Workman, October 1907, 527–28. In contrast to Pratt, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis E. Leupp and other reformers encouraged the study of Native arts and crafts because they saw it as “an effective means of ‘industrializing’ their charges and thereby speeding up the process of adaptation” (Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 325).
4. Red Man, March 1911, 279–85.
Gertrude Bonnin
1. Originally in the Red Man, February 1900, 8. Full text of “The School Days of an Indian Girl” is reproduced in Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories, 87–103. Although the editorial comment is unsigned, it was likely written by Richard Henry Pratt, as he maintained strict editorial control over the white-run publications printed at Carlisle and the representations of Native Americans contained within them. Pratt attempts to take credit for Zitkala-Ša’s literary success by reminding her of “the friends” who helped her become who she is. Pratt also sought to cast doubt over the veracity of Zitkala-Ša’s account of her boarding school experience by stating, “Her pictures are not, perhaps, untrue in themselves, but, taken by themselves, they are sadly misleading.” It is worth noting that Pratt censored the version of the essay he reprinted in the Red Man without providing any indication that the original text had been altered in any way. As literary scholar Amelia V. Katanski observes, there are no ellipses, for instance, to signal that content has been excised (Learning to Write “Indian,” 121). Two chapters from the original essay have been omitted—“The Snow Episode,” during which a schoolteacher spanks one of Zitkala-Ša’s classmates several times with a slipper, and “The Devil,” in which Zitkala-Ša takes revenge upon the image of the devil in the Bible by “scratching out his wicked eyes” with a pencil (American Indian Stories, 95). Both moments are commonly interpreted by scholars as “incidents of rebellion,” so it is unsurprising that they have been expunged (Lukens, “American Indian Story,” 148). Pratt further eliminates the paragraph in which Zitkala-Ša recounts the death of her “dear classmate” (American Indian Stories, 96). That paragraph, according to literary scholar Margaret Lukens, offers “the most damning charge against the white missionaries” for their “inattention to the Indian children’s physical ailments” (Lukens, “American Indian Story,” 149). It is telling that Pratt chose to omit mention of the incident in the pages of the Red Man.
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press Page 32