The Spatial Imaginary of American Indian Boarding Schools

PENITENTIAL EDUCATION: THE SPATIAL IMAGINARY OF AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS

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

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.

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

“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

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

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

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

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 written by Laura Tohe (Diné), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) to illustrate how American Indian writers have used literature as a space to remember, imagine and represent the boarding school as a carceral space. Finally, the conclusion to this dissertation explores the function of contemporary tribal schools and boarding schools and argues that self- determination in education can help dampen the effects of the cultural trauma passed down by the boarding schools. Specifically, the conclusion traces how the cultural trauma perpetrated by the boarding schools relates to the high rates of incarceration of American Indians, and I pose that American Indian self-determination in tribal schools and contemporary boarding schools can upset this school-to-prison pipeline.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

The Cultural Center and Museum at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence,

Kansas displays and archives a number of artifacts from Haskell’s time as the United States

Indian Industrial Training School, one of the largest off-reservation boarding schools for

American Indian children. Among these artifacts is a pair of tiny handcuffs, used to restrain children as they were transported to the school. The handcuffs, rusted and surprisingly heavy for their size, were donated to the museum in 1989 by a non-Native man who said that his father possessed the handcuffs and no longer wanted them. Bobbi Rahder, former director of the

Cultural Center and Museum, remembers when the handcuffs came to the museum: “I was shocked and afraid to touch them.” According to an article written by Mary Annette Pember, former president of the Native American Journalists Association, the handcuffs were quickly blessed by elders, wrapped in a small quilt, and archived at the museum where they remained until the summer of 2012 when students and faculty decided that the handcuffs should be revealed as a “tangible example of the painful history between Native people and the U.S.” which includes “forced acculturation through brutal military-style incarceration cloaked as education in U.S. Indian boarding schools” (Pember). As further evidence of this “incarceration cloaked as education,” the museum at Haskell also displays “a heavy iron lock and key for the school jail, which held unruly students” (Pember).

The tiny handcuffs, as well as the iron lock and key, serve as a tangible example of the link between the American Indian boarding schools and the regimes of imprisonment they recreated. The connection between the American Indian boarding schools and the nineteenth- century prison mobilizes this dissertation, which argues that the founder of the American Indian boarding school system, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, was in part influenced by the penitentiary

and the prison reform movements of the nineteenth century when he opened the Carlisle Indian

Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. The lasting legacy and carceral impact of the boarding schools is demonstrated in literature written by former boarding school students and contemporary descendants of students, who use the imagery of the prison in their writing in order to re-write the boarding school as a savage, carceral space and to represent the boarding school story as one of strength and fortitude.

This dissertation draws on the field of carceral studies, which analyzes the ways the spatial, architectural and ideological features of the prison filter into other spaces, everyday life and literature. In this way, this dissertation elevates carceral studies as a key field for analyzing the American Indian boarding school and for reading American Indian boarding school literature. The first half of this dissertation examines how the ideological features of the prison filtered into the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida and into the

Carlisle Indian Industrial School. I synthesize prison theory and history, theories of architecture, space and human geography, substantial archival research, and sustained literary analysis, to argue that Richard Henry Pratt was 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—and that Pratt conducted experiments with space and self-transformation at a prisoner-of-war camp for

Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and Arapaho prisoners at Fort Marion between 1875 and 1878 and subsequently the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879.

The second half of my dissertation turns to the literature written by some of the first boarding school students to tell their stories at the turn of the twentieth century: Francis La

Flesche (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša/Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), and Ah-nen-la-de-ni/Daniel la

France (Mohawk). I argue that these writers appropriate the western rhetoric of frontier borders and describe their school days using the metaphor of the prison in order to invert the then- popular dichotomy of the reservation as savage space and the boarding school as civilized space.

Examining how these three writers characterized the reservation as civilized and the boarding school as carceral illuminates an important rescripting of Pratt’s popular narrative that the boarding school would free American Indians from the prison-like reservations.

Next, I analyze the literature of contemporary American Indian writers Laura Tohe

(Diné), Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) in order to illustrate how these authors use the imagery of the prison to re-write the boarding school experience as one of both survival and resistance, or what Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) calls “survivance.” By examining the carceral imagery in contemporary American Indian literature, I reveal how these writers confront the boarding school’s legacy of cultural trauma by imagining the boarding school as a space of resistance and escape.

It is important to note that not all early twentieth-century boarding school writers used the carceral metaphor or even characterized their boarding school experience as negative. For example, in his boarding school story, From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), Charles

Eastman (Santee Sioux) “renounces [his] wild life” and chooses to “lov[e] civilization” (39). As he attends two different mission schools; Beloit, Knox and Dartmouth Colleges; and Boston

University where he earned a medical degree, Eastman “desire[s] to know all the white man knows” (48). Eastman, like Zitkala-Ša and La Flesche, challenges the definition of civilization; yet, he advocates for American Indians to achieve civilization through a combination of

Christianity and an “Indian sense of right and justice” (195). Thus, while Eastman criticizes the younger generation of boarding school students for their inability to embrace both their

American-ness and their tribal knowledge, as he disparages “our younger element [that] has now been so thoroughly drilled in the motives of the white man, at the same time losing the old mother and family training through being placed in boarding school” (164), he never characterizes his own school experience as destructive. Similarly, Luther Standing Bear (Oglala

Sioux) understands the importance of Euro-American education for American Indian survival in his autobiography My People the Sioux (1928). Like Eastman and La Flesche, Standing Bear narrates the difficult transition to school life, but also tells of his happy moments. In fact, when his father comes to visit he writes, “This was another happy day for me” (149). By including the word “another,” Standing Bear adds his father’s visit to his narrative list of happy moments.

The first boarding school students to write their stories characterize their experiences in diverse ways, yet it is notable that three of these authors—La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša and Ah-nen-la- de-ni—use carceral imagery and/or highlight the carceral aspects of the schools. Studying how these authors use this imagery is integral to understanding a larger theme of incarceration in

American Indian boarding school literature, and assists our understanding of how carceral regimes helped shape the American Indian boarding school. Only by placing these three authors together can we fully understand how the histories of the boarding school and prison worked together.

My methodology of placing American Indian writers in conversation with Richard Henry

Pratt is inspired by historian David Wallace Adams’ foundational history of American Indian education, Education for Extinction (1995), which begins with what I call a top-down history of how the United States used the boarding schools to eradicate American Indian cultures and assimilate American Indians into mainstream America. However, Adams ends his book with a more bottom-up examination of how students resisted and adapted to the boarding school

regime. By positioning American Indian literature in conversation with Pratt’s top-down discourse, my dissertation embeds the American Indian boarding school story into what Malea

Powell (Miami/Shawnee) calls the “familiar” narrative of dominance. Powell calls for an academic discourse of “seeing,” where academics “open space for the existing stories that have been silenced.” “Open[ing] space” for students’ boarding school stories allows me to further expand on the seminal bottom-up case-histories of the late 1990s, K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s

(Creek) They Called It Prairie Light (1995) and Brenda Child’s (Ojibwe) Boarding School

Seasons (1998), which re-scripted the narrative that boarding school students were mere victims into a story of students’ courage and perseverance. Through an examination of archived documents and letters from Chilocco and Haskell/Flandreau respectively, Lomawaima and Child show how students endured the sometimes-difficult environment of the boarding schools and used the boarding school to create pan-tribal alliances that both reinforced their own tribal identity and helped them adopt new identities. My dissertation further develops Lomawaima’s and Child’s bottom-up narrative by analyzing how former boarding school students responded to the boarding school space as carceral and savage in their published work, thus resisting the then- popular dichotomy of reservation/savage, school/civilized, and how descendants of students have written the memory of the boarding school as one of resilience. A more thorough overview of

American Indian boarding school scholarship is included later in this introduction.

The Beginnings of Off-Reservation Indian Education

Prior to the late nineteenth century, the United States relied on military confrontation and warfare to pacify hostilities between settlers/the government and tribes. In 1869, President

Ulysses Grant attempted to take what he thought to be a more philanthropic approach to this confrontation by passing the Peace Policy. The Peace Policy implemented three changes: first, religious personnel would appoint reservation agents; second, federal funding for Indian

education would increase; and third, a Board of Indian Commissioners would oversee Indian policy under the Secretary of the Interior (Adams 7-8). The Peace Policy resulted in the appropriation of $100,000 to promote education among tribes and mandated that all American

Indian children attend school (Spack 17-8).

Before Carlisle opened in 1879, schools for American Indian children were either day schools or boarding schools run by religious groups, and were either on or near the reservation.

These schools existed on the reservations throughout the nineteenth century, and by 1860 there were forty-eight day schools in the United States. However, by 1870 policymakers began to realize that day schools were not as effective at assimilation as they originally hoped because children would return to their “savage” ways after the school day ended. The first solution was the on-reservation boarding school. On-reservation schools were still mostly run by missionaries and partially funded by the federal government; however, students remained at the school for the duration of the school year. According to policymakers, the largest benefit of the on-reservation boarding schools was that children could be fully immersed in civilized ways and parents could be comforted knowing their children were near. Furthermore, on-reservation schools acted as a symbol of progress, inspiring the whole tribe toward civilization. However, some agents still argued that the schools were located too close to the reservations to be effective (Adams 30-1).

During this same time, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt was overseeing a group of seventy- two Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapahoe prisoners of the Red River War at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. In 1875, Pratt escorted these prisoners from Indian Territory, where he led the United States Tenth Calvary, a unit made mostly of African American soldiers known as

the Buffalo Soldiers.1 Pratt’s experiences with the Buffalo Soldiers and with Indian scouts led

Pratt to believe that savagery was caused by nurture, not nature, and the prison camp at Fort

Marion became a place for him to experiment with his hypothesis that American Indians could assimilate into mainstream American society if removed from reservations, provided a civilized environment, and instructed in education and labor.

Pratt dressed his prisoners in soldier’s uniforms, remodeled the fort as best as he could to serve his purposes, created classrooms for his prisoners to learn English and a chapel for

Christian service, and found the prisoners work whenever he could. Soon after arriving at the fort, Pratt dismissed the military guard, gave the prisoners faux military rank, and appointed them responsibilities around the fort, such as baking, calling roll, and even guarding themselves and their fellow prisoners. The prisoners soon began speaking some English and expressed an interest in Christianity, agricultural and mechanical labor. As I will discuss further in Chapter 2,

Pratt’s experiment in assimilation was largely thought to be successful, and he began to petition the United States Government to release the prisoners and help provide them with further educational and vocational opportunities. As I will also discuss further in Chapter 2, the United

States Government first ignored Pratt’s requests, and Pratt enlisted the help of some of his wealthy supporters, including General Samuel Armstrong, the superintendent of Hampton

Normal and Agricultural Institute, an industrial and agricultural school for mostly ex-slaves in

1 Pratt’s autobiography, speeches and archived letters sustain that Pratt’s ideas regarding assimilation were also inspired by slavery and reconstruction. Exploring the link between the American Indian boarding schools and the model of slavery is beyond the scope of this dissertation, as weighing in on the long history of slavery and abolition may cause me to oversimplify this connection and would become tangential to my exploration of why American Indian writers use the imagery of the prison when writing about the boarding school. For scholarship on the link between slavery and the boarding schools, see Joel Pfister’s Individuality Incorporated and Jaqueline Fear-Segal’s White Man’s Club.

Hampton, Virginia. In 1878, Pratt and Armstrong began an Indian program for seventeen of

Pratt’s released prisoners; however, Pratt believed that American Indians needed their own dedicated school far from the reservations where he could separate students from their homes and immerse them in civilization. Thus, citing the need for an industrial school dedicated solely to the education of American Indians, Pratt petitioned the United States Government for the use of the abandoned Carlisle Army Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The government granted

Pratt the use of the barracks and provided him with federal funding in hopes that his new type of school would transform “savage” children into future citizens, thus solving the “Indian Problem” through assimilation. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened on November 1, 1879.

Carlisle’s first students consisted of ninety-eight boys and thirty-eight girls, about two- thirds of whom were recruited from Dakota Territory to be held as “hostages” for the good behavior of their tribes (Pratt Battlefield 220). The remaining students were recruited from Indian

Territory by former St. Augustine prisoners. Once at the school, students were bathed, dressed in uniform, and their hair was cut. Half of each student’s day consisted of academic education, while the other half focused on manual labor training. In the summers, Carlisle hired out many students to nearby homes and farms to learn through immersion, a system Pratt called “outing.”

Carlisle became the model for subsequent American Indian boarding schools. Twenty-five off- reservation boarding schools opened by 1902, and on-reservation boarding schools and day schools continued to increase, spreading from the east coast to California with enrollment peaking in the 1970s (Adams 57).

Pratt believed that through the boarding school process, American Indians, within one generation, could become civilized Americans if their children were removed from their “savage homes,” taught English and immersed in Euro-American culture (Pratt Battlefield 246-7). While

Pratt’s ideas that American Indians were not biologically distinct were progressive for his time, I argue that his notion that the American Indian boarding school could transform American

Indians into proper American citizens through the right environment, surveillance, labor, and education were reformist and mirrored the ideology of the prison reform movements of the nineteenth century. Understanding how the prison reform movements inspired Pratt adds an additional lens to current American Indian boarding school scholarship, as it reveals how Pratt used penitential models to experiment with space and transformability of selfhood at Fort Marion and how he drew from those models as he renovated the Carlisle Army Barracks into the first off-reservation American Indian boarding school. Thusly, if Pratt intended his students to experience the Carlisle School as a carceral space, then it also helps us understand why former boarding school students and descendants of students use carceral tropes when writing about the boarding school experience.

Prison Reform in the Nineteenth Century

In the wake of independence, Americans began to reconsider the effectiveness of punishing criminals’ bodies rather than reforming their souls. The early American solution to criminality, specifically the whipping post and the gallows, did not mesh with Enlightenment ideals that the “display of violence only spread violence” and a new philosophy of punishment began to take shape through the institution of the penitentiary (Meranze 3). American reformers believed that removal of the criminal from society through incarceration would not only be more humane, but could potentially reform a criminal into a proper citizen. Michael Meranze argues that, “Penitential punishments promised an entirely new way of governing society—one based on spiritual engagement, not coercive violence; one that would reclaim rather than expel, that would preserve individual reputation instead of spreading infamy, and that would contain rather than extend the example of criminality” (3). Thus, by end of the eighteenth century, reformers

tired of experiments with workhouses, public punishment, and public labor, sought a new solution that focused on removing criminals from contact with each other. Using a blend of architecture, labor and religious instruction, reformers and architects built an institution that prioritized solitude, self-reflection and repentance.2

Perhaps the most well-known prison design was Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, proposed to England’s Prime Minister, William Pitt, in 1793. Bentham’s proposal for the Panopticon was a semi-circular, or polygonal, structure in which all singular cells faced a central watchtower. The circular nature of the prison meant that the keeper in the watchtower could observe all prisoners in their cells simultaneously. However, because the watchtower was to remain dark, prisoners would not be able to see the guards inside, allowing for the best opportunity for full, anonymous surveillance of all prisoners (Johnston 50). In fact, Bentham proposed not fully staffing the watchtower; if the tower was dark, prisoners would assume there was a guard inside and thus police themselves. Michel Foucault noted that the Panopticon “reverses the principle of the dungeon” because instead of imprisoning criminals in a space where they are to be forgotten, they are placed in space to be constantly observed (200).

While Bentham’s Panopticon was never built due to its high construction costs, other architects, influenced by the Panopticon, mimicked its basic structure. The Pennsylvania model, established at Eastern State in Philadelphia in 1829, was a radial model with seven cell buildings converging on the central tower. Radial prisons, like polygonal, also housed solitary cells and a center watchtower. However, instead of cells circling the watchtower, the watchtower became a central axis to a varied number of cell buildings. While this model was not ideal for constant

2 For a background on the history of the American penitentiary, see The Oxford History of the Prison edited by Norval Morris and David Rothman, Norman Johnston’s Forms of Constraint, Robin Evans’ Fabrication of Virtue, and Michael Meranze’s Laboratories of Virtue.

surveillance, the radial structure was thought to be the easiest way to classify and separate prisoners as an architect could fit more solitary cells in a smaller amount of available space.

Eastern State subjected prisoners to solitary confinement throughout their entire sentence and each cell included a small outdoor area for exercise (Johnston 55-64). Contrastingly, the Auburn model in New York, opened in 1816, was composed of rectangular buildings placed together to form a larger rectangle that enclosed a central courtyard. In the Auburn model, prisoners slept in solitary cells, but worked, ate, exercised and worshiped together. Various methods were used in the Auburn model to simulate solitude during times of congregation, such as walking in lockstep with heads turned, wearing masks, and complete silence (Johnston 77).

Architecture was at the center of debates on moral reform as it was responsible for isolating criminals from corrupting influences, providing a physically and morally healthy space for reflection, and keeping the body occupied by labor and exercise (Rothman 84-5). According to David Rothman, proponents of the Pennsylvania system argued that Auburn was not complete enough; they were only taking solitude half-way. Proponents of the Auburn system not only argued that the Pennsylvania system was unrealistic, but also that its architecture was not planned well enough for total isolation. They argued that Eastern State’s walls were not thick enough and that the configuration of the pipes allowed for communication through them. Auburn proponents also argued that complete solitary confinement led to insanity, not to mention building solitary cells and outdoor runs was expensive (87-8). Debates regarding prison architecture continued, but the fact remained that building and maintaining penitentiaries was costly and the implementation of solitary cells only exacerbated overcrowding problems. By the middle of the nineteenth century, many Americans lost confidence in the idea that architecture could shape behavior, and many Americans began to consider the reformatory prison a failure.

However, once the Civil War concluded reformers began to once again turn their attention to the penitentiary, but this time reformers’ focus was less on architecture for the purposes of isolation and more on shaping prisoners’ behavior through incentives (Rotman 151). In 1876, the second prison reformatory movement was in full swing with the opening of a new penitentiary, the

Elmira Reformatory in Elmira, New York. Elmira motivated prisoners through reward, not punishment and its goal was to transform young prisoners into useful citizens through positive reinforcement, education and labor training. Elmira became the model penitentiary of this second prison reformatory movement and influenced the opening of similar penitentiaries across the

United States (174). Elmira and the prison reform movements are discussed further in Chapter 2.

Prison reform was not an isolated movement, but part of a larger movement that sought to create and experiment with institutions for the purpose of reforming individual character.

