“Jacqueline Emery offers an important addition to the field of Native American studies and, in particular, boarding school literature. . . . [This study] is a significant contribution to making available early voices of American Indian students.”
—Cari M. Carpenter, associate professor of English at West Virginia University and coeditor of The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights, 1864–1891
“This collection offers something not only to specialists but also to general readers, and especially to classes devoted to Native American studies, Native literature, literacy history, and mass communication. This is an important work.”
—Hilary E. Wyss, Hargis Professor of American Literature at Auburn University and author of English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press
Edited by Jacqueline Emery
University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London
© 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
Portions of the introduction originally appeared in American Periodicals, published by the Ohio State University Press: “Writing against Erasure: Native American Students at Hampton Institute and the Periodical Press,” American Periodicals 22, no. 2 (2012): 178–98; “Mining Boarding School Newspapers for Native American Women Editors and Writers,” American Periodicals 27, no. 1 (2017): 11–15.
Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image is from the interior.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Emery, Jacqueline, editor.
Title: Recovering Native American writings in the boarding school press / edited by Jacqueline Emery. .
Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017017419 (print)
LCCN 2017046739 (ebook)
ISBN 9781496204073 (epub)
ISBN 9781496204080 (mobi)
ISBN 9781496204097 (pdf)
ISBN 9780803276758 (hardback: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Indian authors. | Indians of North America—Literary collections. | Off-reservation boarding schools—United States. | Student newspapers and periodicals—United States. | Indians of North America—Intellectual life—19th century. | Indians of North America—Intellectual life—20th century. | Indians of North America—Education—United States—History—19th century. | Indians of North America—Education—United States—History—20th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Native American.
Classification: LCC PS508.I5 (ebook) | LCC PS508. I5 R37 2017 (print) | DDC 810.8/0897—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017419
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part 1: Writings by Boarding School Students
Letters
Arizona Jackson (Wyandot)
Letter to Laura, 1880
Letter to the Editors, 1881
Letter to Susan Longstreth, 1881
Samuel Townsend (Pawnee)
Letter by an Apprentice, 1880
Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Sioux)
Letter on Baltimore, 1881
Letter to Father, 1882
Editorials
Ida Johnson (Wyandot?), Arizona Jackson (Wyandot), and Lula Walker (Wyandot)
Hallaquah Editorial, December 1879
Hallaquah Editorial, January 1880
Hallaquah Editorial, February 1880
Hallaquah Editorial, March–April 1880
Hallaquah Editorial, May 1880
Lucy Grey (Seneca), Arizona Jackson (Wyandot), and Bertrand N. O. Walker (Wyandot)
Hallaquah Editorial, January 1881
Hallaquah Editorial, February 1881
Hallaquah Editorial, March 1881
Hallaquah Editorial, April 1881
Hallaquah Editorial, May 1881
Hallaquah Editorial, August, September, October, and November 1881
Samuel Townsend (Pawnee)
School News Editorial, June 1880
School News Editorial, July 1880
School News Editorial, August 1880
School News Editorial, October 1880
School News Editorial, December 1880
School News Editorial, January 1881
School News Editorial, February 1881
Annie Lovejoy (Sioux), Addie Stevens (Winnebago), James Enouf (Potawatomi), and Frank Hubbard (Penobscot)
Our Motto Changed, Talks and Thoughts Editorial, January 1892
Essays
Henry Caruthers Roman Nose (Southern Cheyenne)
An Indian Boy’s Camp Life, 1880
Roman Nose Goes to New York, 1880
Roman Nose Goes to Indian Territory, 1880
Experiences of H. C. Roman Nose, 1880
Experiences of H. C. Roman Nose, on Captain Pratt, 1881
Experiences of H. C. Roman Nose, on Going to Hampton, 1881
Experiences of H. C. Roman Nose, on Getting an Education, 1881
