Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press Page 2
By giving only brief consideration to one student-authored text published in a boarding school newspaper, Warrior misses an important opportunity to engage with lesser-known writers and texts that deepen our appreciation of Native educational experiences. Given the privileging of the book in Native American literary studies, it is unsurprising that Warrior’s study focuses mostly on retrospective accounts of boarding schools that were published in book form and engages only briefly with boarding school newspapers that contain educational narratives written by students while they were still at school. Scholarship in the main has ignored boarding school newspapers and Native-edited periodicals like the American Indian Magazine, the organ of the Society of American Indians (SAI), despite the recognition by a handful of literary scholars and historians that these periodicals served as important outlets for Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4
Another reason why boarding school newspapers remain understudied is that scholars are skeptical of them and the Native-authored texts they contain. Child, whose groundbreaking study of unpublished student letters offers a more complicated understanding of boarding school experiences, acknowledges that boarding school newspapers “present an especially intriguing category for analysis,” but she dismisses them as simply promoting an assimilationist agenda (Child, Boarding, xvi). Child is right to point out that school authorities often exerted strict editorial control over boarding school newspapers. It is likely that even student-run newspapers like the Hallaquah were produced with oversight and possible censorship from school authorities, and thus they should be read with some degree of skepticism. I would argue, however, that all periodicals, including boarding school newspapers, are products of complex negotiations between editors, writers, and readers, and because of that they are objects worthy of study.
New scholarship asserts that boarding school newspapers are an untapped archive for scholars working to recover early indigenous writings and to challenge the restrictive assimilationist-resistance binary that has dominated narratives of the boarding school experience. Scholars who have worked on recovering student-authored texts in boarding school newspapers underscore that this newspaper archive reveals important continuities between student writers and Native American public intellectuals like Bonnin, Eastman, Montezuma, and Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida), among many others.5 The present collection contributes to this recent scholarship by emphasizing that boarding school newspapers are important sites for recovering Native American print histories. In it I seek ultimately to demonstrate that Native American boarding school students and public intellectuals capitalized on the periodical’s ability to create conversations and debates among a growing network of Native American consumers and producers of print that extended beyond federal boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The Boarding School Legacy and Early Native American Literature
The writers and editors featured in this collection belong to an emerging canon of early Native American literature that notably includes students who attended missionary-run boarding schools in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Students of this earlier generation produced a variety of writings using their English-language literacy for their own purposes, as scholars such as Joanna Brooks, Hilary Wyss, and Theresa Strouth Gaul have suggested. The early student writers and the boarding schools they attended serve as precursors to later federal boarding schools and the student writers and public intellectuals connected with them. Briefly tracing some of the similarities between the boarding schools of these two generations and the Native writers affiliated with them allows us to better appreciate the prehistory of the writings reprinted in this collection.
The federal boarding schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had their “roots” in the mission boarding schools located in the Northeast in the eighteenth century and in the Southeast in the early nineteenth century (Warrior, People, 106). One of the first boarding schools established to convert and educate Native Americans was Moor’s Indian Charity School, founded in Connecticut in 1754 by Eleazar Wheelock. A Congregational minister and mentor to the Mohegan writer Samson Occom, Wheelock established his school to prepare Native American missionaries to convert tribes in New England and beyond. He gave his students a college-preparatory education; however, as Brooks explains, that changed in 1762, when, facing criticism from sponsoring missionary societies, Wheelock “retooled the Moor’s curriculum to focus more on preparing his students for the practical aspects of their future duties as missionaries and schoolmasters, small farmers, and domestic servants” (Brooks, The Collected Writings, 16). Moor’s was eventually relocated to New Hampshire and reconstituted as Dartmouth College.
The next major effort to convert and educate Native Americans in boarding schools was not until 1810, with the establishment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). The ABCFM founded the Brainerd School, which was located in what is now Tennessee and focused on Cherokee education, and the Cornwall Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut. Although the Brainerd School and other ABCFM mission schools in the Cherokee Nation served as models for the later federal boarding schools, Gaul points out a crucial difference between them: “Cherokee leaders chose to invite the American Board missionaries into the Nation, encouraged them to open more and more schools, and enrolled their children in the schools” (Gaul, Cherokee Sister, 14). Influential Cherokee figures like Catharine Brown and Elias Boudinot attended these schools and later used their English-language literacy and their access to print culture in the service of their communities. Not only did Brown gain an audience for her writings and help shape public opinion, but as Gaul explains, her literary corpus comprises thirty-two recovered letters and a diary, making her, after Occom and John Johnson (Mohegan), “the most prolific Native writer before the late 1820s” (Cherokee Sister, 5). Boudinot founded the Cherokee Phoenix, the first tribal newspaper, in 1828 and is therefore considered an important figure in the history of the Native American press.