Reformers also created and experimented with institutions that controlled the poor, prostitutes and juveniles. For example, Philadelphia and New York not only created the prototypes for the

American penitentiary, but also for free public education and poor relief. Michael Meranze argues that, “Whether the target was poverty, criminality, delinquency, prostitution, or idleness, reformers and officials believed that social problems could be best contained through the transformation of individual character, that individual character could best be transformed through the careful supervision of individual regimen, and that the supervision of individual regimen could best take place within an environment where time and space were carefully regulated” (4). Pratt’s experiments with American Indian education at Fort Marion and Carlisle acted as what Meranze calls a “laboratory of virtue,” as Pratt likewise sought to transform social others, in his case American Indians, into proper citizens through environment, surveillance and labor as well as education in English, Christianity, domesticity and manual labor.

No theorist has contributed more to our understanding of how architecture works as a form of power designed to shape behavior than Michel Foucault, who turns to the prison and military camp to articulate his theories of power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues, “In organizing ‘cells’, ‘places’ and ‘ranks’, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical” (148). Foucault looks mostly at how space is organized to enforce and reinforce hierarchy. In his chapter “The Means of Correct Training,” Foucault analyzes ways that architecture provides for maximum systems of observation. In discussing the military camp, Foucault asserts, “The old, traditional square plan was considerably refined in innumerable new projects. The geometry of the paths, the number and distribution of the tents, the orientation of their entrances, the disposition of files and ranks were exactly defined; the network of gazes that supervised one another was laid down” (171). Of course Foucault recognizes that disciplinary space includes the prison, and as his chapter “Panopticonism” shows, the architecture of the prison ranks prisoners and keepers in a way that reinforces power relations by dividing the observer and the observed (201). Foucault argues that the architectural structure of the Panopticon, or what became implemented in radial and non-radial prisons, allowed for the most efficient division of power. It allowed for total surveillance and total solitude. It rejected violent force and promoted “milder penalties” and reformation. However, Foucault focuses less attention on the solitary cells of the Panopticon and instead analyzes the central observatory. He quotes Ducatel’s Instruction pour la Construction des Maisons d’arrêt: “The architect must therefore bring all his attention to bear on this object; it is a question both of discipline and economy. The more accurate and easy the surveillance, the less need will there be to seek in the strength of the building guarantees against attempted escape and communication between

inmates” (249-50). For Foucault, the perfect observatory is necessary for complete surveillance and thus for the perpetuation of power.

Foucault reveals two important issues relevant to my analysis of the American Indian boarding school. Speaking of the Panopticon, Foucault emphasizes its versatility:

It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centers and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behavior must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. (205)

Foucault’s quotation is useful to my dissertation for two reasons. First, that the model of surveillance, power and control supersedes the institution of the prison and has “polyvalent” application beyond penitentiaries into other spaces, including, as both Foucault and Meranze emphasize, poor houses, juvenile detention facilities and prostitution reform houses, and as I argue, Indian boarding schools. Second, that the focus is not on the panoptic structure explicitly but on how space is organized to reinforce hierarchical power relations, impose control over bodies, and produce a specific desired outcome. Thus, Foucault is particularly useful in helping us understand how architecture was thought necessary to create what Meranze calls “laboratories of virtue,” and how specific buildings were constructed to meet these goals, shape notions of selfhood, and transform social “others” into proper citizens.

As I argue in Chapter 2, the United States’ shift from violent coercion to assimilation and education in dealing with American Indian tribes did not occur independently from the rise of the penitentiary. Pratt incorporated elements from both the first and second prison reform movements into the regime of the Carlisle School. Pratt’s notion that American Indians could be transformed through environment, surveillance, labor and religious training mirrors the early

nineteenth-century prison reform movement’s philosophy that criminals could be reformed and transformed into useful citizens through the same regimes. Additionally, as I will show through an analysis of Pratt’s correspondence in Chapter 2, Pratt was also influenced by the second reformatory movement’s philosophy that education, industrial training, military drill and athletics could civilize a social other. In fact, Pratt’s experiments at Fort Marion between 1875 and 1878 coincided with the second prison reform movement and the opening of Elmira in 1876.

This idea that American Indians could, through immersion in a European-style environment, education and labor, be rewritten into “proper” citizens mobilizes my study, which is one of the first to consider the role of the spatial imaginary in the history of the American

Indian boarding school. Centering my project on the spatial imaginary allows for new discoveries as to how space was constructed by Pratt and other assimilationists in order to rewrite “savages” into “useful citizens.” This lens also provides a framework for revealing how space was actually experienced, represented and resisted by students, as well as how it was remembered by future generations.

Overview of Boarding School Scholarship

Scholars have cited various explanations for the origins of the boarding school, such as shifts in government policy and changing attitudes regarding biological determinism, and while scholars have asserted the roles the military and industrialization played in the boarding school experience, none have noted the near simultaneous rise of the penitential reform movements and

American Indian education reform. In order to consider how the prison has influenced American

Indian education, we must also focus on how Fort Marion acted as a critical site in the transformation of American Indian education from mission and on-reservation schools to the regimented institution of the boarding school. In other words, in order to understand the role the penitentiary played in the origins of the boarding school, scholars must weigh Pratt’s tenure at

Fort Marion more heavily than we do. Scholarship on the American Indian boarding school has largely focused on either general histories of the school system, case studies of particular schools, or on how language is used as a tool of oppression and resistance. Until Jaqueline Fear-

Segal’s book, White Man’s Club, was published in 2007, few scholars had but mentioned Fort

Marion as Carlisle’s starting point and all had overlooked the contribution of space and space planning to the boarding school experience.

While general histories and case studies discuss Fort Marion as a place where Pratt began to experiment with Indian education, most do not elaborate on the degree to which Fort Marion influenced Carlisle. For example, because Brenda Child’s book Boarding School Seasons is a case history of three schools (Flandreau, Haskell, and Pipestone) during a specific timeframe

(1900-1940), her study does not necessitate a lengthy discussion of the origins of American

Indian boarding schools. However, Child does mention that Pratt’s involvement in the Southwest

Indian Wars and his experiments at Fort Marion gave him the opportunity to remove the Native prisoners of war to Fort Marion where he subjected them to his experiments in civilization.

Pratt’s success at Fort Marion resulted in the admittance of seventeen former St. Augustine prisoners to Hampton Normal School and Hampton’s growing Indian school program (6). Thus,

Child attributes the opening of the Carlisle School to Pratt’s successes at Fort Marion and

Hampton, but does not elaborate on the ideological roles that Fort Marion played in the conception of the boarding school.

Lomawaima, like Child, briefly mentions Fort Marion’s part in the formation of Carlisle but emphasizes the Dawes Act’s role in developing American Indian education. Her book, They

Called it Prairie Light, focuses on the personal narratives of students at Chilocco Indian

Agricultural School. Thus, Lomawaima calls attention to the rise of Carlisle and the boarding

school system only to provide a more general background for her case study of Chilocco.

Lomawaima ascribes the creation and success of the boarding school to the Dawes Act’s land allotment clause, which required American Indians to learn how to live in nuclear families and take up farming. Since missionary schools were largely unsuccessful at instilling these skills in individualization and assimilation, the government funneled its resources into Carlisle. Because the focus of Lomawaima’s book is on one particular school, she only needs to mention Fort

Marion and Carlisle in order to provide background for readers’ understanding of Chilocco.

Similar to Lomawaima, Myriam Vučković attributes the rise of the boarding school to earlier theories of assimilation rather than the intermediary role of Fort Marion. In her case study of Haskell Institute titled Voices from Haskell, Vučković argues that the wave of immigration in the late nineteenth century created anxiety among white Americans, which lead to a reliance on schools to transform racial others into proper citizens. Thus, Vučković’s study emphasizes social evolutionary theories that trusted schools “to speed up the evolutionary process” while also contributing to the “complete political and cultural subjugation” of racial others (12).

Specifically, Vučković asserts that these theories created a need for the Carlisle School, and while she recognizes that Carlisle is also embedded in a long history of missionary and reservation schools, she does not explore how Pratt’s experiments at Fort Marion and Hampton provided him with an opportunity to create a space where he could erase Indian “otherness” through his methods of assimilation.

Both Amelia Katanski’s Learning to Write “Indian” and Ruth Spack’s America’s Second

Tongue examine how the boarding schools used the English language as a tool of oppression and how students used English to resist this oppression. Katanski only briefly mentions Fort Marion in order to introduce the site of her study: Carlisle. As she explains, “Carlisle…was based on

Pratt’s Florida experience and on the Hampton Institute’s program of industrial training for former slaves” (4). Like Vučković, Katanski only mentions Fort Marion as the beginning of

Pratt’s experiments in social evolutionary theory in order to set up her argument that students used language to “explor[e] and inhabit diverse identities that contradicted both nineteenth- century social evolutionism and our contemporary understandings of ‘biculturalism’” (8). Ruth

Spack also briefly mentions Fort Marion; however, she does so in order to give background to

Hampton’s Indian program for the purpose of analyzing how teachers at Hampton devised a unique pedagogy for teaching English to American Indian students.

By contrast, those scholars who devote time to Fort Marion from 1875 to 1878 do not develop Fort Marion’s role in the rise of the boarding school. Brad Lookingbill’s War Dance at

Fort Marion provides a thorough history of Fort Marion during Pratt’s tenure through the prisoners’ perspectives. However, Lookingbill does not make an argument regarding Fort

Marion’s influence on American Indian education other than to note that the former prisoners’ recruiting efforts helped make Carlisle possible. Other scholars of this period in Fort Marion’s history, such as Phillip Earenfight and Joyce Szabo, focus on the art produced by the prisoners rather than on the function of Fort Marion as the beginning of the off-reservation boarding school.

Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s White Man’s Club is the first study to thoroughly investigate how

Pratt’s experiments at Fort Marion shaped his ideology and subsequently the regime of the

Carlisle School. Specifically, Fear-Segal focuses her analysis on how Pratt used architecture to reinforce power, or as she states, “the complicated interplay between Pratt’s schooling program and the use he made of the layout of the fort and it [sic] environment.” Fear-Segal argues that the ways Pratt used the space of Fort Marion promotes an understanding of Fort Marion’s influence

“in shaping the complex dialectical power relations at work in the white-Indian education process” (14). She posits that Pratt may have modeled some of Carlisle’s features after the fort’s architecture and concentrates specifically on how the gateways at Fort Marion and Carlisle reinforced white authority. Furthermore, Fear-Segal argues that Pratt closed off the campus as he erected more buildings and structures. Through her analysis of Carlisle’s architecture and its similarities to the architecture at Fort Marion, Fear-Segal concludes that Carlisle’s architecture represented an important contradiction: while the Carlisle School trained American Indian students to assimilate and become equal to the white man, the physical space of the school reinforced the white man’s control (185).

This dissertation builds off of Fear-Segal’s argument that architecture reinforces and perpetuates power relations by locating the penitentiary as the quintessential space where theories of architecture, and architecture’s role in the shaping of personhood, was practiced.

Adding the lens of prison and prison architecture theory sets the groundwork for me to expand on Fear-Segal’s argument that Pratt took his experiments with space and education with him from Fort Marion to Carlisle; I add that Pratt created a carceral space that went beyond reinforcing the regimes of the prison camp by recreating the regimes of the penitentiary. I also broaden Fear-Segal’s analysis of the spatial layout of Carlisle by employing human geographer

Yi-Fu Tuan’s theories of how humans perceive and experience space. By expanding on Fear-

Segal’s analysis of how Carlisle’s architecture perpetuated power relationships, and adding prison theory, prison architecture theory, literary analysis and archival research, I conclude that the links between the penitentiary and the boarding school are not simply coincidental, but that

Pratt was in fact at least partially inspired by the prison reform movements of the nineteenth century. This conclusion drives the first half of the dissertation which examines how Pratt

created a carceral space as he repurposed and remodeled the Carlisle Barracks into the Carlisle

School. Beginning this dissertation with an examination of how Pratt intended students to experience Carlisle as a carceral space mobilizes the argument in the second half of my dissertation, which analyzes the literature of former boarding school students and descendants of students to assert that students indeed experienced the space as carceral.

In this dissertation, I have chosen to use the term American Indian rather than Native

American. While these two terms are generally understood as interchangeable, I believe that the term American Indian invokes a history of colonization of which this dissertation directly engages. I also use the term Native simply because it is a condensed way to refer to the original peoples of this continent. Furthermore, when appropriate, I favor tribal designations over the generalized term American Indians.

Chapter Breakdown

Chapter 2, titled “Battlefield to Classroom,” argues that between the years 1875 and 1878

Richard Henry Pratt used the makeshift prison space of the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Marion to both formulate and experiment with his ideas regarding American Indian education, ideas that he later took with him to Carlisle. By devoting attention to Pratt’s tenure at Fort Marion, a period largely unexamined by scholars of the American Indian boarding school, I demonstrate that

Pratt’s prison played a formative role in what would soon become the off-reservation boarding school. I draw largely from archival sources housed in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library to support my claim that Pratt’s ideologies regarding education and transformation were directly influenced by the second prison reform movement. I apply Norman

Johnston’s concept of the “makeshift prison” and Foucault’s theories of surveillance to assert that Pratt remodeled and used the spaces of the fort and St. Augustine to recreate the penitential regimes of surveillance, labor and education he thought necessary for the prisoners’

transformation. Finally, I analyze the Fort Marion chapters of Pratt’s autobiography, Battlefield and Classroom, which has not before been read as a work of literature, in order to reveal how

Pratt rhetorically reasserts and rescripts the prison experience at Fort Marion.

In Chapter 3, “Moral Architecture: The Carceral Space of the Carlisle Indian Industrial

School,” I offer a sustained analysis of the space and architecture of the first off-reservation

American Indian boarding school, founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, to reveal how the spatial layout of the campus (from the guardhouse to the dormitories) perpetuated power relationships between students and teachers and underscored what the school taught students about their envisioned place in American society. I expand on Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s observation that the campus layout preserved segregation between students and teachers; drawing from theorist Yi-Fu Tuan’s claims that spatial layout affects social hierarchy, I show how Carlisle’s design also reflected reformers’ concept of time, i.e. past/savage and future/civilized. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Carlisle was crafted as a space of enclosure and surveillance, Pratt actively sought to downplay the carceral aspects of the Carlisle

School in the Carlisle chapters of Battlefield and Classroom and in his speeches by repeatedly invoking the image of the reservation as a prison, a technique that I fully explore in this chapter’s concluding section.

In Chapter 4, “Autobiographical Space: The First American Indian Boarding School

Writers,” I show how the first generation of American Indian writers to emerge out of the boarding school movement—Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša/Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton

Sioux), and Ah-nen-la-de-ni/Daniel la France (Mohawk)—worked to actively rescript Pratt’s narrative by representing boarding schools as savage, carceral spaces and reservations as civilized spaces. I place La Flesche in conversation with philosopher Jeremy Bentham to

illuminate how La Flesche uses the language of frontier borders to re-conceptualize the spaces of the reservation and the boarding school in his novel, The Middle Five (1900). I assert that

Zitkala-Ša challenges the government’s policies of removal, reservations and education in her

Atlantic Monthly trilogy (1901) in order to argue against the idea that only legal property could be considered civilized space. In doing so, Zitkala-Ša (inverting Pratt’s rhetoric) re-classifies the reservation as civilized space and the boarding school as a carceral, savage space. In “An Indian

Boy’s Story” (1903), Ah-nen-la-de-ni repeatedly employs the metaphor of the prison to highlight his lack of freedom at the Lincoln Institute: this sustained metaphor helps Ah-nen-la-de-ni argue for student agency and choice.

Chapter 5, “Contemporary American Indian Writers Reimagine the Boarding School

Experience,” analyzes how boarding schools are remembered, represented and re-imagined in contemporary American Indian literature. American Indian studies scholar Brenda Child

(Ojibwe) argues that “for better or worse, the schools became part of our histories,” and I use

Laura Tohe’s (Diné) collection of poetry and prose titled No Parole Today, Louise Erdrich’s

(Ojibwe) Little No Horse novels and Leslie Marmon Silko’s (Laguna Pueblo) novel Gardens in the Dunes to show how the metaphor of the boarding school as prison became an integral remembrance of that history. To extend my analysis, I engage with theories of cultural trauma alongside Gerald Vizenor’s (Ojibwe) term “survivance” to first illustrate how powerful and frequent the metaphor appears across literature and second to examine how authors use prison imagery to characterize students as survivors and resistors of the boarding schools’ carceral regimes. In order to show how authors combine notions of space and resistance, I make use of

Edward Soja’s appropriation of Henri Lefebvre’s term “thirdspace,” which Soja defines as a real and imagined space where the oppressed can resist power and dominance. I conclude this chapter

by analyzing how Silko’s characters in Gardens in the Dunes create thirdspace in order to resist the cultural trauma perpetrated by the carceral regimes of the boarding school, and thusly become characters of survivance.

The tiny handcuffs at Haskell represent a long history of incarceration for American

Indian children. The handcuffs, as well as the stories analyzed in this dissertation, attest that the carceral environment and regimes that students endured are more than just metaphors. When Ah- nen-la-de-ni refers to his classmates as “inmates,” when Tohe’s grandmother witnesses the horror of Haskell’s jail, and when Silko’s Sister Salt refers to her school labor as prison labor, it is because they experienced how the prison influenced the regimes of the boarding school. This dissertation seeks to fill in archival documents, material history, and theory to make explicit the connection between the American Indian boarding school and the American prison observed by generations of American Indian writers.

CHAPTER 2 BATTLEFIELD TO CLASSROOM

At the end of the Red River War in 1875, hundreds of Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapaho chiefs and warriors surrendered to the United States at Fort Sill in present day Oklahoma. Tasked with investigating the war crimes of the surrendered was Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt’s investigation incriminated approximately 150 American Indians at Fort Sill, seventy-two of who were arrested and transported to a prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida.

Pratt volunteered to escort the warriors to Fort Marion, where they remained prisoners of war under his care for three years. Thirty-two Cheyenne men, two Arapahoe men, twenty-seven

Kiowa men, nine Comanche men and one Caddo man made the long, frightening journey by wagon, train and steamboat.1 Among them were some of the most notorious: Making Medicine

(Cheyenne), Lone Wolf and White Horse (Kiowa). Crowds of people gathered at train stations from Saint Louis to Jacksonville hoping to catch a glimpse of “savage” Indian warriors and chiefs famous for terrorizing the southwestern American frontier.