Mary North (Arapaho)
A Little Story, 1880
Joseph Du Bray (Yankton Sioux)
Indians’ Accustoms, 1891
How to Walk Straight, 1892
The Sun Dance, 1893
Robert Placidus Higheagle (Standing Rock Sioux)
Tipi-iyokihe, 1895
Samuel Baskin (Santee Sioux)
What the White Man Has Gained from the Indian, 1896
Alonzo Lee (Eastern Band Cherokee)
The Trail of the Serpent, 1896
Indian Folk-Lore, 1896
An Indian Naturalist, 1897
Transition Scenes, 1899
Anna Bender (White Earth Chippewa)
A Glimpse of the Old Indian Religion, 1904
An Indian Girl in Boston, 1904
Elizabeth Bender (White Earth Chippewa)
From Hampton to New York, 1905
J. William Ettawageshik (Ottawa)
My Home Locality, 1909
Caleb Carter (Nez Percé)
Christmas among the Nez Percés, 1911
How the Nez Percés Trained for Long Distance Running, 1911
Short Stories and Retold Tales
Joseph Du Bray (Yankton Sioux)
A Fox and a Wolf: A Fable, 1892
Harry Hand (Crow Creek Sioux)
The Brave War-Chief and the Ghost, 1892
A Buffalo Hunt, 1892
The Story Teller, 1893
The Adventures of a Strange Family, 1893
Chapman Schanandoah (Oneida)
How the Bear Lost His Tail: An Old Indian Story, 1893
Robert Placidus Higheagle (Standing Rock Sioux)
The Brave Deaf and Dumb Boy, 1893
The Legend of Owl River, 1895
Samuel Baskin (Santee Sioux)
Ite Waste, or Fair Face, 1895
Stella Vanessa Bear (Arikara)
An Indian Story, 1903
How People First Came to the World, 1903
An Enemy’s Revenge, 1905
Ghost Bride Pawnee Legend, 1910
Indian Legend—Creation of the World, 19
10
Anna Bender (White Earth Chippewa)
Quital’s First Hunt, 1904
The First Squirrel, 1904
The Big Dipper, 1904
William J. Owl (Eastern Band Cherokee)
The Beautiful Bird, 1910
The Way the Opossum Derived His Name, 1912
Emma La Vatta (Fort Hall Shoshoni)
The Story of the Deerskin, 1910
Why the Snake’s Head Became Flat, 1911
J. William Ettawageshik (Ottawa)
The Maple Sugar Sand, 1911
Caleb Carter (Nez Percé)
The Coyote and the Wind, 1913
The Feast of the Animals, 1913
Part 2: Writings by Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Native American Public Intellectuals
Francis La Flesche (Omaha)
Address to Carlisle Students, 1886
The Laughing Bird, the Wren: An Indian Legend, 1900
The Past Life of the Plains Indians, 1905
One Touch of Nature, 1913
Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai)
An Apache, to the Students of Carlisle Indian School, 1887
The Indian Problem from an Indian’s Standpoint, 1898
Civilized Arrow Shots from an Apache Indian, 1902
The Indian Dance, 1902
Flash Lights on the Indian Question, 1902
How America Has Betrayed the Indian, 1903
Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Sioux)
An Indian Collegian’s Speech, 1888
Address at Carlisle Commencement, 1899
The Making of a Prophet, 1899
Notes of a Trip to the Southwest, 1900
An Indian Festival, 1900
A True Story with Several Morals, 1900
Indian Traits, 1903
The Indian’s View of the Indian in Literature, 1903
Life and Handicrafts of the Northern Ojibwas, 1911
“My People”: The Indians’ Contribution to the Art of America, 1914
Angel De Cora (Winnebago)
My People, 1897
Native Indian Art, 1907
An Autobiography, 1911
Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux)
School Days of an Indian Girl, 1900
Letter to the Red Man, 1900
A Protest Against the Abolition of the Indian Dance, 1902
Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida)
Indian Public Opinion, 1902
John Milton Oskison (Cherokee)
The Outlook for the Indian, 1903
The Problem of Old Harjo, 1907
The Indian in the Professions, 1912
Address by J. M. Oskison, 1912
An Indian Animal Story, 1914
Arthur Caswell Parker (Seneca)
Making New Americans from Old, 1911
Progress for the Indian, 1912
Needed Changes in Indian Affairs, 1912
Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago)
Education of the American Indian, 1915
Elizabeth Bender (White Earth Chippewa)
Training Indian Girls for Efficient Home Makers, 1916
A Hampton Graduate’s Experience, 1916
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
1. Front page of the Hallaquah, December 1879
2. Front page of the School News, January 1881
3. Harry Hand’s illustration on the front page of Talks and Thoughts, March 1893
Fig. 1. Front page of the Hallaquah, December 1879. Oklahoma Historical Society.