Early missionary-run boarding schools produced texts that represented students as passive recipients of a Native education in English literacy—what Wyss terms “Readerly Indians”—and used student writing for fundraising purposes, as would federal boarding schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her study of early missionary-run boarding schools, Wyss notes how in the 1760s Wheelock sent student handwriting samples, letters, and other schoolwork to secure continued funding from benefactors in England and Boston. Wheelock also reprinted letters by pupils David Fowler (Montaukett) and Joseph Woolley (Delaware) in his 1766–67 English narratives. Both letters, Wyss points out, “are substantially longer than the version he reprints in his narratives” (Wyss, English Letters, 60). Wyss demonstrates how Wheelock exercised control over the narratives by excising details that might reflect poorly on him; for example, Wheelock leaves out Fowler’s mention of how much money he will need to live on and Woolley’s concern over the shortage of funds. Wyss’s examination of how figures like Wheelock used Native writings contextualizes our understanding of how later boarding school authorities like Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, used student-authored texts in the school newspapers they edited to create narratives of “progress” and total transformation, as I discuss later.
While Wheelock and other school authorities sought in their missionary literature to represent their students as “Readerly Indians,” Wyss argues that Native Americans demonstrated their agency by becoming what she terms “Writerly Indians.” As Wyss observes, “Writerly Indians used written discourse to manage their own sovereignty in ways that often challenged, confused, or contradicted missionary desire. At times, however, that sovereignty meshed nicely with missionary goals. Either way, the Writerly Indian figure left evidence of a powerful commitment to the continued existence of Native communities, even in the face of sometimes overwhelmin
g rhetorical and political challenges to that identity” (Wyss, English Letters, 7).
Wyss also emphasizes not what Native Americans connected to these early missionary-run boarding schools wrote but that they wrote: “Those Natives who did write, no matter what they wrote, fundamentally altered the relationship between missionary culture and Native people through the simple act of self-expression” (7). By suggesting that the act of writing itself should be understood as a demonstration of agency and an effort to control their own representation, Wyss models a way to move beyond the critical tendency to see early boarding school students and their later counterparts who attended federal boarding schools as passive recipients of an assimilative education.6
Wyss’s concept of the Writerly Indian provides a useful framework for understanding how the boarding school students and prominent Native American public intellectuals featured in this collection used their English-language literacy in ways that at times may have supported the assimilationist goals of the boarding schools and that were at other times unanticipated by school authorities and at odds with the schools’ civilizing missions. The Hallaquah and other boarding school newspapers thus reflect the complexities of Native writers’ positions and contain a range of perspectives—sometimes, within the same issue, writings by Native Americans who assert their tribal identities in an effort to preserve them against the school’s programs of cultural erasure appear alongside Native-authored texts that promote the school’s assimilationist agendas.
Native American Periodical Networks
Periodicals served as important publication venues for early Native American writers. The Native American press is considered to have begun with the launch of either Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Muzzinyegun in 1826 or Elias Boudinot’s Cherokee Phoenix in 1828. Native American press historians Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. and James W. Parins consider the Muzzinyegun the first Native American periodical because Schoolcraft’s Ojibwa wife, Jane, and her mother and brother contributed much of the content to the newspaper. Jane wrote poetry as well as articles on Ojibwa folklore and history (Littlefield and Parins, American Indian, xii, xx). The same year Schoolcraft’s periodical was founded, Boudinot, while on a speaking tour, expressed the need for a tribal newspaper. The American Board of Foreign Missions helped him raise funds to purchase the press and equipment. The Cherokee Phoenix was published in English and Cherokee and was established, as Littlefield and Parins explain, “as a direct response to Georgia’s efforts to extend her laws over the Cherokee Nation” (American Indian, xii). The Phoenix published local news, educational essays, poetry, and letters.
Other noteworthy periodicals edited by Native Americans include the Cherokee Rose Buds published at the Cherokee Female Seminary in Oklahoma in 1854, Carlos Montezuma’s pamphlet Wassaja, and the pan-tribal Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians. Catharine Gunter and Nancy E. Hicks, who edited the Cherokee Rose Buds, are two of the earliest known young Native American women to assume the role of editor of their school newspaper. The Cherokee Rose Buds was a three-column newspaper of eight pages that contained original poetry, essays, and narratives composed by students. As Littlefield and Parins note, this was not an ordinary school newsletter but a vehicle “for the literary expression of the students, who were exposed to a classical education” (American Indian, xx, 407). Montezuma’s Wassaja was published in Chicago from 1916 to 1922. According to Rochelle Rainieri Zuck, the pamphlet reflected Montezuma’s view that “the American Indian press should communicate the material realities of American Indians and focus on the development of strategies and tactics to fight the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs]” (Zuck, “‘Yours,’” 79). The influential Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians (later renamed the American Indian Magazine) was launched in 1913. Arthur C. Parker served as editor-general until Gertrude Bonnin assumed the editorship in 1918.7
As publishing opportunities for Native Americans began to expand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent figures like Bonnin, De Cora, and Eastman found outlets for their short stories and autobiographical essays in magazines with a predominantly non-Native readership like the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks. These early Native American writers were boarding school graduates with connections to Carlisle. Indeed, it was partially through their affiliation with Carlisle and its periodical networks that they learned how periodicals could serve as a powerful tool for shaping public perceptions of Native Americans. They used their periodical writings, in the words of A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff, to educate “white audiences about the intellectual and creative abilities of Indian people, the value of their tribal cultures, and white injustice to Native peoples” (Ruoff, Foreword, x).