Pratt began his military career as a Union soldier. After the war, the military stationed him in Indian Territory to help pacify growing Indian hostilities against white settlers during the

Gold Rush. He quickly worked his way up the military ranks, and in 1867 he was promoted to second lieutenant in charge of the Tenth Cavalry, a regiment of (mostly) ex-slaves popularly known as the Buffalo Soldiers. Pratt’s experience leading the Tenth Cavalry, as well as with leading Native scouts, informed his ideas regarding race and education. Pratt later wrote:

My regiment, the 10th, is one of the two regiments of colored cavalry….I often commanded Indian scouts, took charge of Indian prisoners and performed other Indian duty which led me to consider the relative conditions of the two races. The

1 One Comanche woman and her child (Pe-ah-in and Ah-kes), and one Cheyenne woman (Mochi) also accompanied the men. The Army never considered them prisoners of war.

negro, I argued, is from as low a state of savagery as the Indian, and in 200 years’ association with Anglo-Saxons he has lost his language and gained theirs; has laid aside the characteristics of his former savage life, and, to a greater extent, adopted those of the most advanced and highest civilized nation in the world, and has thus become as fitted and accepted as a fellow citizen among them….Then, I argued, it is not fair to denounce the Indian as an incorrigible savage until he has had at least equal privilege of association. If millions of black savages can become so transformed and assimilated…there is but one plain duty resting upon us with regard to the Indians, and that is to relieve them of their savagery and other alien qualities by the same methods used to relieve others. (Pratt “Eleventh Annual Report”)

Pratt cites the example of slaves turned soldiers to argue that nurture, not nature, informed intelligence and if placed in the right environment and given the proper tools, American Indians, like African Americans, could become valuable second-class citizens. In this quotation Pratt evades the ethics of mass enslavement of African Americans and instead focuses on his philosophy that it is America’s “duty” to combat savagery by assimilating the “lower” races into citizenship in the “most advanced and highest civilized nation in the world.”2

Much of Pratt’s writing repeats this idea that savages can become citizens, citing African

Americans as success stories and crediting assimilatory practices. In arguing against the segregating nature of the reservation system in Battlefield and Classroom, Pratt argues, “The fitness [the Negro] had for that high place he had gained by the training he was given during slavery, which made him individual, English speaking, and capable industrially. This was a lesson which in some way should be applied to the Indian” (214). In this quotation, Pratt emphasizes the role slavery played in African Americans’ ability to assimilate into American civilization; however, Pratt would take advantage of another form of captivity, imprisonment, to train American Indians in the tools of civilization.

2 For further scholarship on Pratt’s ideas regarding social evolutionary theories of intelligence, see Lomawaima, Vučković, Katanski, Pfister and Fear-Segal.

Pratt used his time at Fort Marion to experiment with his idea that “savage” Indians could be transformed into proper citizens through “association.” He provided the prisoners with the tools he believed could lead them to citizenship, namely education in the English language, labor, commerce and military drill. The prisoners learned English quickly, sold their handmade goods to tourists at Fort Marion and at St. Augustine curios, and choreographed performances that drew large audiences and eventually earned many of them an education outside of the fort.

Pratt’s seemingly successful experiment at Fort Marion earned him enough private donations and federal funding to begin an Indian education program at Hampton Normal and Agricultural

Institute; however, Pratt believed that American Indians had unique needs that required an exclusively American Indian school, and he therefore opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial

School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879.3 This transition from soldier to jailor launched Pratt into his life’s work in Indian education, and his idea that the “savage Indian” could be transformed and pacified underlies both Pratt’s career and his 1923 memoir Battlefield and

Classroom.4

This chapter locates Fort Marion as a key, under-examined site for Pratt’s experiments in transformation and discusses how Pratt’s use of the physical space of the Fort informed the intellectual space of Indian education. While Pratt’s time at Fort Marion is acknowledged in histories of American Indian boarding schools, most scholars devote far more attention to Pratt’s later work founding and running the Carlisle School, deemphasizing Fort Marion as a

3 Seventeen prisoners were enrolled at Hampton after their release from Fort Marion in 1878. This began Hampton’s small Indian program that continued until 1923. 4 This transformation is exemplified by the famous before-and-after photos of Pratt’s charges transforming from savage or “blanket” Indians into civilized young men and women.

foundational period in Pratt’s thinking about Indian education.5 No scholar has focused on the important fact that the off-reservation boarding school system emerged from the space of a prison camp, and this chapter argues that understanding the role the prison played in the origins of Indian education is fundamental to understanding the regime of the off-reservation boarding school. After examining how Fort Marion gave Pratt the space to experiment with ideas and practices of imprisonment and education, I analyze Pratt’s archived letters to support my claim that Pratt was indeed inspired by the regimes of the penitentiary during the time he conceptualized his theories of American Indian education. I further develop my argument by illustrating the prison’s structural role in Pratt’s autobiography, Battlefield and Classroom. In his text, Pratt structures his story in a way that, I argue, keeps the realities of imprisonment simultaneously masked and asserted. By locating and analyzing primary sources that illuminate

Fort Marion’s important role as prison/school by using spatial theory to read Fort Marion as a carceral space, by examining Pratt’s letters to highlight how Pratt was inspired by the regimes of the penitentiary, and by subjecting Pratt’s autobiography to a close reading in order to emphasize how he highlights and ignores themes of imprisonment, this chapter argues that Fort Marion deserves an elevated place in the history of the Indian boarding school, particularly for seeing the links between the boarding school and the prison.

From Battlefield to Prisoner-of-War Camp: Fort Marion as Makeshift Prison

In 1672, The Spanish built Fort Marion (then named Castillo De San Marcos) to protect

Spanish occupied St. Augustine from British forces. The British renamed the structure Fort Mark in 1763 after the British gained the northern regions of Florida from the Spanish in exchange for

5 See Chapter 1, “Introduction,” for a fuller overview of scholarship pertaining to the American Indian boarding school.

Havana, Cuba. The fort was renamed Fort Marion in 1821 when the British ceded Florida

Territory to the Americans. While several nations occupied Fort Marion at various times (the fort was exchanged between Spain and Great Britain twice), it was never taken by force and never fell (“Fort Marion”). While the National Park Service now operates the fort under the name

Castillo De San Marcos, I refer to the fort as Fort Marion as that was the name during the period of Pratt’s tenure.

Fort Marion’s resiliency is due to its unique construction. Known as a “star fort,” an aerial view of the fort shows four reinforced walls forming a square with a diamond-shaped bastion emerging from each corner, thus resembling a star. The fort was constructed from coquina, a naturally-formed sedimentary rock made of broken sea-shells. Coquina proved an ideal material for Fort Marion’s construction, as its naturally soft structure absorbs artillery on impact. Water surrounded three sides of the fort, and a dry-ditch protected the landed side. A drawbridge crossed the ditch to allow entry into the fort. The passageway between the entrance and the courtyard turned at a ninety-degree angle, so once inside the fort, one could not see the courtyard until entirely exposed. The courtyard contained no shelter, and was surrounded by Fort

Marion’s twelve foot thick, thirty foot high walls. Casemates were embedded into the walls, which stored ammunition and served as a chapel and dungeons. Two large casemates situated under the ramp to the terreplein served as soldier’s quarters. A stairway led up to the terreplein, where one could walk along the top of the walls and onto the bastions. Cannons lined the walls and each bastion contained a small watchtower. Fort Marion’s oceanfront location, coupled with its unique architecture and construction, made the fort impenetrable (Florida Center).

Norman Johnston’s term “makeshift prison” offers an especially useful way to analyze how an old Spanish fort becomes a prisoner-of-war camp and the seed of the American Indian

boarding school system. Johnston argues that in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century

Europe and nineteenth-century America, castles (Europe) and forts (America) were no longer needed as blockades for defense and began to be used as prisons. Because these prisons were not built from the ground up for the sole purpose of imprisoning people, the structures had to be remodeled and altered over time to suit their newly intended purposes. Fort Marion had been constructed 200 years before Pratt’s arrival as a structure meant to keep opposing military out; therefore, Fort Marion had to be remodeled into a makeshift prison, i.e. a space meant to keep people in.

The United State Military first used the fort as a prison camp in 1837 to imprison

Seminole chief Osceola and his fellow warriors during the Second Seminole War. However, some of these warriors escaped the fort through a nine-inch window placed fifteen feet above the ground in one of the casemates. This escape proved disastrous, as the escaped Seminole continued to fight for another five years. While the fort repelled the British and Spanish, it proved weak fortification for its first Native prisoners. Because of this escape, President Grant ordered United States military engineers to secure the fort prior to Pratt’s and his prisoners’ arrival in 1875.

Engineers fastened the windows with iron grating and each casemate with a “heavy door and bolt…for padlocking” (Pratt Battlefield 118). Therefore, the casemates acted as secure cells because windows look into the courtyard instead of the outside; At the top of each door was a

“narrow slot” for ventilation, and plank floors were installed in some of the casemates for sleeping (118). Colonel Gillmore, the man in charge of securing the fort, wrote in a letter to his post that “a strong barricade [be] erected with thick planks, across the ramp leading to the terreplein” (qtd. in Fear-Segal White Man’s Club 15). According to Battlefield and Classroom,

engineers completed this task, for when Pratt arrived at the fort “the ramp from the court to the terreplein had been boarded up, leaving a door with lock at the lower entrance so that their living was to be in a large pen permitting no outlook except toward the sky” (Pratt Battlefield 117).

Living in damp, unsanitary casemates, the move from dry weather to the humid Florida summer, and the prisoners’ depressed outlook, proved disastrous and deadly; three Kiowa died before the end of the first summer (Fear-Segal White Man’s Club 16).6 While the structure of Fort Marion allowed for it to be repurposed into a prison, the deaths of the three Kiowa men, as well as numerous illnesses, proved that the fort was never meant to be inhabited for long periods of time.

The makeshift nature of the prison-fort accorded Pratt the opportunity to create a new regime of Indian imprisonment that would also soon inform Indian education. Furthermore, it allowed Pratt to simultaneously practice modern penitential ideals of surveillance, self- surveillance, and labor while also experimenting with and redefining the limitations of imprisonment. After the Kiowa deaths, Pratt made several changes to the prisoners’ physical appearances. He believed that altering his prisoners’ physical appearance would not only improve their hygiene, but could influence their inward growth; a civilized appearance, environment and exercise could reform his prisoners into civilized selves. Pratt states in his autobiography that he removed their chains, cut their hair and dressed them in military uniforms in order to “get them out of the curio class” (Pratt Battlefield 118). Figure 2-1 shows the prisoners at Fort Marion standing in formation, dressed in military uniform, resembling

American soldiers. The prisoners in the front line are even holding rifles. Pratt believed that if the prisoners resembled civilized Americans, they could become civilized Americans. He taught them to care for their clothing and their bodies like American soldiers and regularly performed

6 Ih-pa-yah, Co-a-bote-ta and Manan-ti

army drills for exercise. To improve the air quality and the health of the prisoners, Pratt allowed access to the terreplein. Under his orders, the prisoners built new sleeping quarters, a “large one- room shed” on the north side of the terreplein, and made beds out of scrap lumber and grass ticks

(119). Pratt not only began to transform his prisoners’ physical appearance, but also their physical space, allowing them more freedom of movement throughout the fort. No longer were prisoners surrounded by four walls and only able to see the outside world by looking up, but they could now look out on the ocean and the city of St. Augustine.7

Figure 2-1. Prisoners at Fort Marion

In his chapter about the prisoner-of-war camp built on Johnson’s Island during the Civil

War, David R. Bush implies that the two most important structural aspects of a prisoner-of-war camp were surveillance and location, and I argue that Pratt experimented with these two aspects at Fort Marion (63-4). Early on, Pratt dismissed some (and eventually all) of the United States military guard and appointed a number of Native prisoners to guard themselves and fellow

7 This photograph is housed in Box 26, Folder 805 Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.

prisoners. He argues that his time commanding Native scouts in Indian Territory “had given me confidence in their good qualities, particularly when pledged to obedience” (Battlefield 119).

After only six months at Fort Marion, Pratt sent a formal request to the commanding officer at

St. Francis Barracks, about six miles from the fort, to “allow the organization of the younger men into company with sergeant and corporals, to loan some old guns, and to use the Indians to guard themselves” (119-20). Allowing the prisoners to guard themselves exemplifies Pratt’s confidence that in the right environment and under the right supervision, his prisoners could become harmless enough to be given guns and guard themselves. Pratt attributes this transformation directly to his understanding of Native peoples as “good” from his time with the Tenth Cavalry and their natural propensity for “obedience”; however, by narrating the prisoners’ self- surveillance after the description of the their physical and environmental alterations, he also indirectly attributes their docility to his imposed changes. The changes Pratt made to the prisoners’ bodies, their access and their guard could only have taken place within the makeshift prison, a space where he could create his very own regime.

While Pratt attributes the prisoners’ disposition to natural law and a modification of appearance and environment, he does not attribute his decisions to the penitential ideas of power and surveillance that the prisoners were subject to regardless of their occupational position.

However, I argue that Pratt’s alteration of the prison’s space and the prison experience still adhered to penitential notions of power and discipline, including the applied regimes of surveillance, self-surveillance, and labor. These regimes had been developing in the United

States since the first penitentiaries and elevated surveillance as a means of discipline and control.8 Regarding surveillance and self-surveillance, Foucault argues that:

The major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state on conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. (201)

While Fort Marion was certainly not a panopticon, and was more makeshift prison than modern penitentiary, Foucault’s ideas of surveillance still inform how we understand the intersection of surveillance and power at Fort Marion. The idea that power is “independent of the person who exercises it” pertains to Pratt’s practice of self-surveillance. While he continued to employ some military guards at first, he placed Native guards in charge of daily morning inspections, when prisoners’ bodies, their quarters and their workspaces were examined for cleanliness. According to Pratt, prisoners were required to make eye-contact with the guard during these morning inspections because an avoidance of eye-contact meant mischief (Battlefield 147). Prisoner- guards called roll, inventoried the stores, and worked alongside American soldiers of rank. Pratt assigned jobs and ranks to the younger prisoners and provided competition and incentives that

“accentuated their ambition, precision, diligence, and pride” (Lookingbill 71). It did not matter whether the guards at Fort Marion were military or prisoner, inmates were still in a state of

“permanent visibility that assure[d] the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 201).

Another way that Pratt implemented surveillance with little use of military guard was through tourist visits. He welcomed visitors to the prison in order to “correct the unwanted

8 An overview of the history of the penitentiary is provided briefly in the following section and in Chapter 1 of this dissertation.

prejudice promoted among our people against the Indians through race hatred and the false history which tells our side and not theirs.” He saw these visits as mutually beneficial, as “It was just as important to remove from the Indian’s mind his false notion that the greedy and vicious among our frontier outlaws fairly represented the white race” (Battlefield 120). Some of these visitors were significant members of American society, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bishop

Henry Whipple and General Winfield Scott Hancock. However, while Pratt frames these visits as a dual lesson in cultural relativism, as well as proof of his success as a jailor, allowing visitors also added white bodies and eyes to the fort that could serve as an added layer of surveillance.9

These prisoners were removed far from their home and imprisoned by a military that had oppressed and waged war on their people for generations, only to be openly observed by members of that same race of people. The presence of Fort Marion’s visitors was not only a lesson in peace but also a reinforcement of power.

Regardless of whether the prisoners were watched by military officers, tourists or fellow prisoners, the fact remains that they were still prisoners subjected to constant surveillance within the confines of a makeshift prison. In other words, the very idea of surveillance within the confines of the prison acted as a constant reminder of their captive state. As Foucault would argue, the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapahoe warriors were still confined to the prison,

9 Many visitors also wrote articles and letters to the editor of prominent magazines and newspapers about their visit. This literature also acted as a form of surveillance, as it allowed a large population of Americans to also look in and observe Pratt’s experiments at Fort Marion. Amelia Katanski, in writing about Carlisle’s newsletter articles written by Pratt, writes that “the newspaper acted as a rhetorical panopticon, encouraging student self-colonization through writing” (16). While the Fort Marion prisoners presumably never saw the articles written by their visitors, Pratt did and republished many of them in his autobiography. Therefore, Pratt and the prisoners were subjected to this surveillance. Pratt’s attempt to control this representation will be discussed later in this chapter and the Carlisle newsletters will be discussed further in Chapter 3.

and therefore the architecture of the prison itself—the thick coquina walls, case-mate cells, terreplein and bastions—was a constant reminder of their captive condition. To re-emphasize the previously stated quotation by Foucault: “[the] architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it.” Foucault underscores a relationship of power in which the architecture, not the guards, maintains the power structure because confinement within a prison-space reinforces the prisoners’ subordinate status.

Moreover, the larger space of St. Augustine acted as the “machine for creating and sustaining a power relation.” As time passed, Pratt seemingly eased the carceral environs by giving the prisoners permission to camp on Anastasia Island and to work on farms, orchards and railways. They ran errands in town and sold their handmade goods to souvenir shops. Pratt even allowed a young Cheyenne to go on a boat ride with a group of local youth. However, Pratt’s impression of trust and benevolence relies on the spaces of the fort and of St. Augustine in that its geographical location on an eastern peninsula ensured against escape or rescue, and provided an environment where the prisoners were always monitored by residents and tourists. Fear-Segal relates Pratt’s “leniency” to the architecture of Fort Marion: “Pratt could be compassionate and lenient in his treatment of the prisoners because he was readily able to enforce his power” (White

Man’s Club 17). I argue that, for the same reason, Pratt was able to appear lenient toward his prisoners because the larger space of St. Augustine also acted as a space of imprisonment. Not only did the prisoners know they were too far from home to make a successful escape, but they also knew that they were imprisoned in a town where, despite their physical transformations, they were discernible and thus monitored.

In his autobiography, Pratt republishes a letter-to-the-editor of a local St. Augustine newspaper that expresses fear over the prisoner’s access to arms and to the town after dark. The letter’s author, Mr. J. O. Whitney, writes, “A few nights since, in fact several nights of late, a number of them, including some of those interested in the recent restless demonstration [the

Kiowa escape plot], have been seen upon the streets after 10 o’clock at night, some with bayonets and cartridge boxes strapped about them.” Whitney writes to the newspaper, he says, at the behest of the townspeople who “are ever watchful and expectant of an outbreak” (Battlefield

133). Pratt responds to this letter with his own, which he also includes, and he both corrects and dismisses Mr. Whitney and the town’s anxieties. This is the only mention of fear among St.

Augustine residents in Battlefield and Classroom, a feeling that Pratt excuses as unwarranted and silly. Prior to this letter, Pratt characterizes the residents as welcoming, curious and helpful, not fearful. However, this moment also recognizes that the town is not only observing (as is implied by their visits), but actively monitoring the formerly “hostile” Indians and presumably Pratt’s experiment.

This monitoring by local residents is further exemplified during Pratt’s prevention of the

Kiowa escape when a number of “vigilantes” prepared to rush toward the fort and protect the town; however, the soldiers Pratt called in from St. Francis Barracks interfered before the vigilantes could reach the fort. A number of visitors left the city when rumors spread that something was amiss (Lookingbill 101-2). As a result of this fear and chaos, a number of residents signed and forwarded a petition to Congress demanding that Pratt keep the prisoners confined to the fort (Battlefield 135). No doubt many St. Augustinians believed that these men were still just as capable of savagery despite their new clothes and haircuts and kept one eye constantly open to maintain their own safety. The location of Fort Marion in St. Augustine

ensured prisoner surveillance inside and outside of the fort. Whether or not Pratt allowed the prisoners on the terreplein, on the beach or in the town, they were constantly monitored in these spaces. While the prisoners’ access to these spaces may have projected a semblance of freedom, the very fact that they were subjected to constant surveillance continued to confine the prisoners to a prison-space.