Introduction
In December 1879 three young Native American women at the Seneca Indian School—Ida Johnson, Arizona Jackson, and Lula Walker—launched the first issue of their school newspaper, the Hallaquah.1 This was a rather extraordinary feat, considering these students were printers and editors at a time when such positions were limited for Native Americans and especially limited for young Native women. It is even more remarkable that in the inaugural issue, they proclaimed their intention to make the newspaper serve their own interests and those of the local Native American community and not strictly those of school authorities. Whereas school authorities used boarding school newspapers to promote the civilizing missions of their schools and showcase the transformation of their students, the Indian schoolgirl editors of the Hallaquah had something else in mind.2
As they announce in their first editorial: “We desire and intend that the Hallaquah shall represent the spirit of our school and always speak in behalf of its interest. Supported directly by the Hallaquah Society, it yet is intended to be a true exponent of the Seneca, Shawnee, and Wyandotte Industrial Boarding School, and a news letter to the neighboring people as well as for the pupils” (Hallaquah Editorial, December 1879, this volume). Their commitment to using the Hallaquah as a vehicle for serving their community and preserving aspects of Native American cultures reflects how students learned to use the tools of the boarding school—their proficiency in English, access to new print technologies, and exposure to the dominant discourses on racial identity—to pose challenges, albeit often subtle ones, to the assimilative policies and practices of the boarding school.3
The Hallaquah belongs to a vast newspaper archive that remains largely understudied despite the fascinating insight it offers into how Native Americans used boarding school newspapers for their own purposes: to shape representations of Indianness that circulated in U.S. print culture and to foster and maintain indigenous communities of printers, editors, writers, and readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With a few notable exceptions, such as Karen Kilcup’s Native American Women’s Writing, Bernd Peyer’s American Indian Nonfiction, and Robert Dale Parker’s Changing Is Not Vanishing, writings by boarding school students and prominent Native American public intellectuals that appeared in boarding school newspapers have lacked critical attention and thus remain virtually unknown and unavailable to most scholars and students of Native American literature. Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press fills this gap in the scholarship by making available a representative sampling of Native-authored letters, editorials, essays, short stories, and retold tales published in boarding school newspapers.
For Native Americans of this generation, the federal boarding school experience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant many things, and yet one common thread that binds the thirty-five writers and editors in this collection together was that they employed the periodical as a powerful tool for writing against cultural erasure and for serving the interests of Native communities. Boarding school newspapers, much like the schools themselves, were complex sites of negotiation. Writing for and editing boarding school newspapers, Native Americans developed multiple strategies to negotiate the different and sometimes competing demands and expectations of Native and non-Native audiences in order to gain visibility and the authority to speak. This collection of rich and diverse writings is intended to provide readers with a greater understanding of how boarding school students and Native American public intellectuals demonstrated their agency by fashioning identities for themselves as writers and editors, thus contributing to an expanding history of Native American literature.
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press is addressed to readers interested in Native American literature or history, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, periodical studies, and U.S. print culture. In this collection readers encounter student-authored texts in a variety of genres from personal letters and autobiographical essays to short stories. The compilation ultimately offers readers insight into the boarding school legacy and its influence on Native American literary production. Besides student writings, selections include writings by prominent Native American literary figures like Gertrude Bonnin or Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux), Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Sioux), Arthur Caswell Parker (Seneca), Angel De Cora (Winnebago), and John Milton Os
kison (Cherokee), among others, who used boarding school newspapers as a forum for their writings on a range of topics. As the writings collected here reveal, Native Americans used the boarding school press for various purposes—as a vehicle for voicing the interests of their communities, for celebrating tribal identity and preserving oral traditions, and for cultivating networks of Native American editors, writers, and readers at the turn of the twentieth century.
Critical Contexts
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press is informed by and contributes to critical conversations in Native American studies that complicate our understanding of the experiences of boarding school students and the influence of boarding schools on Native American literature. The important work of Native scholars Brenda J. Child (Ojibwe), K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Creek), and Robert Warrior (Osage) has allowed us to move beyond seeing boarding school students and prominent Native American writers affiliated with these schools—Bonnin, Eastman, De Cora, Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai), and others—as simply assimilated victims or simply resistant. Boarding school students had complex and competing responses toward their schooling. These scholars have worked to understand boarding school experiences by reclaiming the voices and writings of students and making them central to discussions of Native American literature.
Despite an interest in recovering student voices, Native and non-Native scholars have been slow to embrace boarding school newspapers in their search for Native-authored texts. One possible explanation for this is the tendency in Native American literary studies to privilege the book over other forms. Warrior’s third chapter of The People and the Word, titled “The Work of Indian Pupils: Narratives of Learning in Native American Literature,” is exemplary in this regard. Central to Warrior’s project in the chapter is the notion that Native-authored educational texts, including texts written by boarding school students, are “the backbone of Native American literature” (Warrior, People, 100). Warrior searches for student voices in boarding school newspapers like the Indian Helper, a white-edited newspaper printed by Native American male students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and although he briefly examines only one student-authored text, an essay by Dennison Wheelock (Oneida), he focuses most of his attention on well-known boarding school narratives that were published in book form: Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories, Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization, and Luther Standing Bear’s My People the Sioux. These influential books have already garnered significant critical attention, whereas boarding school newspapers remain largely understudied.