At the same time, they sought to reach a broader audience that included Native American readers in their efforts to cultivate and sustain pan-tribal networks of communication. In this way they resembled their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors who established northeastern networks by adapting print and English-language literacy practices to serve as tools for resistance and change, as the work of Lisa Brooks (Abenaki), Matt Cohen, and Phillip H. Round demonstrates.8 Bonnin, De Cora, Eastman, boarding school students, and other writers of their generation recognized early on that boarding school newspapers and Native-edited periodicals provided the best venues for reaching a mixed audience of Native and non-Native readers. That is why, according to Bernd Peyer, boarding school newspapers and Native-edited periodicals like the Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians constitute a major archive for nonfiction prose as well as fiction and poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 26). Native Americans used these periodicals as outlets not only for self-expression but also for community building. Student editors of the Seneca Indian School’s Hallaquah, Hampton Institute’s Talks and Thoughts of the Hampton Indian Students, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s School News as well as editors of the Quarterly Journal employed reprinting, a common journalistic practice at the turn of the twentieth century, in their efforts to strengthen communication between disparate networks of Native American editors, writers, and readers. They also announced and supported other periodicals edited by or written for Native Americans. The editors of the Quarterly Journal even published several pieces on boarding school newspapers.
For example, in the “Editorial Comment” in the January–March 1915 issue Arthur C. Parker notes that in every boarding school newspaper he has examined “there is an expressed spirit of cheer and of helpfulness.” Parker goes on to emphasize the value of boarding school newspapers and their mission. That mission, as he explains, is not only to give students who want to learn instruction in printing but also to keep students, parents, and the public informed of the educational work of the school. Parker further asserts, “All of these purposes are worthy ones, and the school paper deserves the support of the field it reaches and the appreciation of the public” (“Editorial Comment,” 5–6). Parker’s editorial ultimately reveals his belief that boarding school newspapers and the Quarterly Journal served as tools for fostering and sustaining pan-tribal networks of periodical producers and consumers.9
Native American editors and writers also used boarding school newspapers to debate pressing issues that were important to the survival of Native American communities in the face of the assimilationist imperative of the boarding school and the dominant culture more broadly. This newspaper archive thus troubles the assumption that Native Americans voiced static or homogenous perspectives on issues like assimilation, citizenship, and education; indeed, these issues were widely debated in Native writings that appeared in boarding school newspapers. It is because boarding school newspapers offer disparate and often competing perspectives that they provide a richer sense of the conversations and debates that transpired between and among boarding school students and prominent Native American public intellectuals at the turn of t
he twentieth century.
Given the complicated institutional contexts of the production of boarding school newspapers, it should come as no surprise that the writers and editors featured in this collection engaged in the assimilationist and progressivist rhetoric of their day in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. Although many of them voiced critical perspectives that posed challenges to the assimilative thrust of federal boarding schools and the dominant culture more broadly, most of the time their resistance was subtle. As Gale P. Coskan-Johnson explains in her insightful literary recovery of Charles Eastman, “Revolution is only occasionally ‘blood in the streets’; what we are more likely to find here, given the overwhelming hegemony of American cultural and military forces in the United States at the time, is something trickier, more sophisticated, and heavily veiled—something that would protect the speaker from retribution and so allow her or him to continue speaking” (Coskan-Johnson, “What Writer,” 111).
Boarding school students, who lacked the relative cultural authority of prominent Native American public intellectuals like Eastman, had to develop even trickier and subtler strategies in their writings in order to express their critical perspectives and their commitment to Native communities and to change. In a more telling example, even a writer like Bonnin, whom Dexter Fisher described as “the darling” of the northeastern literary establishment, found herself engaging in pen wars with school authorities who sought to silence and discredit her in print (Fisher, “Zitkala-Ša,” 229). The editorial comments accompanying Bonnin’s essays reprinted in this collection serve as a reminder of the obstacles she and other Native Americans were up against in the contest over representations of Indian identity in the boarding school press and the complex rhetorical strategies they used in their writings in order for their voices to be heard. Like Eastman, who, as Coskan-Johnson writes, “engaged in a rich Native American public discourse that circulated in and out of national discussions of identity and politics,” so too did Bonnin, boarding school students, and other writers of this generation (Coskan-Johnson, “What Writer,” 130).