Citizenship Through Labor: The Penitentiary’s Influence on Pratt’s Ideology

The makeshift prison of Fort Marion allowed Pratt to experiment with alternative methods of imprisonment based on his ideas that American Indians simply needed to learn the tools of civilization in order to become civilized. As his role as jailor and the prisoners’ roles within Fort Marion and St. Augustine evolved, so did Pratt’s ideas regarding American Indian education. Similar to how he used and altered the existing space of Fort Marion to suit his prisoners’ needs, he altered existing ideologies of the prison and of education to fit what he thought were the needs of American Indians and the needs of the American workforce. This section examines Pratt’s letters to argue that the second prison reformatory movement and Indian education policy inspired Pratt to use Fort Marion as a space to rewrite citizenship through the regimes of labor and education.

The idea that the prison could act as a space to rewrite citizenship, rather than simply a space to confine and punish, did not originate with Pratt but was a part of prison discourse since the turn of the nineteenth century. David Rothman argues that controlling crime became a fundamental necessity to America’s vision of the republic and thus America turned toward the penitentiary to “transform the deviant into a law-abiding citizen” (“Perfecting the Prison” 117).

Early prison reformers argued that rehabilitation could only occur if inmates were removed from the corrupting influences of one another. Thus reformers and architects worked together to create a penitentiary system that prioritized self-reflection and repentance through solitude,

surveillance, labor and religious instruction. America’s first modern prison, Auburn State, opened in New York in 1816, followed by Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829.

Both of these prisons relied on architecture to maximize surveillance and solitude. At Auburn, prisoners slept in solitary cells, and although inmates ate, worked and exercised in common spaces they were forbidden contact with one another through the enforcement of silence and the use of masks. Eastern State sought to completely eliminate the congregate system by confining prisoners to solitary cells for the duration of their sentence (Rothman “Perfecting the Prison”

117). Thus, architecture and space planning were seen as essential to the idea that the penitentiary could transform criminal “others” into proper American citizens as its reliance on solitude required specific spatial layouts.10

However, by the end of the Civil War, public opinion considered the reformatory prison a failure. The Auburn and Eastern State models, which relied on solitary cells, could not accommodate for overcrowding. This overcrowding, along with resource shortages, abuse, and other problems, led prisons to prioritize cost-effectiveness over personal reformation (Rotman

170). In 1867, Enoch Cobb Wines and Theodore Dwight published Report on the Prisons and

Reformatories of the United States and Canada, commissioned by the New York Prison

Association. The report revealed numerous accounts of abuse and cruelty toward prisoners and recommended a total overhaul of the penitentiary system. Wines and Dwight’s suggestion mirrored the rhetoric of reformers one-hundred years earlier: prisons should prepare inmates for

10 See Chapter 1 of this dissertation for a more sustained history and discussion of prison history, reform and architecture. See David J. Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum, and his edited collection with Norval Morris titled The Oxford History of the Prison, for a more comprehensive history of the American prison and prison reform, as well as the role architecture played in prison reform. For a general overview and history of prison architecture, see Norman Johnston’s Forms of Constraint. Also, Michael Meranze’s Laboratories of Virtue provides an extensive study of prison reform in Philadelphia.

a non-criminal life. This return to prisoner reform became the focus of the 1870 National

Congress of Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline, which declared that prisoners could reform through a fostering of self-respect built through education and industry (Rotman 172-3).

Six years after attending the conference, Zebulon Brockway opened Elmira Reformatory in Elmira, New York. Elmira attempted to prepare young offenders for a lawful life through education. The institution provided general education classes, industrial training, athletic and religious instruction, and military drill. Rather than controlling prisoners through fear and punishment, Elmira sought to control prisoners through reward; excellence in classwork could be rewarded with a reduced sentence. Thus, hard work and labor was one key idea of the first prison reform movement that persisted in the second. Elmira became the model penitentiary during this second reform movement and influenced reformatories in Michigan, Massachusetts,

Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana (Rotman 174). 11

Notably, this second prison reformatory period coincided with Pratt’s experiment at Fort

Marion. Elmira opened only one year after Pratt and his prisoners arrived at Fort Marion, and the regimes of education, industry, religion and military drill of both institutions remarkably resembled one another. The shared timing and regimental resemblance shows that Pratt shared the philosophy that these regimes could transform criminals into citizens, and his letters written in 1875 reveal that Pratt considered the penitentiary the quintessential place for criminals to learn citizenship through labor. In a letter to Adjutant General Edward Townsend dated June 29, 1875,

Pratt requests the prisoners of war be transferred from Fort Marion to a penitentiary:

11 Of course, Elmira had its faults. The continued problem of overcrowding and the admission of older criminals and recidivists negated rehabilitation programs and often caused staff to resort to corporal punishment.

Is it not possible to dispose of them [the prisoners of war] at some of our Northeastern Penitentiaries where facilities for learning trades is offered and where they can be kept at work. I will answer that such a course will meet with gratifying results. I have said Penitentiaries because they offer the greatest diversity of facilities and Northeastern because of great perfection of industry, guarding them is only a secondary consideration.

This letter reveals that Pratt saw the northeastern penitentiary as the model institution for his prisoners to learn American trades while remaining under guard. At the time Pratt wrote this letter, he had not yet allowed the prisoners to guard themselves; yet, this letter reveals his lack of concern regarding the prisoners’ behavior and implies that the prisoners would willingly remain incarcerated in exchange for learning trades. Pratt continues to advocate for sending the prisoners of war to a penitentiary in another letter to Townsend written a few weeks later on July 17, 1875:

We try in our state prisons to keep criminals employed and generally at trades that eventuate in placing them in a position to earn a livelihood after release, why do not do the same for these people, when they want it and they say they have never had any one to show them how to work like the white man and they say truly….If they are to be held in close confinement it seems to me that some of our Northern Penitentiaries would be the place offering the greatest diversity of labor. This is not a good place to advance them, they are simply objects of curiosity here. There are no industries worth noting.12

In both of these letters, Pratt focuses on labor as essential to American citizenship: knowledge of a trade would lead to the prisoners earning and accumulating capital, adopting American lifestyles, and joining American communities. The penitentiary would not only keep the prisoners confined, but could provide them with greater opportunities to learn a trade and potentially enter the American workforce upon release. These letters reveal that Pratt subscribed to the rhetoric of the second prison reformatory movement that considered the penitentiary the quintessential place to train men for citizenship, particularly through labor. He believed that his

12 Pratt’s copy of this letter is housed in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Box 14, Folder 493a. A typed version can be found in Box 14, Folder 490. It is also re-printed in Battlefield and Classroom 168-70.

prisoners of war would benefit from such training, and that the prisoners were just as capable of transforming into responsible, working Americans as any white man. As I will show below, Pratt not only thought of the penitentiary as the model institution for training individuals in citizenship, but he was inspired by the penitentiary as he recreated the regimes of education and labor most exemplified by Elmira and the second prison reformatory movement at Fort Marion.

Pratt continued to promote the idea that American Indians could learn industrial labor through a penitential setting even after he left Fort Marion and opened the Carlisle Indian

Industrial School. Pratt writes in a letter to E.L. Stevens, Chief Clerk at the Bureau of Indian

Affairs, dated October 8 1881:

Mr. Hayt prior to making his recommendation in1879 was kind enough to talk this matter over with me and I gave him my unqualifyed [sic] judgment on its favor, to get the best results the establishments should be as much within the limits of civilization as possible. In my opinion they should partake of the nature of a penitentiary with the appliances for mechanical instructions abundantly provided and large agricultural advantages. I have no doubt that if properly managed all of the wagons, harnesses and many of the agricultural implements, etc. etc. required for the Indian service could be manufactured by the prisoners.

While the context of this letter is unknown, and Stevens’ incoming letters missing, it appears that

Pratt is reiterating advice given to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ezra Hayt, regarding an

“establishment,” possibly an Indian prisoner-of-war camp as Hayt was occupied with the White

River War in 1879. This “establishment” would resemble a penitentiary and supply manufactured goods for use by the Indian service, probably on reservations. Pratt’s statement that this “establishment should be as much within the limits of civilization as possible” mimics his ideology that American Indians should be immersed in civilization, whether in prison or at school, and thus the “prisoners” he refers to are likely Indian prisoners because American Indian prisoners of war were the only prisoners Pratt had experience with and therefore the only prisoners on which Pratt would be qualified to advise Hayt. Furthermore, Pratt implemented this

idea that Indians could manufacture goods for use by the reservations at the Carlisle School.

While the details of this letter are unknown, it clearly exhibits that Pratt continues to consider the penitentiary the place for American Indians to learn and practice industry and agriculture.

Perhaps that is also why Pratt donated $24, nearly $600 in today’s dollar, to a New York based prison reform society, the Volunteer Prison League, in 1902 (Pratt Letter to Maud Ballington

Booth).

Pratt’s letters to Townsend imply that Townsend never responded to Pratt’s pleas to relocate the southwestern prisoners of war to northeastern penitentiaries, so by March 1876 Pratt shifts his focus away from the penitentiary to industrial and agricultural schools. On March 21,

1876, Pratt again writes to Townsend proposing a number of prisoners be enrolled in “some agricultural or other labor school.” Pratt argues, “If this can be done, and after three or four years schooling they become able to make themselves useful as helpers about their agencies and are so returned to their people the best results must follow” (Battlefield 172). Pratt believed that educated tribesmen could encourage the whole tribe to become civilized, and asks Townsend “if private enterprise to this end would be sanctioned” (172). The idea that American Indians had the potential to not only transform themselves, but their whole tribes, excited Pratt so much that he proposed obtaining an education for his prisoners regardless of government involvement.

Pratt copies this letter to General William Tecumseh Sherman one month later and it appears that his plan regarding Indian education developed in this time. Pratt writes, “I can select nine or ten from the different tribes who are quite boys, and unmarried, who can be educated and then made use of about their agencies, as I have suggested, with greatest benefit. I can conceive of no better expenditure of effort for their people. The number I have suggested will take an education rapidly. About thirty of the others can be successfully taught” (Battlefield 173). As

Pratt’s experiment at Fort Marion evolves and becomes increasingly successful, his post-Fort

Marion plans for the prisoners become more specific. However, Pratt appears to be the only person interested in his early plans for Indian transformation as neither Townsend nor Sherman respond to Pratt’s requests to enroll some of the prisoners in an industrial or agricultural school.

At this time, Pratt decides to take matters into his own hands and he recreates the penitential regimes of labor and education at Fort Marion. In a letter to Sherman dated May 1,

1876, Pratt writes, “I believe I see that my application for a thorough schooling for some of the young men will not meet with favorable action, and that whatever is done in this direction, for them, must be done here.” At this point, Pratt begins to focus his correspondence on the development of his own education and labor program. For example, Pratt outlines his program at the fort in a letter to General H. J. Hunt dated May 18, 1876:

It [the school] was attended by an average of 50 and was in every way a success. Military drill is given sufficient to enable a handling in [?] and to keep them set up. After adjournment of school they were encamped two weeks at Matanzas, and since their return to the fort have been under instruction in building a log house. Your attention was invited to their general appearance, to their industry in the manufacture of canes, bows and arrows, polishing of sea beans, and drawings from all of which they realized considerable money to sales of visitors. They work at anything with much industry, the guard, the cooks, the baker, etc.

This letter reveals the beginnings of Pratt’s experiment in education and industrial training for

American Indians. Not only did he set up a school attended by the majority of the prisoners, but he did his best to simulate industrial training through the manufacture of goods and other labor.

Most prisoners worked within the fort as guards, called roll, maintained the structure, or baked bread. They also earned money selling their ledger art and hand-crafted bows, arrows and canes to tourists. Early in their imprisonment, a local curio hired the prisoners to polish “sea beans,” a hard shell that could be polished, made into jewelry and sold to tourists. In just a few months, the prisoners earned $1,600, which Pratt let them keep, no doubt as a lesson in capitalism and

finance (Pratt Battlefield 119). The following summer, Pratt and the prisoners camped on

Anastasia Island, where they found their own sea beans. This discovery led them to collect, polish, and sell the shells directly to the Fort Marion tourists to earn a higher dollar margin (125).

In addition to polishing and selling sea beans, Pratt hired the prisoners out for multiple tasks around the St. Augustine area. They helped clear an orange grove, carried baggage for the railroad, staked lumber for a sawmill, dug wells, moved a Sunday school building, and even excavated Indian burial grounds for the Smithsonian! (129-30).

In 1876, Pratt wrote to General Sheridan that the prisoners had already earned three to four thousand dollars selling their art and craft to visitors (Letter to Sheridan). In fact, in a letter to General John Eaton, Pratt brags that the men were such successful salesmen that “a very considerable number of the laboring class and others of the community ask[ed] that I be stopped in the putting of the Indians out to labor in competition with other classes as I was taking bread from the mouths of those who were dependent upon such labor for their living.” In other words, the prisoners were so successful at selling their wares that the local vendors petitioned Pratt to limit their business activities to the fort. Seemingly, Pratt successfully recreated the regimes of education and labor exemplified by the second prison reformatory movement despite the limits of the prison camp.

Regardless of the prisoners’ monetary success, Pratt continued to feel frustrated by the lack of opportunity for industrial and agricultural training in St. Augustine and petitioned various military officials to allow the prisoners to seek opportunity elsewhere. In an April 8, 1877 letter to Colonel James W. Forsyth, Pratt writes:

Mrs. H. B. Stowe, recently here, was so much interested in the advancement the younger men have made, and in their disposition to learn, that she is making an effort towards giving some of them privileges of education at Amherst Agricultural School, with Govt. aid, if that can be obtained, and if not, there by private means if

the Govt. will allow it. To satisfy her inquiries I submitted the question and found that twenty three, of the most promising, would elect to remain east for education, rather than go home, if such an alternative was offered.

Pratt also suggests enlisting prisoners as military scouts. A fair wage as a scout would allow them to build a house and have a small farm where they could learn agriculture. While it appears that Pratt may have preferred the prisoners enter an agricultural or industrial school upon release, and that the prisoners also wanted to attend such a school, Pratt’s primary focus fell on sustainable labor that would keep the men in a civilized environment.

While Pratt prioritized labor, he also subscribed to nineteenth-century ideology (and policy) that the English language would aid in the civilization efforts of American Indian peoples. Around the time that the army appointed Pratt jailor at Fort Marion, the United States was actively implementing policies regarding on-reservation Indian education. The United States

Government, under President Grant’s Peace Policy, believed that teaching Native children

English would solve the Indian Problem by easing communication between American Indians and Euro-Americans, teaching Euro-American values, and classifying Natives as a homogenous group rather than individual tribes. For these reasons, the federal government mandated English education for all Native children (Spack 17) which they enforced through various treaties, most notably the treaties at Medicine Lodge Creek and Fort Laramie. Commissioner of Indian Affairs,

Nathaniel Taylor, presented the Treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek to members of the Kiowa,

Comanche, Plains Apache, Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes on October 21, 1867. Six months later, on April 29, 1868, General Sherman presented the Treaty of Fort Laramie to a group of Sioux chiefs and headsmen. These treaties, which shared much of the same language, promised peace between the tribes and the United States Government, formed reservation boundaries, and established agencies that would provide an agent, workshops and schools. The

United States believed that setting boundaries and encouraging farming and education would

lead these “hostile” tribes to civilization. In fact, the Treaty of Fort Laramie even promised Sioux individuals full citizenship if they “receiv[e] a patent for [unsettled] land” outside of reservation boundaries on the condition that they homestead on and improve the land over a set period of time (Article VI).

While the United States believed that land boundaries and agriculture were necessary for peace and civilization, government officials thought that Natives could only attain civilization through education. Article VII of both the Treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek and of Fort Laramie outline the specifications for on-reservation education:

In order to insure the civilization of the tribes, entering into this treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially by such of them as are or may be settled on said agricultural reservations: and they therefore pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school; and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with; and the United States agrees that for every thirty children between said ages, who can be induced or compelled to attend school, a house shall be provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education, shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher. The provisions of this article to continue for not less than twenty years.

These treaties marked a turning point in the ways the United States Government dealt with the

‘Indian Problem.’ Rather than continuing to acquire power and land through military force, the

Peace Policy, enforced through these treaties, sought to “kill the Indian” though assimilation/civilization and saw education as the ultimate way to “insure the civilization of the tribes.” As Jacqueline Fear-Segal argues, these treaties exemplify how “education had been made an integral part of an aggressive policy of pacification” (White Man’s Club 5). Pacification through education, if successful, could benefit the United States in several ways: the United

States could expend its military resources elsewhere, it could gradually eliminate the reservation system and acquire Indian land, and it could gain a new working class. While the treaties do not

specifically mandate children to attend school, as implied by the sentence, “who can be induced or compelled,” they do assign the enforcement of education to the reservation agents.

Pratt’s ideas on Indian education were set within the historical context of the Peace

Policy and the subsequent treaties at Medicine Lodge and Fort Laramie, as he too believed education was the cornerstone of pacification through civilization. He believed that his prisoners could become civilized, and thus controlled, through education and labor. Thus, by the first winter Pratt had converted several casemates into classrooms and began offering English lessons.

Mrs. Anna Pratt and a group of five local women taught the classes, including Miss Mather and

Miss Perrit who ran a women’s boarding school in St. Augustine during the Civil War. In addition, a revolving group of women volunteered during the winter season (Pratt Battlefield

121). The women put up blackboards, decorated the casemates with the alphabet and spelling cards, and taught lessons in speaking, reading and writing the English language (Stowe Indians).

