The Spatial Imaginary of American Indian Boarding Schools
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PENITENTIAL EDUCATION: THE SPATIAL IMAGINARY OF AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS By SARAH KATHRYN PITCHER HAYES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 © 2015 Sarah Kathryn Pitcher Hayes To Tim, who supported and encouraged me throughout the writing of this dissertation. To my mom, who instilled in me a love of reading. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my appreciation for my dissertation chair, Jodi Schorb, for her guidance and encouragement. This dissertation would not have been possible without her continued enthusiasm and dedication. I thank Dr. Schorb for improving my writing and for making me a more prudent and mindful scholar. I thank my committee members, Susan Hegeman and Malini Schueller for their invaluable feedback throughout the dissertation process. I also thank Ed White for his support and for helping me conceptualize the framework for this dissertation. I am additionally indebted to Elizabeth Wilkinson for introducing me to Zitkala-Ša’s writing and the topic of the American Indian boarding school. I am grateful to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for awarding me with a graduate research fellowship to study the Richard Henry Pratt Papers. The research in this archive proved invaluable to my research. Finally, I would like to thank Bill Johnston for helping me interpret statistics used in Chapter 5. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................................4 LIST OF FIGURES .........................................................................................................................7 ABSTRACT .....................................................................................................................................8 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................10 The Beginnings of Off-Reservation Indian Education ...........................................................14 Prison Reform in the Nineteenth Century ..............................................................................18 Overview of Boarding School Scholarship ............................................................................24 Chapter Breakdown ................................................................................................................29 2 BATTLEFIELD TO CLASSROOM ......................................................................................33 From Battlefield to Prisoner-of-War Camp: Fort Marion as Makeshift Prison ......................36 Citizenship Through Labor: The Penitentiary’s Influence on Pratt’s Ideology .....................46 Pratt’s Rescripting and Reinforcing of the Prison in Battlefield and Classroom ...................58 Coda: The North Star ..............................................................................................................65 3 MORAL ARCHITECTURE: THE CARCERAL SPACE OF THE CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL ........................................................................................69 The Division of Time and Space: Carlisle’s Moral Architecture ...........................................72 Pratt’s Prisons .........................................................................................................................88 4 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SPACE: THE FIRST AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL WRITERS ..............................................................................................................96 The Ethnographic Moment ...................................................................................................100 “We Loved it as Our Country”: Francis La Flesche, Borderlines and the Boarding School in The Middle Five ................................................................................................107 “Semblance of Civilization”: Zitkala-Ša’s The Atlantic Monthly Trilogy ...........................116 “A Stranger and a Nobody with No Possibilities”: Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “Prison Scenario” in “An Indian Boy’s Story” ...............................................................................................126 The Impact of Boarding School Stories ...............................................................................131 5 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN WRITERS REIMAGINE THE BOARDING SCHOOL EXPERIENCE ...............................................................................135 The Boarding School’s Legacy of Cultural Trauma .............................................................138 5 “Generations of Indian People Spent Time in These Schools”: Prison Metaphor and Cultural Trauma in Laura Tohe’s No Parole Today .........................................................143 “They Could Not Cage Me Anymore”: Imprisonment and Escape in Louise Erdrich’s Little No Horse Novels .....................................................................................................151 “This was No School, This was a Prison”: Escape in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes ...........................................................................................................................160 Conclusion to Chapter 5 .......................................................................................................170 6 CONCLUSION.....................................................................................................................172 LIST OF REFERENCES .............................................................................................................183 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................................196 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure page 2-1 Prisoners at Fort Marion ....................................................................................................40 2-2 Drawing titled, “The School in the Chapel. Indian School at Fort Marion. St. Augustine, Florida – Drawn by J. Wells Champney.” Published in Harper’s Weekly, May 11, 1878. ....................................................................................................................57 3-1 Interior of Blacksmith Shop ...............................................................................................75 3-2 Laundry Interior .................................................................................................................75 3-3 School and Campus Looking North from the School Building .........................................76 3-4 The Old Guard House Built by Hessian Prisoners Over 100 Years Ago ..........................79 3-5 West End of Girls’ Quarters and Fire Company ................................................................83 3-6 The bandstand in the center of campus ..............................................................................87 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy PENITENTIAL EDUCATION: THE SPATIAL IMAGINARY OF AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS By Sarah Kathryn Pitcher Hayes August 2015 Chair: Jodi Schorb Major: English “Penitential Education: The Spatial Imaginary of American Indian Boarding Schools” analyzes the literature that came out of the American Indian boarding school, identifies the recurring trope of the prison in this literature, and develops the history and literary significance of this trope in order to argue that American Indian writers often employ the trope of the prison because the boarding school’s history is embedded within the prison’s history. While scholars have cited various explanations for the origins of the boarding school, such as shifts in government policy or changing attitudes regarding biological determinism, this dissertation reveals how the government-funded, off-reservation boarding school was conceptualized and practiced in a prisoner-of-war camp for Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and Arapaho prisoners at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida between 1875 and 1878. Synthesizing carceral studies, prison theory and history, theories of human geography, substantial archival research, and sustained literary analysis, “Penitential Education” argues that the founder of the American Indian boarding school system, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, conducted experiments with space and self-transformation at Fort Marion and subsequently the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 8 1879 that were inspired by the ideologies of the two major prison reform movements of the nineteenth century, specifically that space and architecture, surveillance, labor and education could transform a social other into a proper citizen. This dissertation then identifies the trope of the prison in American Indian boarding school literature and emphasizes the authors most substantial to seeing how this trope links boarding school history and prison history. I turn to early twentieth-century literature written by the first boarding school students—Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux) and Ah-nen-la-de-ni (Mohawk)—in order to reveal how these authors use carceral tropes to challenge the popular characterization of the reservation as savage space and the boarding school as civilized space. The final chapter of this dissertation analyzes contemporary literature