Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press Read online

  “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.