Figure 2-2 shows artist J. Wells Champney’s rendering of a classroom at Fort Marion. The students in this drawing look engaged with what the teacher writes on the chalkboard, as they not only turn their heads toward her, but some students rest their heads on their hands, implying their careful thinking. Most students sit at desks in this drawing; however, the fact that some students stand suggests that there are not enough desks for all the students that want to attend. Pratt confirms the popularity of the classes in his autobiography, and explains that the women taught up to six classes simultaneously at the program’s height. On some Sundays a Christian minister would provide religious instruction to the prisoners. Bishop Henry Whipple writes to the editor of the New York Daily Tribune of how he “preach[ed] to them every Sunday, and upon weekdays

I told them stories from the Bible” (Pratt Battlefield 163). As previously discussed, education at the fort also consisted of industrial labor whenever Pratt found an opportunity. For example,

Pratt hired a local baker to teach a Cheyenne prisoner how to bake bread for meals. Likewise,

Pratt bought the equipment to build log houses so he could teach the prisoners how to make their own European-style homes (Pratt letter to Philip Sheridan).13

Figure 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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe owned a vacation home on St. John’s River and visited Fort

Marion with her good friend, Miss Mather. Stowe wrote a number of editorials regarding Pratt’s project at the fort. These editorials highlight the prisoners’ transformations from savage to civilized and credit Pratt’s unorthodox prisoner-of-war camp in this transformation. In an article published in The Christian Union in 1877 and republished in Battlefield and Classroom, Stowe

13 This drawing is housed in Box 26, Folder 799 Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT.

uses Fort Marion as an example of how education can solve the Indian Problem. Stowe illustrates the prisoners’ dramatic transformation from the savages she saw travelling to Fort Marion on the

St. John’s River in 1875, to the civilized men she now visited in St. Augustine. She argues that the young prisoners ask for an industrial or agricultural education because they want to be

“useful” to America and their own people. Stowe asks, “Is here not an opening for Christian enterprise? We have tried fighting and killing the Indians, and gained little by it. We have tried feeding them as paupers in their savage state, and the result has been dishonest contractors, and invitation and provocation to war. Suppose we try education?” Stowe calls for a re-appropriation of government funds for Indian education and concludes her letter by asking: “Might not the money now constantly spent on armies, forts and frontiers be better invested in educating young men who shall return and teach their people to live like civilized beings?” (Indians). Stowe hoped that her readers’ only answer could be yes.14

Pratt’s Rescripting and Reinforcing of the Prison in Battlefield and Classroom

Unfortunately, Battlefield and Classroom continues to be an under examined text and scholars have largely ignored this memoir except to cite it as a historical source or mention it briefly in conversation with literature written by boarding school students. Whereas the previous section illustrates tangible moments when Pratt invoked and drew from the American penitentiaries as models for his future American Indian program, this section analyzes the Fort

Marion chapters of Battlefield and Classroom to highlight how Pratt used the autobiography to simultaneously rescript and reinforce the prison experience at Fort Marion. Three chapters are of

14 Pratt republishes this article in Battlefield and Classroom along with an article written by Bishop Henry Whipple that shares similar sentiments. Whipple links the Christianization mission to the civilization mission and argues that Christian education is a long-lasting solution to the Indian problem.

particular interest here: chapter eleven titled “Prison Life at Fort Marion,” chapter thirteen titled

“Anthropological Interest in the Prisoners,” and chapter fourteen, “The Kiowa Escape Plot.” One might assume “Prison Life” to be about the harsh everyday experiences of living in Fort Marion; however, Pratt uses this chapter to write about the leisure activities he organized for the prisoners. By minimizing the carceral aspects of prison life by telling endearing stories, Pratt controls his readers’ perception of the prisoners and conjures support for his civilizing programs.

Furthermore, in “Anthropological Interest” and “The Kiowa Escape Plot,” Pratt uses the stereotype of the naïve Indian to assert and reinforce his control over the prisoners’ bodies and to assure his readers of this control.

Prison life at St. Augustine was not all attending school and polishing sea beans. Pratt arranged a number of activities for the prisoners outside of the fort to keep the prisoners healthy, to break the monotony, and possibly to train them for military scouting (Lookingbill 74-5). In the heat of the summer, Pratt often took prisoners to camp on nearby Anastasia Island. The prisoners challenged each other to foot races and in “Prison Life,” Pratt tells of when two of the long distance runners raced the length of the island and back, 30 total miles. During the summer, while they camped on Anastasia Island, boating parties would stop to visit. One day, the youngest Cheyenne joined a party of young St. Augustinians on a boat ride without receiving permission. He was punished upon his return and sentenced to carry a “light stick of wood…on his shoulder in front of the guard tent until midnight.” However, when Pratt awoke he found the young man still carrying the stick because he felt the initial punishment too light. Pratt includes these stories of self-discipline to show that his prisoners were not only docile, but trustworthy.

Rescripting the prison experience as more summer camp than prison camp allows Pratt to rhetorically transform the prisoners from savages to tamed men deserving of employment and

education. For example, Pratt re-characterizes once fearsome Indian warriors as harmless children in his retelling of the oyster story. Pratt writes of when he and the interpreter, Mr. Fox, took Manimic (Cheyenne chief) and Lone Wolf (Kiowa chief) for an oyster dinner at a new restaurant in St. Augustine. Pratt writes, “Lone Wolf immediately took up an oyster and ate it.

Manimic watched us carefully and finally, smiling, took an oyster on his fork, put it in his mouth, and immediately jumped up and ran out of the door. He soon came back laughing but would eat no more oysters, notwithstanding our urgencies and the satisfaction we had”

(Battlefield 125). This story is not only intended to entertain readers, but also to endear readers to

Manimic, who was previously described as one of the most dangerous Cheyenne “ringleaders.”

His reaction to the oysters is childlike and innocent. The story continues as Pratt tells of how the prisoners found an oyster mound while camping and “one day we found Manimic in a boat all alone, opening and eating oysters with apparent relish” (126). Creating an image of Manimic secretly “relishing” oysters after the scene he made in the restaurant allows Pratt to re- characterize Manimic as likable and harmless.

Pratt concludes this chapter by developing the characters of the whole party, not just

Manimic. He writes of a shark fishing expedition:

Sometimes the shark was the stronger in the tug of war and would successfully pull against the Indians until all the line was paid out and only the fastening at the shore line stopped him. It was great sport for the twenty or more Indians who whooped and tugged and pulled until the shark surrendered. Sometimes when they were pulling their hardest the shark would turn suddenly and dash toward the shore and the crowd all fall down, and before they could get up the shark was going the other way. (Battlefield 127)

Once again, Pratt tells a story that characterizes the prisoners as funny and likable. In this story, they are not hardened warriors and hunters, but men out of their elements and the elements win.

The physical comedy of the story, coupled with Pratt’s conversational tone, allow the nineteenth- century Euro-American reader to laugh along with Pratt and the prisoners. Pratt’s repetition of

“whooped and tugged and pulled” adds excitement to the story as readers see and hear the

Indians fighting against the shark. While the humor is in their failure, Pratt also carefully notes the overall success of the fishing trip, as they caught 1,200 pounds of fish that day! So, while contemporary white readers can laugh with them, readers also know that they work hard through adversity and succeed in what they do. Pratt’s rescripting of the prison camp into a summer camp encourages his readers to accept his developing American Indian education program, as characterizing the prisoners as harmless, amusing and hard-working only legitimizes his civilizing project.

Pratt continues to ignore or lighten the harsh realities of the prison experience through the following two chapters. While he mentions the hard work the prisoners perform, he does not detail the difficulties of that work. For example, the chapter titled “Prison Industries” ends with the story of how the prisoners saved the town from a fire by running buckets of water from the ocean to the town. Pratt writes this story not to highlight the labor performed, but to emphasize the Indians’ trustworthiness, loyalty, and value as members of a community. He offers his stories as evidence that even the most dangerous “savages” can transform into civilized men, and in doing so Pratt attempts to persuade his readers to accept and advocate for a change in Indian policy—a policy that would support and legitimize his career as the founder and superintendent of the first off-reservation Indian industrial school.

In case the stories of racing and fishing made the reader forget that the American Indian men are prisoners, Pratt takes us back inside the fort to narratively create a closed environment where he can reinforce control over the prisoners’ bodies. Pratt first displays control over the prisoners indirectly at the end of “Anthropological Interest,” then forcefully in “The Kiowa

Escape Plot.” In “Anthropological Interest,” the Smithsonian commissions sculptor Clark Mills

to make plaster casts of the prisoners’ heads. During this procedure, Pratt notices a visitor wearing a wig and invites him to have a cast made. While putting the skull cap on the visitor’s head, Pratt “accidently” pulls off the visitor’s wig and notes, “The astonishment of the Indians was most interesting. Several of them ran outside the room and turned and looked back, while the gentleman himself, his friend, Mr. Mills, and I greatly enjoyed the situation” (Battlefield

145). Pratt follows this story with a story about his friend’s visit to the fort. Pratt’s friend,

Captain Williams, lost a leg in battle with the Cheyenne in New Mexico several years prior and walked with a prosthetic leg. Pratt writes of how he and Captain Williams began play fighting with their canes and Pratt knocked off his friend’s leg. Pratt writes, “I then took hold of his leg and called the Indians to come and see what it was made of, which they did and were greatly interested that such a remarkable repair to the body could be made” (145). In the final story of the chapter, Pratt notices a visitor with a glass eye. He removes the eye in front of the prisoners to which Pratt exclaims, “they became further impressed with the white man’s wonderful accomplishments” (146). Furthermore, in chapter fifteen, “Prison Educational Programs,” Pratt writes of the prisoners’ fear when Miss Mather removes her false teeth in front of the classroom.

Pratt uses the stereotype of the naïve Indian to create stories that read like entertaining practical jokes; however, the prisoners’ reactions, particularly in the wig and teeth stories, reveal that Pratt was not just teaching the prisoners lessons in the white man’s ability to modify and/or repair the body, but was exemplifying the white man’s control of the body. This control of the human body may have acted as a reminder to the Natives of their imprisoned state and the white man’s control over the prisoners’ bodies. After all, if the white man can remove his own hair, legs, eyes and teeth, what might he do to them?

Pratt answers the prisoners’ fears by fully asserting his power over their bodies in “The

Kiowa Escape Plot.” “The Kiowa Escape Plot” outlines Pratt’s master plan to thwart the Kiowa’s plan to escape the fort, and reminds the reader of his control despite the prisoners’ semblance of freedom. To assert his power over the Kiowa, Pratt reinstated the military guard, secured the loyalty of the other tribes, and locked the fort. He locked the prisoners and staff in the dining casemate and ordered the soldiers to search the casemates and the prisoners’ bodies. When

Wyako (Comanche) made a threatening comment upon his inspection, he was bolted into a casemate by himself. The two Kiowa leaders were also imprisoned in a casemate together, and

Lone Wolf and White Horse (the alleged leaders of the escape plot) were placed into individual cells. Pratt called the blacksmith to replace the shackles on Wyako and the ringleaders in front of the other prisoners. That night, the three were blindfolded and individually marched around the courtyard until they could no longer walk. As if asserting control of the prisoners’ bodies through search, containment and humiliation were not enough, Pratt performed the ultimate display of power when he ordered a doctor to inject the leaders with “some preparation to render them unconscious,” carried them out of the fort on stretchers in front of the other prisoners and imprisoned them in St. Francis Barracks. Undoubtedly, Wyako, Lone Wolf and White Horse thought they were being executed and the other prisoners believed them to be dead. In fact, when

White Horse asks Pratt, through Mr. Fox, about the injection, Pratt responds, “Tell him that I know the Indians have strong medicine and can do some wonderful things, but the white man has stronger medicine and can do more wonderful things” (Battlefield 151). This threat parallels the more light-hearted stories of body modification in the previous chapter and supports my claim that Pratt meant those stories as more than just practical jokes. Pratt’s ominous and threatening

tone, mock execution, and control over the prisoners’ bodies reinforces Pratt’s power as jailor and reminds the prisoners, and the readers, of the Natives’ captivity.

As Pratt’s story of the Kiowa escape plot resumes, he continues to assert control over his prisoners as he speaks to the remaining Kiowa. He reminds them:

If they had succeeded in getting away from their prison life in the old fort they could not have possibly gone far without soldiers and citizens with guns being after them from all sides and that they would soon have been recaptured or killed, that if they had only continued their good behavior sooner or later the government would have concluded they had punishment enough and might have released and restored them to their people or permitted them to have their women and children and live someplace away from their tribe. Also, that many of our people did not agree with my methods of kindly treatment and that my career as an army officer would probably have ended; that notwithstanding all this I would overlook their conduct and put them back into the same freedom and responsibility they had before; that I still had faith in them. (Battlefield 151)

This sentiment is repeated to White Horse after the three men return from the barracks after six weeks: “Every attempt you make to end it your way will react upon you” (152). Pratt frames his punishment of the Kiowa in paternalistic terms. Despite the outrageous scheme of publically

“executing” the three Kiowa, Pratt still characterizes himself as their protector. Hordes of men wait outside the fort’s walls with guns ready should the prisoners escape.15 By asserting that these men are “on all sides,” Pratt threatens the prisoners with the knowledge that there is nowhere to escape to and that escape is futile. The only way out of imprisonment is to serve their sentence patiently, but even then, they will never be allowed to return to their tribes.16 And, despite these ready militias, suspicious Americans, and the risk of Pratt losing his job, he

“decides” to continue to “have faith” and trust the Kiowa. Pratt portrays himself as the tough love father, risking his career to protect the prisoners from the “soldiers and citizens with guns,”

15 Which, according to Lookingbill’s War Dance at Fort Marion, was true. 16 The older men did return to their tribes upon release.

punishing them because he has to, and making the choice to trust them regardless. By characterizing himself in this way, Pratt uses his relationship with the prisoners to gain control over them because they must trust and rely on him, and the safety of Fort Marion, for their own survival. Furthermore, this tough-but-fair characterization makes Pratt likable to his readers, as it shows him as someone who respects his wards as humans but also someone who maintains discipline.

In “The Kiowa Escape Plot,” Pratt shows the reader the prison at work. The intrusive inspections of the body and space, the medical control over the body, assertions of power, solitary confinement and bondage demonstrate the punishments of a carceral space. By using one chapter to reveal the carceral nature of the prison camp, Pratt validates his position as the man suited to transform savage Indians into civilized men. While “Prison Life” highlights the transformability of the prisoners and rhetorically converts them from dangerous savages to tamed men, “The Kiowa Escape Plot” demonstrates Pratt’s control of this transformation. Fort Marion thus occupies a pivotal space, both in history and in Pratt’s retelling, as he figures the prison as the launching place for what will become the off-reservation Indian boarding school.

Coda: The North Star

While Pratt presented an image of the savage Indian transformed into a civilized man to his visitors and to his readers, Brad Lookingbill argues that the prisoners used their role as spectacle to “reenact the vibrant culture of the Great Plains” (92). The prisoners not only sold their ledger art and sea beans to tourists, but staged exhibitions twice weekly where they performed pow-wows, war dances, traditional songs, and even a mock buffalo chase for visitors who were willing to pay a $2 admission for such a show (approximately $45 in today’s dollar)

(Lookingbill 88). Pratt felt conflicted about allowing the prisoners to revert to their old ways of dress and tradition, and even ignores these exhibitions all-together in his writing. However, Pratt

seemingly allowed the exhibitions because the prisoners earned a lot of money from admission and peddling their goods, thus providing them with another opportunity to participate in

American capitalism.

These performances eventually benefitted Pratt as several of St. Augustine’s seasonal residents later sponsored some of the prisoners’ employment and education, and eventually became benefactors of Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Under the Diocese of Central

New York, Mrs. Burnham took four prisoners to Paris Hill in Utica to live “under the care of

Reverend J. B. Wicks, an Episcopal clergyman, who took them in as members of his family”

(Battlefield 190). Bishop Whipple took four to Minnesota, Mrs. Larocque, the wife of a prominent New York lawyer, took two to New York, and Dr. Curuthers took Tsait-Kope-Ta

(Kiowa) to live with his family in Tarrytown and help him with his practice. Miss Mather, besides being good friends with Harriet Beecher Stowe, was also friends with General Samuel

Armstrong and appealed to him to enroll several students at his Hampton Normal and

Agricultural Institute, a boarding school for ex-slaves. While Armstrong felt hesitant at first,

Pratt’s success at Fort Marion eventually convinced him to take seventeen prisoners as students.

During the first year, Pratt travelled to the Great Sioux Reservation and recruited ninety-eight additional students for the program. Hampton Institute continued its Indian program until 1923.

Therefore, the prison camp at Fort Marion was integral to the Indian education movement that characterized the last quarter of the nineteenth century, beginning with Hampton and the Carlisle

School.

In a final campaign to raise funds for these men’s expenses and tuition, the ladies of St.

Augustine mimicked the exhibitions already organized by the prisoners and prepared a “Mother

Goose” program using their children and Pratt’s children. Included in this program were seven of

the prisoners, each providing a “traditional” performance: “an Indian dance,” “an Indian war whoop” performed by White Horse (Kiowa), “an Indian love song” performed by Etahdleuh

(Kiowa), and “a demonstration of the sign language” given by Tsait-Kope-Ta (Battlefield 188).

The ladies asked the men to dress in “the old way” and Etahdleuh even reattached his severed braids. Having these men perform aspects of their tribal traditions out of context and alongside the children’s performance of Mother Goose infantilizes the prisoners, as the ladies symbolically become the Mother Geese preparing to send their children off to school and into the world. Pratt, then, continues to act as the paternal figure, who through influence and discipline transforms notorious warriors into non-threatening subjects. The ladies sold over 700 tickets to their program at $1 per ticket. While the Mother Goose program once again made the prisoners spectacles for a white gaze, the men used white curiosity to their advantage by earning themselves opportunities outside of the prison walls.

Pratt concludes the Fort Marion chapters by reflecting on the influence of the Mother

Goose program: “Behind the curtains was the most interesting picture of the occasion: the mother trainers, their costumed Mother Goose children, and the Indians decorated for their parts, all on fraternal relations, eager to begin a small effort to lift Indians into their rightful place as real potential Americans….that night was lit an illuminating north star that has been a guide to the way for all the forty-five years since” (Battlefield 189-90). Here, the “north star,” the quintessential marker of freedom for African American slaves, gets reinscribed as Pratt’s hope of freedom through the “fraternal relations” between the St. Augustinians and the American

Indians. In this moment Pratt sees his dream fulfilled and recognizes the magnitude of his success. The Mother Goose program and St. Augustine’s financial and educational support of the

American Indian prisoners epitomizes Pratt’s vision of integration and mutual acceptance that

was just an idea only three years before. The fact that the Indian prisoners and white St.

Augustinians could finally join together within the space of Fort Marion and St. Augustine to

“begin a small effort to lift Indians into their rightful place as real potential Americans” proved to Pratt that his experiment was a success.

CHAPTER 3 MORAL ARCHITECTURE: THE CARCERAL SPACE OF THE CARLISLE INDIAN INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL

The skyline of the Carlisle Army Barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania has transformed steadily since the Revolutionary War, yet the story of this place has remained remarkably constant as one of imprisonment of and violence against American Indians. Between 1879 and

1918, the barracks housed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The original Carlisle Barracks were constructed during the Revolutionary War by Hessian prisoners of war captured by General

Washington’s troops at the Battle of Trenton (Civic Club). The strategic location of the barracks, approximately 125 miles west of Philadelphia, allowed the Americans to fight Indians near the growing populace and to train soldiers as they travelled further west. The buildings erected by the Hessians aged and were rebuilt in 1836; however, General Fitzhugh Lee’s troops burnt the barracks down in 1863 during the Civil War Battle of Carlisle. Only the original guardhouse was left standing and still stands today.

The barracks were rebuilt once again in 1865-1866, but abandoned in 1872 when the

Army school moved further west to St. Louis, a location even more convenient for monitoring and policing Native peoples. Although the barracks had been abandoned for seven years, Colonel

Richard Henry Pratt saw the benefits of its rural location and could envision the barracks as the home of the first off-reservation American Indian boarding school. The barracks already provided housing and a mess hall as well as land to teach agriculture and other trades.

Furthermore, as Pratt notes, Carlisle’s “inhabitants [were] kindly disposed and long free from the universal boarder [sic] prejudice against the Indians” (Pratt Battlefield 216). Pratt petitioned the federal government for the use of the space, and in the winter of 1879 Congress passed H.R.

1935 titled, “A Bill to Increase Educational Privileges and Establish Additional Industrial

Training Schools for the Benefit of Youth Belonging to such Nomadic Indian Tribes as Have

Educational Treaty Claims Upon the United States” (Ludlow 669-70). This bill allowed for the

“utilization, for such school purposes, of vacant military posts and barracks, ‘so long as the same may not be required for military occupation,’ and the employment of officers of the Army, either from the active or retired list, as teachers or otherwise” (Aarons). This bill, written specifically for Pratt’s purposes, allowed him to use the abandoned Carlisle Army Barracks to establish the first off-reservation Indian industrial school.

While Pratt wanted to recruit students from the tribes he was most familiar with—Kiowa,

Cheyenne, Comanche and Arapahoe—the United States Government had another idea: recruit students from the “hostile” northwestern plains tribes, particularly the Sioux, and use the children as “hostages for the good behavior of their people” (Pratt Battlefield 220). He employed the help of Sarah Mather, the woman who ran the educational program at Fort Marion, and set out for Dakota Territory (220). Pratt also enlisted the help of former Fort Marion prisoners

Etahdeleuh (Kiowa) and Making Medicine (Cheyenne) and sent them after pupils from their tribes.1 Carlisle’s first class was comprised of 158 students from twelve different tribes

(Lookingbill 171).

Considering that the barracks were originally built (and rebuilt) for the purposes of solving the Indian Problem through war, it is notable that the new purpose of the space was to solve the Indian Problem through education. Just as important, the Carlisle Army Barracks were originally built by prisoners of war, and it was as jailor to the prisoners of war at Fort Marion that Pratt began to experiment with Indian education, an experiment that came to fruition at

1 Etahdeleuh travelled to the Kiowa and Comanche, Making Medicine to the Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Carlisle. The Carlisle Barracks began as a space built by prisoners to fight Indians and continued as a space to imprison Indian children to fight Indian-ness.

As the previous chapter argued, Pratt’s experience as the jailor to the southwestern prisoners of war was no doubt useful as he began creating and constructing his school. His time at Fort Marion not only allowed Pratt to experiment with his ideas on Indian education, but also his ideas on imprisonment. The makeshift structure of Fort Marion allowed Pratt to transform the prison camp into a regimented carceral space where he could experiment with the regimes of the penitentiary—specifically labor, agriculture, and military drills popularized at penitentiaries like

Elmira. This spatial and regimental shift made him hopeful that the right structure and regimes could transform an entire generation of savages into civilized young Americans.

This chapter argues that Pratt not only took his theories regarding Indian education with him to Carlisle, but also his ideas on imprisonment. It illuminates the intersection between the

Carlisle School and the prison and asserts that Pratt constructed a carceral space when renovating the Carlisle Army Barracks into the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. By analyzing Carlisle’s architecture and construction, I demonstrate how the moral and disciplinary architecture that were central to the prison subsequently impacted the American Indian boarding school. This chapter draws from the emerging field of carceral studies and uses David Rothman’s term “moral architecture” alongside spatial theory and human geography to create a framework for illustrating how Pratt remodeled and reconfigured the Carlisle Barracks to act as a carceral space that reinforced power relations and influenced what students learned about their envisioned place in American society and the intended future for their people. Part of this chapter also explores how Pratt’s success at recreating carceral regimes at Carlisle earned him a job offer at a juvenile detention facility. Furthermore, while the previous chapter analyzed the Fort Marion chapters of

Pratt’s autobiography, Battlefield and Classroom, this chapter analyzes the Carlisle chapters alongside Pratt’s speeches to show how he used his writing to deflect the public’s attention away from the “real prison” of Carlisle by rhetorically rendering the reservation a prison. By shifting the reader’s focus away from the school and onto the reservation, Pratt erased Carlisle from his speeches and autobiography. Through Carlisle, Pratt created a space influenced by the nineteenth-century prison that sought to remove the corrupting influence of savagery and promote American citizenship and civilization.

The Division of Time and Space: Carlisle’s Moral Architecture

While the institution of the federally funded off-reservation boarding school was new, the theory that the removal and institutionalization of social others for the purpose of transforming them into proper citizens was not Pratt’s alone, but an ideal embedded in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century reform movements. Institutions meant to contain and transform juvenile offenders, prostitutes, and vagrants opened throughout the United States and abroad. In addition, cities created systems of free public education to teach children the tools necessary to proper citizenship with the hopes of preventing criminality, prostitution and vagrancy. Prison historian

Michael Meranze calls these institutions “laboratories of virtue,” and argues that:

Whether the target was poverty, criminality, delinquency, prostitution, or idleness, reformers and officials believed that social problems could best be contained through the transformation of individual character, that individual character could best be transformed through the careful supervision of individual regimen, and that the supervision of individual regimen could best take place within an environment where time and space were carefully regulated. These laboratories of virtue assembled spaces separate from daily life, arranged according to carefully specified rules and overseen by hierarchical organizations. They sought to inculcate the habits of labor, personal restraint, and submission to the law. (4)

Out of this period came the birth of the institution for the purposes of containing and transforming those who did not fit into the republican mold. The institution afforded a space separate from the spaces of daily life and provided particular regimes of power necessary to

rescript and rewrite bodies. While several “laboratories of virtue” operated throughout the nineteenth century, the penitentiary was the one institution that best embodied the theory that a person could be reformed through a specific environment that regulated the division of time and space. As discussed in the introduction to this dissertation, penitentiaries were built from the ground up to implement the particular architecture needed to regulate the regimes of surveillance, solitude, and labor. However, once in operation these ideas of prison reform proved too optimistic as the realities of overcrowding undermined the principle regime of solitude. Yet, as I discuss in the previous chapter, a new wave of optimism regarding prison reform, as best exemplified by the opening of Elmira Reformatory in New York in 1876, revived the idea that the institution could transform a social deviant into a proper citizen. It was also at this time that

Pratt began conceptualizing what became the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Prison reformers believed that the architecture of the prison was necessary to the transformation of the self, as it created the structure needed to properly divide a prisoner’s space and time. David Rothman’s term “moral architecture” is especially useful to understanding the importance of architecture to a transformative institution. Moral architecture, defined by

Rothman, is the “divisions of time and space within the institution. The layout of cells, the methods of labor, and the manner of eating and sleeping” (Discovery 83). While Rothman applies moral architecture specifically to the penitentiary, I argue that this term also applies to the Carlisle School. 2 The Carlisle School carefully divided students’ time and labor through the sounds of a bell, and the ways that Pratt reordered and reconstructed the space of the campus reflected a particular disciplinary structure as well as his vision for his students’ future. This

2 The architecture of the Carlisle School is largely under-examined by scholars. Jacqueline Fear- Segal is currently the only scholar to analyze the architecture of the school and comes closest to my argument that the architecture of the school was inseparable from its assimilating goals.

section will examine the moral architecture of Carlisle and how Pratt divided “time and space within the institution” in order to create the environment thought necessary for molding Native children into a new citizen class.

The daily regime of Carlisle was closely controlled by the sounds of the school bell.

Students woke, ate, used the bathroom, worked and slept to the ringing of the bell. They marched between their various classrooms, cafeteria and dormitory (Trafzer 19). The bell also split students’ days between academic and industrial learning. Carlisle’s first priority was that students learn to speak, read and write in English, and second that they learn enough arithmetic to buy and sell goods. Other academic subjects, such as geography, history and the arts were only important in that they gave students a glimpse into civilization. The other half of a student’s day was spent learning a trade, which was divided along gender lines. Boys learned trades such as blacksmithing, agriculture and husbandry, carpentry, and wagon making while girls learned domestic tasks such as cooking, serving, sewing, laundry and cleaning (Adams 150). The blacksmith shop and the laundry are pictured below in figures 3-1 and 3-2. Of course the use of a bell to signify the division of time and labor was not unique to the Carlisle School, as it was also a fixture of elementary schools, the military and the prison. However, as Foucault points out, the bell (or other signal) is necessary to the creation of docile bodies as it trains children (or soldiers, or prisoners) to react a in a predetermined way to a mere signal (166-7). This type of control, as

Foucault argues, is essential to achieving “an efficient machine” (164). Through a careful division of time and labor, Pratt created a disciplinary regime that introduced students to

capitalism by teaching them their value as second-class citizens to a regimented American system of wage labor and servitude.3

Figure 3-1. Interior of Blacksmith Shop

Figure 3-2. Laundry Interior

As he remodeled the campus, Pratt architecturally rooted the school in its history of colonialism by mimicking the colonial revival design of Carlisle’s existing buildings. Colonial

3 All photographs in this chapter (except the bandstand photograph) are cited as: Box 25 Folder 774 Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. 30 June 2014.

revival architecture, first popularized after the Revolutionary War, was thought of as distinctly

American because it replicated America’s original colonial architecture. This architectural style became popular again after the Civil War as America worked to define itself as a united nation.

While England’s Georgian style originally inspired this architecture in the colonies, colonial revivalist architecture makes itself unique in its larger size and exaggerated detail. These buildings are characterized by elaborate front doors, commonly with a gable and columns, symmetric windows, usually three on each side, and a height of two or three stories (Harris 68-

9). As shown in figure 3-3, the exterior of Carlisle’s campus exhibited these features. By surrounding American Indian children with elaborate, whitewashed, imposing buildings, Carlisle codified itself as an authoritative institution. These buildings signified the very opposite of the tee-pee or wigwam as they were static, intimidating and engrained in a history of colonialism. In fact, the very name colonial revival means a revival of the colonies and looks back to a time of white colonization of Native peoples.

Figure 3-3. School and Campus Looking North from the School Building

Pratt carefully enclosed the campus in order to keep students in, on-lookers out, and to create a central entrance point. One of Pratt’s first orders of business upon arriving at Carlisle was to construct a seven-foot picket fence around the twenty-seven acre school (Pratt Battlefield

234). To construct the fence and make minor repairs to the existing buildings, Pratt enlisted the help of eleven of his former Fort Marion prisoners, a number of students and a carpenter

(Lookingbill 171).4 While a fence may not seem like an urgent addition, Pratt wrote that it was necessary “in order to keep the Indians in and the whites out” (Battlefield 234). He argued that while he needed to contain students to the limits of the campus, he also needed to regulate the number of Carlisle’s residents who came to gawk at the young Indians in this strange new school.

The campus was further enclosed with the addition of a new dining hall, which blocked off an otherwise open view on the west side of the courtyard. Highlighting the dining hall as a strategy of confinement, Jacqueline Fear-Segal asserts, “The dining hall both physically and visually served Pratt’s double agenda. It completed the enclosure of the campus, thus intensifying … the confinement of students and the possibility for surveillance” (White Man’s

Club 201). Enclosing the campus with a fence and the addition of the dining hall essentially incarcerated the students as it limited their movement to the confines of the school, created a controlled environment in which staff could easily monitor students, and ensured against escape.

Enclosing the campus not only confined students and prevented outsiders from seeing in, but it also reinforced the entrance as a surveillance point by forcing all entrants through the

4 These prisoners were attending Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Once released from Fort Marion in 1878, seventeen prisoners were enrolled at Hampton. This began Hampton’s small Indian program that continued until 1923. Pratt opened the Carlisle School one year after the Indian program at Hampton began, citing a need for an exclusively American Indian school.

gateway at the guardhouse. Anyone entering or exiting the school had to pass by the guardhouse, pictured in figure 3-4, and therefore all were monitored (Fear-Segal White Man’s Club 190-1).

Additionally, forcing all entrants to pass the guardhouse immediately indicated to entrants that they had arrived at a carceral space. The only remaining Hessian built structure on campus, the guardhouse’s three-foot thick walls housed a room for the guard and four cells first used to imprison soldiers and then students. Pratt openly used the guardhouse to discipline students, as evidenced in his letters and autobiography, and it was not uncommon for students to spend a week locked away in the 100-year-old structure. For example, Pratt wrote a letter to Howard

Rupert, a local man that employed one of Carlisle’s students during the summer months, to follow up on disciplinary measures for the student’s unsatisfactory conduct, insubordination, and

“not serv[ing] you right.” Pratt writes, “I made it a condition that he should walk back and see you and bring a letter to me from you, he refused to do it, so I have had him under punishment in the Guard House for several days.” Even Sioux Chief Spotted Tail’s children were not immune to punishment in the guardhouse, and the imprisonment of Sioux Chief Spotted Tail’s son angered Spotted Tail so much that he removed all of his children from Carlisle (Pratt Battlefield

237). Spotted Tail had many concerns about the school, but became outraged when he heard that his youngest son had been locked in the guardhouse for a week. Pratt asked Spotted Tail’s oldest son to explain how “his brother had quarreled with a schoolmate and with his jackknife stabbed his comrade in the leg. A court martial of the student officers had tried him; he himself as an officer was a member of the court, and the court’s sentence was confinement in the guardhouse for a week. The sentence was not severe under our laws” (Pratt Battlefield 237). Despite the explanation that imprisonment was an agreed upon and moderate punishment for stabbing a schoolmate, Spotted Tail angrily removed his children from the Carlisle School.

Figure 3-4. The Old Guard House Built by Hessian Prisoners Over 100 Years Ago

The guardhouse not only signaled entrance into a carceral space, but also serves as an example of how, even when a new space can be made from an existing one, the memory of the old space still remains. In his foundational book, The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues that the memory of a place is never quite removed from the place, even if one never experienced it as it previously was. He asserts: “Thus the house is not experienced from day to day only, on the thread of a narrative, or in the telling of our own story. Through dreams, the various dwelling places of our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days” (5). While Bachelard’s argument specifically relates to homes, I argue that the Carlisle Barracks also existed on “the thread of a narrative.” As I have shown, the barracks had its own long history; it told its own story. That narrative and story do not simply disappear once a place gains a new purpose. Henri

Lefebvre adds to this, emphasizing that memory still plays a role in the understanding of the

“new” space. He argues that while space is always a “present space” it leaves traces of history.

The history of a space becomes a part of the present space (Lefebvre 37). So while Carlisle’s

students knew and used the space as an industrial school (its present space), the present space is still rooted in the history of army barracks. By using the guardhouse to contain and punish his students just as the military had used it to contain and punish soldiers and prisoners-of-war 100 years before, Pratt not only took advantage of the existing structure but also used its memory to further create a disciplinary space.

Routing the entrance past the guardhouse also gave the campus a front and a back, a right side and a left side, which forced all entrants to experience the space in a particular theoretical way. Controlling the vista of the campus regulated the way that students understood their new roles as second-class Americans and pressured them to leave their old ways literally behind. In her reading of the spatial layout of the campus, Fear-Segal argues that the campus perpetuated segregation between the white teachers and the Native students as the buildings associated with the teachers were near the entrance to the school whereas the students’ buildings were in the rear.

She argues that this segregation contradicted Pratt’s goals of Native assimilation through mutual contact. However, this segregation may have represented a particular social order. In his foundational book, Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan argues, “In large and stratified societies spatial hierarchies can be vividly articulated by architectural means such as plan, design, and type of decoration” (41). Tuan argues that in space planning, important buildings for important people are usually tall and in front (38). Likewise, buildings for unimportant people are usually short or underground and placed further back in a space (40-1). He gives reasoning to these meanings, citing how humans understand direction in relation to the human body: “The front signifies dignity. The human face commands respect, even awe. Lesser beings approach great with their eyes lowered….The rear is profane. Lesser beings hover behind…their superiors” (40). In general, places that are tall and in front will command more respect than spaces that are lower

and positioned toward the rear. These meanings can change culturally; however, they are meanings deeply rooted in western consciousness. Therefore, placing the teachers’ buildings at the entrance to the school and the students’ at the rear perpetuates a social structure in which the teachers “command respect” and the students remain “lesser beings.”

The layout of the campus holds temporal significance as well as spatial, as Tuan argues that “frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past” (40). Therefore, the buildings near the entrance not only represent civilization because they are associated with the teachers, but because they represent what Carlisle saw as its students’ future. Likewise, the buildings near the rear that housed the students represent the past, i.e. savagery. When one enters the campus past the guardhouse, one first sees several renovated buildings: the schoolhouse and chapel, the model home, the teachers’ quarters, the office and the administrative building. These buildings represent what Carlisle saw as the future for its students. The schoolhouse and chapel represent the students’ transformation from “ignorant heathens” to “learned Christians.” The model home, a newly erected cottage in which the girls practiced homemaking, represents the future for

American Indian women as members of republican womanhood. The renovated teachers’ quarters and administrative buildings create a Euro-American presence that models the future of

American Indian education. Continuing to the rear of the campus, one approaches the girls’ quarters, the small boys’ quarters and the older boys’ quarters. Tuan also argues, “In nearly all cultures for which information is available, the right side is regarded as far superior to the left”

(43). If one entered the campus at the gate on the west side, the entrance that Pratt blocked off, the same principles of superior/inferior, civilized/savage, would apply, as to our right are the teachers’ quarters, school house and chapel and to the left are the students’ dormitories.

Students still learned civilized ways in the dormitories, how to dress and wash in Euro-

American ways, and were often forced to communicate with one another in English, since students of differing tribes bunked together. As enrollment rose, extensive renovations had to be completed to the girls’ dormitory, pictured in figure 3-5, and the older boys’ dormitory was leveled and rebuilt. The renovations on the girls’ dormitory were paid for by “friends of the school” and carpenters demolished walls, added a third floor, added 60 feet to the back of the building and 5 feet to the side, and built modern bathing facilities. Of course, the boys wanted new quarters too, so Pratt struck a deal: if the boys could come up with $1,000 from their own earnings and perform the labor, Pratt would find the rest of the money. The boys quickly collected $1,800 and went to work constructing a large three story building that included separate bedrooms (Pratt Battlefield 321-2).5 New and renovated dormitories were not only necessary to students’ health and safety, but also provided a space for them to learn hygiene and afforded the boys an opportunity to practice building construction.

However, the dormitories were the students’ spaces and it was in the dormitories that students were subjected to surveillance the least. The relative privacy of the dormitories allowed students the space and time to resist the civilizing mission of the school. For example, in 1897,

Elizabeth Flanders and Fannie Eaglehorn spent two weeks plotting to set fire to the girls’ dormitory. When the dinner bell rang, the two girls ran off to the dormitory reading room and set fire to a pile of newspapers. The fire was quickly discovered and extinguished. The girls tried again when the bell rang for chapel, this time lighting a fire in a closet full of dresses. This fire was also discovered before any major damage could occur. Despite avoiding detection, the girls

5 Prior to the construction of the new dormitory, boys slept communally in one large room. The new building contained bedrooms in which boys slept three to a room.

eventually confessed (Adams 229-30). Punishment for this type of crime was beyond Pratt, who turned the girls over to local authorities. The girls were sentenced to eighteen months at Eastern

State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (Fear-Segal “The Man on the Bandstand” 115). The dorms most likely provided Flanders and Eaglehorn the space to plot arson and acted as the scene of their crime. The girls cited their motivation as homesickness; they wanted Pratt to expel them and send them home (“Indian Girls Sentenced”). Ironically, in an attempt to be expelled from the carceral space of the Carlisle School, the girls were sentenced to serve time in America’s foundational penitentiary.

Figure 3-5. West End of Girls’ Quarters and Fire Company

Of course not every form of resistance within the dormitories was as extreme as Flander’s and Eagelhorn’s. In My People, The Sioux, Luther Standing Bear tells of how the boys would play practical jokes on one another in the dormitories. One boy learned that the beds would crash down if he unscrewed the catches. Standing Bear remembers many nights when a boy would fall

to the floor after sitting on his bed or rolling over in the night. Standing Bear also writes of how the boys escaped the dormitories after receiving their nightshirts because they thought the shirts made them look like angels and they wanted to fly (156-7). Students would also use the nighttime to tell each other stories and sing songs from home (Adams 233-4). This act of cultural preservation could only occur in the spaces furthest from the strict civilizing mission of the school, where no one could hear students speaking their language or telling their stories. The removed space of the dormitories sometimes allowed for resistance and escape from the everyday civilizing regime of the school; however, the disciplinarian was always nearby, as he was housed in the same quadrant as the dormitories.6 Isolating the student dormitories to the rear of the campus, a space theoretically reserved for “lesser beings,” separated this semblance of savagery from the spaces meant to civilize.

In the center of the Carlisle campus stands a bandstand, which became a symbol of control and surveillance for those living at the school. According to Tuan, humans generally establish the center as the most significant location, as we define ourselves as central and understand and define all other directions in relation to our own bodies. Furthermore, many religions and governments view their homelands as the “’middle place,’ or the center of the world” (38). The bandstand existed prior to Pratt’s arrival, however the ways that Pratt employed the image of the bandstand in the Carlisle newsletters, Red Man and Indian Helper, gave it new meaning. These papers had a large weekly distribution inside and outside the school. Pratt sent

Carlisle’s newsletters to members of congress, Indian agencies, military posts, and other widely

6 It is notable that the trade shops were housed at the very rear of the campus. While it could be argued that the location of the trade shops, another place of civilization, negates my argument regarding the spatial layout of Carlisle, the location was not necessarily determined by Pratt but by the reuse of the old stables.

circulating newspapers. In 1893, these papers reached “nine thousand individuals or households each week” (Katanski 48).

Like most school newsletters, these papers reported on school news and activities, and broadcasted students’ successes. Red Man and Indian Helper diverted from the average newsletter in that they also reported on students’ failures, gauged how far students had advanced toward civilization, and even reprinted letters from students to their parents (Katanski 83-6).

Articles were written by teachers, by Pratt, and sometimes by students, but the most notorious writer was the Man-on-the-band-stand.7 The anonymous Man-on-the-band-stand reported on student conduct and exposed individual students he thought to be excelling or misbehaving. For example, in the November 22, 1895 issue of Indian Helper, the Man-on-the-band-stand writes,

“The Man-on-the-band-stand sometimes looks right over the dining-hall. If he should tell the girls’ names who do some very silly things back there, they might be ashamed” (qtd. in Fear-

Segal “The Man on the Bandstand” 108). From the July 17, 1891 Indian Helper: “Are you not afraid you will annoy your neighbor when you chew gum so vociferously?” The papers reported on former students as well as current students: “Levi St. Cyr, Class of ’91, is thinking of leaving his home, Winnebago, Nebraska, and going to work in the sugar beet field at Norfolk. That is right! Anything to earn an honest living” (Landis). Using the newsletters as a tool and the bandstand as a symbol, Carlisle made sure students knew that nothing was private and everything was monitored. Students knew their exploits could make the pages of the papers and

7 No one actually knows who the Man-on-the-band-stand was (most believe it was teacher Marianna Burgess as she served as editor for the papers, some speculate it was Pratt, some guess it was a combination of writers) and this anonymity is what gave the Man-on-the-band-stand power and authority on the Carlisle campus.

often monitored their own behavior accordingly. Amelia Katanski calls this phenomenon a

“rhetorical panopticon, encouraging student self-colonization through writing” (51).

However, this Panopticon was not just rhetorical. As shown in figure 3-6, the bandstand was highly visible in the center of the campus and allowed whoever stood in the bandstand to see most of the campus and view students’ daily activities. The Man-on-the-band-stand made sure the students knew this in his March 9, 1888 Indian Helper article: “The Band-stand commands the whole situation. From it he can see all the quarters, the printing office, the chapel, the grounds, everything and everybody, all the girls and the boys on the walks, at the windows, everywhere. Nothing escapes the Man-on-the-Band-stand” (qtd. in Fear-Segal “The Man on the

Bandstand” 106). This ominous message reinforced a power structure in which it did not matter if children were actually monitored or not. The threat that the anonymous Man-on-the-bandstand might see students and report on their behavior often scared them into behaving. While the

Man-on-the-band-stand remained anonymous, and was sometimes even characterized as supernatural, there was a man who did observe the students from the bandstand: Richard Henry

Pratt. Fear-Segal asserts, “Although he was not the Man on the Band Stand, his imposing six- foot-tall figure, silhouetted on the band-stand, gave a shadowy reality to this imaginary man.

And Pratt’s presence at Carlisle was essential to the Man on the Band Stand’s existence” (“The

Man on the Bandstand” 104). The menacing character of the Man-on-the-band-stand became very real when combined with the presence of the Panoptic bandstand and Pratt’s role as monitor and manager of Carlisle.8

8 This photograph is housed in Box 23 Folder 725 Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT. 17 June 2014.

Figure 3-6. The bandstand in the center of campus

The regime that Pratt created at Carlisle garnered attention both inside and outside the

Indian reformatory circle. In 1892, the Board of Management of the New York House of Refuge offered Pratt the position of superintendent. The New York House of Refuge was the first juvenile reformatory in the United States and was located in the United States Arsenal building on Randalls Island. The majority of a young inmate’s day was taken up with labor, and by 1887 the reformatory changed much of its program to resemble an industrial school, intentionally modeled after the Western House of Refuge in Rochester. At this time, boys learned printing, carpentry, horticulture and baking. Girls focused on domestic tasks, such as sewing, laundry and other domestic work. Beginning in 1890, the reformatory mandated that boys participate in military drill (New York State Archives). Pratt writes his wife, Anna Laura Pratt, about this offer:

This morning I have an offer from the Board of Management of the Superintendency of the House of Refuge on Randalls Island in East River New York opposite 116th and 125th Streets. It is a beautiful place occupying all the Island, has $500,000 worth of Bldgs 700 to 850 inmates both sexes and both black

and white. The annual appropriation by the State is about the same as we have here. It is an old establishment dating back to 1825….the Board ask me to come to New York and see them. I am greatly tempted to accept. If I were not as identified with the cause of the Indians, and had fewer years, I should not hesitate a minute. (Pratt Letter to Anna Laura Pratt)

Pratt appears excited about various aspects of this potential position: the location, the buildings, the inmates. In fact, he seems so excited that he feels “greatly tempted to accept” the offer.

Obviously, Pratt felt that he could transfer the skills he acquired from Carlisle to the House of

Refuge, but perhaps more importantly, the House of Refuge believed Pratt’s skills from Carlisle were transferable to a juvenile prison facility. The House of Refuge’s focus on industrial education as a reformatory tool closely resembled the curriculum of the Carlisle School. The reformatory’s focus on manual labor that could make a young person employable upon release and prevent recidivism, and even the reformatory’s prioritization of military drill for boys, mimic

Pratt’s prioritization of “useful” labor to prevent students from “going back to the blanket.”

Perhaps the Carlisle School also inspired the changes that the House of Refuge made to its curriculum 1887.

Pratt’s Prisons

One crucial way to understand Carlisle as a carceral space is to understand how Pratt rhetorically deflected attention from the school-prison he created by repeatedly stressing the imprisoning condition of the reservations. By referring to the reservations as prisons in his speeches, letters and autobiography, Pratt emphasized the segregating nature of the reservations that negated his, and the United States’, civilizing mission; containing American Indians would not encourage participation and inclusion in American society. Furthermore, the metaphor of reservation as prison helped Pratt promote Carlisle as it created a contrast between the confining nature of the reservation and what he saw as the liberating experience of Carlisle.

The 1851 Indian Appropriations Act established Indian reservations in the American

West. The United States agreed to protect tribes on reservations, made reservation boundaries permanent, and allocated $50,000 per year for food and supplies for a period of 15 years. In exchange, the United States requested an end to inter-tribal warfare and safe passage along the

Oregon Trail (Weeks 77-8). However, not long after a string of treaties formed these promised reservations,9 the United States became preoccupied with the Civil War and turned its attention from the Indian Problem to the war effort. This meant that tribes did not always receive the money allocated to them for food and other goods. Through the antebellum years, rations continued to be slim and inconsistent, settlers continued to encroach on Native land, treaties shrunk reservation boundaries, white hunters decimated buffalo and other game, and the government hired corrupt reservation agents. By 1889, the Great Sioux Reservation, where Pratt recruited many of his students, had been shrunk in half, beef rations were cut by one-third, other food rations were sometimes spoiled and clothing was inadequate (Richardson 108, 111-2). In addition, the drought of 1888-1889 left tribes without crops and stores in which to subsist (114).

This lack of food left many vulnerable to illness in the cold South Dakota winter. At Pine Ridge

Reservation, 45 people died in one month out of a total population of 5,550 (116).

The dire situation on the plains reservations culminated in a number of conflicts between tribes, settlers and the United States military (Weeks 104-24).10 Because of these conflicts, the

United States declared that any American Indian that left reservation land was considered

“hostile” and not subject to protection, which often translated to violence (Weeks 155). In fact,

9 Such as the first Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851 10 Such as the Dakota War, the Colorado War, the Sand Creek Massacre and the Battle at Little Big Horn

General Sherman, in a letter to his brother dated September 23, 1868, wrote, “We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great roads. All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off” (Thorndike 321). The United States forced tribes onto reservations and subjected them to starvation and illness, but punished or killed those who attempted to leave the reservation to make their own way. This damned-if-you-do, damned- if-you-don’t predicament rendered reservations glorified prison camps.11

In his 1891 speech at the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, Pratt used the metaphor of “the pen” to argue that the reservation imprisons students, whereas the outing system, a program in which Carlisle students were sent to live and work in neighboring homes for a contracted period of time, frees them. Pratt spoke:

When the youth write home that they are kindly treated, and of the many privileges and opportunities they have to learn and earn, that they have been down to the ocean, or to Philadelphia, New York, or even, it may be, to Lake Mohonk…slowly but surely, the walls that surround the pen in which those at home are placed are lowered, and I look for the time to soon come when they will themselves break away from their hindrances and become free men and free women. (“A Way Out” 274)

By using the phrase “the pen,” Pratt creates a contrast between the imprisoning reservation system and the liberating space of Carlisle. He plays with the stereotype that American Indians on reservations are caged animals; the pen was also (and still is) a common slang term for

“penitentiary.”12 Yet, by giving students an opportunity to see and experience American civilization, and thus freeing students from the “pen,” Carlisle “lowers the walls” around the

11 For information on the permissions American Indians needed to leave the reservation, see Reyhner and Eder’s chapter, “Reservations,” in American Indian Education. 12 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “pen.”

reservations and liberates students’ families by vicariously bringing them into the fold of

American civilization. Carlisle, then, not only benefits the students, but all American Indians.

This trope of the reservation as prison, and subsequently the Carlisle School as liberating, becomes a regular theme in Pratt’s writing from the 1880s until his death. In a speech given to the National Educational Convention in 1883, Pratt argued, “But the Indian is corralled and imprisoned upon his reservation, and forcibly held aloof from the associations which alone would elevate and civilize him. He meets with no welcome, no invitation to stay outside of this prison life” (Pratt “Address of Capt. Pratt”). In this speech, Pratt emphasizes that the

“imprisonment” on reservations obstructs Native peoples from civilization which depends on

Carlisle and inclusion into Euro-American society. In a pamphlet titled “Indian Schools: An

Exposure Address Before the Ladies Missionary Societies of the Calvary M.E. Church,” Pratt asserts that, “The reservation has always been a prison, and the army was used to establish and enforce this prison life.” In this quotation, Pratt places blame for the prison-reservation on the

United States military for “establish[ing] and enforce[ing]” the reservation system. In a speech before “a California audience” in 1916, Pratt expressed his frustration that the reservations were still in operation: “Two hundred and sixty thousand Indians, by a segregating prison treatment, are still Indians, largely non-English speaking, and a burden to us in tribal masses” (Pratt “The

Place and Destiny”). Pratt blames the “segregating” nature and “prison treatment” of the reservation system for hindering the Carlisle School’s assimilation efforts. These examples abound in speeches, letters and magazine articles and would become redundant if all listed here.

The argument that the reservations imprison American Indians and cause dependence, and that Carlisle liberates Natives and transforms them into independent citizens, is the focus of the Carlisle chapters of Battlefield and Classroom and becomes the book’s overarching thesis.

The chapters become repetitive, as Pratt repeats the problem (the reservation system) and his solution (Carlisle) in different ways through to the end. For example, Pratt ends “The Kiowa

Escape Plot” by commenting on White Horse’s struggle to remain civilized once returning to the reservation, Pratt writes, “This led me to say that reforming a drunkard by keeping him in a saloon would be quite as sensible as our method of trying to civilize and Americanize our

Indians by keeping them separated in tribes on prison reservations excluded from all contact with our civilization and the advantages of our American life” (Battlefield 153). White Horse’s struggle does not surprise Pratt. After all, how could White Horse be expected to continue his civilized ways once separated from civilization? By using the term “prison reservations,” Pratt emphasizes confinement and separation and shifts the responsibility from White Horse and other

American Indians (why would they want to be in prison?) and onto the government system that imprisons them.

Unlike the Fort Marion chapters in which Pratt depicts the day-to-day life at the fort and in St. Augustine, the Carlisle chapters rarely focus on the daily occurrences at the school and only cite exceptional programs and events, such as the football team or the trip to the Chicago

World’s Fair. The first two Carlisle chapters, “The Founding of the Carlisle Indian School” and

“The First Year at Carlisle” explain how Pratt acquired the use of the barracks and how he recruited students. He discusses the campus, some of the first students and the students’ first haircuts. However, Pratt quickly turns away from the school and focuses on his advocacy against the reservation system. In the six page chapter titled “Self-evident Truths,” Pratt clearly and concisely argues that the reservations perpetuate segregation and dependence, and thus savagery.

He highlights the corruption of the reservation system and cites the churches and agents that seek to gain by it. He argues that the issuance of food rations, livestock and farm equipment; the

loaning of money; conservation schemes; and Bureau-appointed lawyers, make American

Indians dependent on the United States and prevent them from becoming members of American society. This dependence, he asserts, has “insidiously destroyed, instead of builded [sic] aspiration among the Indians for citizenship” (Battlefield 271).13 Pratt once again blames the government by attacking its logic in establishing the reservation system: “It was useless to even hope that, through the wicked devices of imprisoning on reservations, his tribal organizations could be successfully promoted and the resources for a new way of independent tribal living be engrafted on his small groups” (269). Again, Pratt shifts the responsibility of civilization onto the government by blaming the reservation system for denying American Indians inclusion in

American society. By shifting the blame, Pratt reveals the United States’ contradiction in seeking to civilize American Indians through segregating them on “prison reservations.”

Pratt’s solution to the government’s policy of “segregating” American Indians on “prison reservations” is, of course, Carlisle:

To overcome these conditions and conduct the Indian into civilized environment and open a way to his rightful place as a co-equal man and fellow citizen, Carlisle labored from the very start. The location of the school, where there were fullest opportunities for Indian youth to see the best activities of our American life and participate in them, and where the broadest observation by our own people was easily had to convince both the white man and the red that neither was as bad as the other thought, was Carlisle’s greatest aim. Every facility to help its students to see

13 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, popularly known as the Dawes Act, in 1887. This act divided reservations into individual plots of land that were given to American Indian individuals for the purpose of living and farming. It was thought that allotment would give American Indians the resources and the push they needed to abandon tribal living arrangements, lose dependency on government rations, and live like their white neighbors. Any land considered excess would be open to white settlement (Adams 17). While this seems like a solution to what Pratt and others saw as the problem of the reservation, allotment was widely unsuccessful. Much of the land was not arable and, of course, not everyone wanted to farm (Pfister 50). Pratt notes that allotment failed to dissolve reservation boundaries as many tribes combined their plots and continued to hold land in common (“The Advantages” 264). So while allotment seemed like a solution, the stated problems of the reservation remained.

and participate, and thus come to fully know, accept, and enjoy our civilization was utilized. (Battlefield 273)

Pratt’s goal was to remove Indian children as far from the imprisoning reservations as possible in order to show them the benefits of civilization. He had no doubt that students would fully accept the opportunities of American civilization after living within the confining and dependence- inducing reservation system.

By focusing the Carlisle chapters of Battlefield and Classroom on the “prison reservation” and the Indian Bureau’s effort to uphold it by attacking the Carlisle School, Pratt eliminated the school itself from his autobiography and thus erased the carceral qualities of the school from his narrative. In other words, by using the rhetoric of the prison-reservation, Pratt deflected the readers’ attention from the prison-school he created, which allowed him to ultimately erase Carlisle from his autobiography altogether. In his speech at Lake Mohonk Pratt declared that Carlisle “lowered the walls” around the “pen” that is the reservation, but what about the fence he erected around the school? He wanted to free American Indians from the

“prison reservation” but what about the actual prison inside Carlisle’s guardhouse? Pratt’s goal was to liberate American Indians from the confinement and segregation of the reservation but what of the regime of surveillance and power that the layout of the school perpetuated? While

Pratt may mention the fence and the guardhouse in Battlefield and Classroom these aspects are not the focus of the Carlisle chapters. Rather, they are minor anecdotes highlighting Carlisle’s success in order to combat the “Bureau oligarchists” that threatened Pratt’s dream of Indian citizenship through the Carlisle School.

While Pratt erased Carlisle and its carceral environment from Battlefield and Classroom, the first generation of students to graduate from the boarding schools wrote it back in. As the following chapter will argue, the first boarding school writers, primarily Francis La Flesche,

Zitkala-Ša and Ah-nen-la-de-ni, responded to Pratt’s characterization of the school as civilized space and the reservation as a carceral space by flipping his script and using the imagery of the prison when writing about their boarding school experiences. Chapter 5 explores how contemporary American Indian writers continue this rhetorical strategy by using prison imagery to assert that their ancestors were not victims but survivors of a carceral regime who carved out spaces separate from the boarding school in order to heal from the cultural trauma it perpetrated.

CHAPTER 4 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SPACE: THE FIRST AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL WRITERS

In 1893, Richard Henry Pratt arranged for 500 of his students to travel to Chicago to participate in the World’s Columbian Exposition (also referred to as The Chicago World’s Fair).

In exchange for one week of admission, the students performed for fairgoers. Every day the boys paraded across the grounds and performed military drills, the band played, the orators spoke and the chorus sang. Boasting of the popularity of Carlisle’s parade, Pratt writes, “The military demonstration attracted many thousands of spectators daily. The roped-off place between the administration building and the main entrance to the exposition grounds was the most popular place at drill hour” (Battlefield 302). Along with their performances, Carlisle had a permanent exhibit alongside other American and international schools in the Liberal Arts Building. Here, the school displayed sample schoolwork and artwork, as well as samples of students’ industrial and homemaking skills (Trennert 211). One of Carlisle’s first students, Chauncey Yellow Robe, manned the exhibit and acted as “a sample” of one of Carlisle’s civilized Indians (Pratt

Battlefield 307). Pratt wrote that “Carlisle’s exhibit showed how the Indian could learn to march in line with America as a very part of it, head up, eyes front, where he could see his glorious future of manly competition in citizenship and be on an equality as an individual” (Battlefield

303). The Carlisle students at the World’s Fair served Pratt as an example of Carlisle’s success as well as entertainment for fairgoers.

Carlisle’s students were not the only Indian spectacles at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Harvard professor F. W. Putnam displayed artifacts from various tribes inside the Bureau of

Indian Affairs’ Anthropological Building. Outside of the Anthropological Building the Bureau established an Indian encampment, where several hundred indigenous people of various tribes set up teepees and lived on the fairgrounds for the duration of the fair. The purpose of the camp,

according to Putnam, was to show fairgoers “the varying aspects of fast-disappearing aboriginal life” (qtd. in Trennert 207). And, although opposed by Pratt and others for glorifying Indian savagery, the fair also welcomed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which set up adjacent to the fairgrounds and proved to be one of the most popular attractions at the fair (Trennert 205, 211).1

The Columbian Exposition in 1893, as a celebration of the New World’s 400 years of progress and civilization, attempted to represent not only the past, but what the United States saw as the future for American Indians. Outside of the Anthropological Building, near the Indian encampment, the Bureau built a model schoolhouse where visiting students from several boarding schools could come and act out their schooldays. The schoolhouse contained desks, blackboards, kitchen equipment and industrial tools. Despite the cramped conditions and the constant surveillance by fairgoers, students and teachers were expected to go about their schooldays as if there had been no interruption (Trennert 207). The existence of the model schoolhouse, and its close proximity to the Anthropological Building and the Indian encampment created a dichotomy of the “Indian of the past” and the “Indian of the future.” Bureau of Indian

Affairs Commissioner Thomas J. Morgan saw the model schoolhouse as an opportunity to create a progress narrative that clearly differentiated between the old/savage Indian life as represented in Putnam’s exhibit and the encampment, and the new/civilized American Indian. Morgan stated,

“The new and the old can be sharply contrasted and though the old may attract popular attention by its picturesqueness the new will impress the thoughtful with the hopefulness of the outlook and the wisdom, as well as fairness, of extending to the weaker the helpful hand of the stronger race” (United States 79). In building the model schoolhouse and Indian village, the Bureau

1 Pratt did not want to align himself with the other Indian exhibits at the fair because he thought they romanticized the savage Indian instead of emphasizing the civilized American Indian. See Trennert for a discussion of Pratt’s reaction to the Indian exhibits at the World’s Fair.

attempted to create what Jean Baudrillard calls the hyperreal, a created reality that becomes understood as reality in public consciousness. In other words, the Bureau attempted to embed the

American imagination with a “real” image of a boarding school and village that visualized and promoted the progress narrative of savage to civilized. However, partly because it was too small, too crowded and under-planned, the model schoolhouse proved to be, more or less, a failure. Yet,

“visitors mobbed the pageant of traditional Indian culture. Thousands of fairgoers spent time at the Anthropological Building, the Smithsonian exhibit, and the Indian village,” not to mention

Buffalo Bill’s show in the Midway (211). Robert A. Trennert Jr. argues that the Bureau’s

“comparative theme seemingly worked in reverse; instead of impressing the public with the superiority of the assimilation program, it stimulated interest in traditional life” (211-2).

The Chicago World’s Fair exemplifies the way the boarding school circulated in the public imagination at the end of the nineteenth century as a symbol for the final conquest of

Indian savagery. A number of American Indian writers quickly emerged to respond to this representation of civilization, including Francis La Flesche (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša/Gertrude

Bonnin (Yankton Sioux) and Ah-nen-la-de-ni/Daniel la France (Mohawk). Seemingly, the first full-length narrative of a student’s boarding school experience appeared in 1900, when Francis

La Flesche published The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe. In a clear, linear, narrative form, La Flesche writes of his exploits with his “gang” of friends, The Middle Five, at the Bellevue Mission School south of Omaha, Nebraska. The following year, Zitkala-Ša published her boarding school trilogy in the January, February, and March 1901 issues of The

Atlantic Monthly. Her stories narrate the various educations she received at home and at school at

White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana and Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

In the final story of the trilogy, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Zitkala-Ša reveals her

impressions of the Carlisle School, Richard Henry Pratt, and Indian education in general. Two years later a less-known writer, Ah-nen-la-de-ni, published a seven page story titled, “An Indian

Boy’s Story,” in The Independent. Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s story, while short, is very rich in his telling of the abuses he witnessed and suffered at Lincoln Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The fact that this first group of writers emerged at this time is significant because they were the first generation of boarding school students to publish their narratives and they published at a time of increased public and government interest in American Indian education as indicated by the exponential rise of Indian boarding schools across the United States (as will be discussed further in the following section).

This chapter asserts that the first boarding school students to publish their narratives appropriated a western rhetoric of borders in order to reverse the popular binary of school/civilized, reservation/savage. This strategy challenges the public’s preconceptions of the boarding school and the reservation, reveals what is really behind the façade that Pratt and other school officials presented to their Euro-American audiences, and ultimately inscribes the boarding school as a savage, carceral space. I do this first by overviewing the history that produced ethnographic interest in American Indians at the turn of the twentieth century and that gave American Indian writers a platform to tell their sides of the boarding school story. I then dedicate a section to each of the three writers discussed in this chapter, Francis La Flesche,

Zitkala-Ša, and Ah-nen-la-de-ni, and examine how each author represented their boarding school space and experience. I place La Flesche in conversation with philosopher Jeremy Bentham and

Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz in order to argue that La Flesche uses the popular language of frontier borders in order to re-conceptualize the spaces of the reservation and the boarding school. I argue that Zitkala-Ša inverts the reservation/savage, school/civilized binary by

challenging the government’s policies of removal, reservations and education, and negates the idea that only legal property could be conceived as civilized. I analyze how Ah-nen-la-de-ni characterizes the boarding school as a prison in order to highlight his lack of freedom and assert his own sense of agency and choice. Finally, I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the possible political legacies of these writers’ stories on the Meriam Report published in 1928.

As a whole, this Native-authored literature has been under-examined as an important cluster of writings that began the process of rethinking the memory and associations of boarding school life, a process that will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5.

The Ethnographic Moment

The United States Government’s effort to solve the Indian Problem through massacre and removal culminated in 1890 at the Massacre at Wounded Knee and the resulting declaration that the frontier was now “closed.” At this time, the government looked to the boarding school to rid

American Indians of the last vestiges of Indian-ness by assimilating Native children into the

Euro-American fold. The combination of exterminating Indian-ness through the new assimilated

Indian, or what Pratt called “kill[ing] the Indian [to] save the man,” established an interest among the general white population in the simulacra of traditional Indian lifestyles as well as the idea and image of the new Americanized Indian. This dual interest created a moment that allowed publications by American Indian writers to emerge in popular media, particularly the boarding school narratives by La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša and Ah-nen-la-de-ni.

In February 1887, the United States Congress continued on its civilizing mission by passing the Dawes Severalty Act. The Dawes Act, proposed by Senator Henry Dawes of

Massachusetts, sought to break up tribal land into allotments for American Indian individuals.

Any “surplus” land was opened to white settlement. The goal of allocating American Indians individual plots of land was to eliminate communal tribal ways of living and encourage a Euro-

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American lifestyle focused on agriculture and the nuclear family. However, much of the land allocated to American Indians was not arable, as the most fertile land was sold to white settlers.

Throughout the plains, allotment proved to be a difficult task and not all reservation land was successfully allotted. In 1888 and 1889, as North and South Dakota lobbied for statehood, federal commissions proposed breaking the Great Sioux Reservation into six smaller reservations, which would open nine million acres of land to white settlement (“History and

Culture”). Compressing the Sioux from 25 million acres of land onto 16 acres of smaller land tracks scattered across the two states devastated the population. For example, on Yankton

Agency, where Zitkala-Ša was raised, the population dropped from 2,600 in 1857 to 1,678 in

1902, a 65 per cent decrease (Susag 13). The lack of arable land and the decimation of the buffalo, coupled with corrupt reservation agents that withheld food rations, left people starving.2

These government efforts to solve the Indian Problem through white settlement erupted violently when the Lakota performed the Ghost Dance in 1890. The Ghost Dance was a pan- tribal ceremony that promised to revive dead ancestors and peacefully end the white occupation of America. The dance appealed to many desperate people on the reservations and felt threatening to reservation agents and the United States Government. When the Lakota at Pine

Ridge Reservation performed the Ghost Dance in November of 1890, the reservation agent warned the federal government of a possible uprising. By December, tensions had escalated and police arrested Chief Sitting Bull outside of Pine Ridge for supporting the dancers. His tribesmen

2 For broader historical sources on the Dawes Act, see Francis Paul Prucha’s encyclopedia of Indian policy The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians and Frederick A. Hoxie’s overview of federal assimilation policies A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians. For sources that discuss the Dawes Act as an instigator for the boarding school see Margaret Connell Szasz’s Education and the American Indian and David Wallace Adams’ Education for Extinction.

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protested and a shootout ensued. Nine American Indians, including Sitting Bull, and six police officers were killed. As the tribe attempted to return to Pine Ridge, 365 officers of the U.S.

Seventh Calvary intercepted them at Wounded Knee Creek. The Lakota agreed to surrender at

Pine Ridge, but U.S. troops fired when a deaf tribesman could not hear the orders to surrender his weapon. The Calvary killed 146 unarmed men, women and children. Others froze to death after they fled. Some scholars estimate that 300 American Indians died as a result of the

Massacre at Wounded Knee.3

The Massacre at Wounded Knee marked the end of violent warfare between Euro-

Americans and American Indians, which prompted the Superintendent of the United States

Census, Robert P. Porter, to declare the frontier “closed”: “that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” Three years later, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, University of

Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his Frontier Thesis that argued that

Americans’ unique character derived from the seeming conquest of the western frontier, namely individualism, adaptability, and optimism (Turner). For Turner and those influenced by his thesis, the closing of the frontier, or the idea that there was no longer a clear delineation between the civilized east and the savage west, meant that indigenous peoples had been conquered. What

Zitkala-Ša would later call the “civilizing machine” was hard at work allocating land, shrinking reservations, and educating children. The Indian, it was said, was “vanishing,” and it was this

“vanishing Indian” that made popular culture at this time romanticize Indian-ness and want to study it, collect it and gaze at it.

3 For sources on Wounded Knee, see Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Heather Cox Richardson’s Wounded Knee, Robert M. Utley’s The Last Days of the Sioux Nation and The Indian Frontier of the American West, and Philip Weeks’ Farewell My Nation.

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During this period, the demand for American Indian commodity greatly expanded print culture. Ethnographers, historians, and other interested persons collected as-told-to stories of

American Indians, and translated and edited the stories into narratives and novels that claimed to present a true picture of the “vanishing American” that appealed to a popular audience (Wong

88, 90). These stories also appealed to social scientists that had an interest in preserving cultures they believed would soon disappear. As Arnold Krupat argues, “If the Indian was soon to

‘vanish’ as an Indian, as was generally assumed, then it was important to salvage as much as possible of Native cultures” (317 emphasis in original). Producing, publishing and collecting literature was necessary to this idea of “salvaging” a culture and created an environment conducive to the publication and consumption of this first wave of important boarding school stories.

The last half of the nineteenth century saw a boom in the amount of mass-published magazines, journals and newspapers published by religious, secular, political, and philanthropic organizations. In fact, the three narratives discussed in this chapter were originally serialized in popular magazines. Articles were written about and written by American Indians, and as Berndt

Peyer argues, “constitute[d] a major source for Indian nonfiction prose from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the 1920s” (27). Reformers concerned with Indian issues jumped on this bandwagon and published articles in literary magazines such as North American Review, and popular magazines such as Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly. The Carlisle School published a monthly newsletter beginning in 1898 titled The Red Man, which became The Red Man and

Helper when it changed to weekly publication in 1900. Christian magazines often published articles concerning Indian issues, such as Henry Ward Beecher’s Christian Union, published between 1876 and 1881. The Society of American Indians also published its own magazine

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beginning in 1911, American Indian Magazine, which was edited by Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-

Ša.

Books comprised of American Indian drawings were also very popular. Books of drawings by former St. Augustine prisoners Zotom and Howling Wolf were sold for $2 each

(about $55 today), and White Bull sold his “Sioux History Book” for a whopping $50 (Wong

76). These pictographs were largely purchased by wealthy collectors, but also by Army officers who wanted war drawings from the people they defeated (77). The romanticization of Indian- ness also fit well into other popular culture movements leading into the twentieth century, such as the local color movement, the back-to-nature movement, and the boy-scouting movement. All of these various interests, along with the “golden age of American anthropology with the founding of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879…and also the American Anthropological

Association in 1902, furthered interest in the ‘vanishing’ Indian traditions” (Peyer 27).

While Americans were fascinated with the idea of the vanishing noble savage, the United

States Government was busy trying to come up with a new way get the Indian to vanish. The short-term solution, of course, was allotment and the shrinking of reservation borders. The long- term solution became the education of Native children in the ways of civilization and citizenship.

The Carlisle School, as the first off-reservation boarding school, set the standard for the multitude of off-reservation Indian schools that opened in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In 1880, Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz announced the opening of the second off- reservation boarding school, Forest Grove Indian Training School in Forest Grove, Oregon

(Schurz 14). After Forest Grove opened in 1880, off-reservation boarding schools began opening across the west and totaled twenty-five by 1902. While these schools were modeled off of

Carlisle, there was one important difference: location. The government and those involved in

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Indian education recognized the value of Carlisle’s location; however, the expenses of transporting children the long distance, and the prevalence of homesickness and other problems stemming from the separation between children and parents, prompted the Indian Bureau to open schools between Michigan and California. These schools were close enough to reservations so that students were not completely cut off from home and family, but were far enough that students could be influenced by white civilization (Adams 57). The opening of off-reservation boarding schools also allowed for more children to be educated in Euro-American customs and labor. By 1900, nearly 18,000 students attended either an on-reservation or off-reservation boarding school, and almost 6,000 of those students attended off-reservation schools (Adams 58-

9). Like Carlisle, these schools focused on teaching English and industry, and most adopted

Carlisle’s outing system.

Even though the Chicago World’s Fair attendees were most fascinated by the anthropological exhibits depicting the noble savage, white Americans were also interested in what was to become of the American Indian now that he was “conquered.” As I discussed in

Chapter 2, Euro-Americans not only gathered to catch a glimpse of the “brutal savages” on their journey to St. Augustine, but visiting the recently civilized Indians at Fort Marion became a valuable tourist attraction. Euro-Americans were also very interested in Pratt’s work at the

Carlisle School. As discussed in Chapter 3, Pratt built a fence around the school not only to keep students in, but to keep curious spectators out. Those who could not visit the school could still keep up with students’ activities through Carlisle’s newsletter, The Red Man and Helper. In

1893, the year of the Chicago World’s Fair, Indian Helper (as it was then called) was distributed to 9,000 households each week (Katanski 48).

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This interest in both the traditional Indian and the new civilized Indian contributed to the popularity of narratives written by American Indians such as Francis La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša and

Ah-nen-la-de-ni. All three of these authors give their readers a glimpse into traditional Indian life, and two use Native names to attract their audience. Yet, readers were most fascinated by the idea of a civilized Indian and expected these writers to represent their transition from savage to civilized. La Flesche’s audience consisted primarily of Euro-Americans interested in Indian affairs and The Middle Five was widely read despite La Flesche’s refusal to allow his publisher to release a school edition. His book received high reviews from notable Americans such as

Richard Henry Pratt and anthropologist/naturalist George Bird Grinnell. Journalist Charles

Fletcher Lummis published a sketch of La Flesche in his popular magazine, The Land of

Sunshine. La Flesche continued to find success in his publications of short stories and anthropological articles (Smith 594). Like La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša also found much success in the publication of her boarding school trilogy in The Atlantic Monthly. While accurate records of

The Atlantic Monthly’s circulation did not exist until 1915, it is estimated that by 1902, one year after Zitkala-Ša published her trilogy in the magazine, circulation reached approximately 20,000

(Sedgwick 311). No doubt, then, did her original publication reach a large audience. Zitkala-Ša also attained much professional success in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and she republished The Atlantic Monthly stories along with additional stories and essays in a 1921 collection titled American Indian Stories.

Francis La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša, and Ah-nen-la-de-ni seemingly gave the American public what they wanted: a profile of traditional life contrasted with stories of assimilation. Yet, once these authors got their audience’s attention, they also gave them a dose of reality, a message from the not-so-romanticized Indian regarding the conditions of the reservations and the cruelty

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of the schools’ civilizing mission. The distinct ways that all three authors characterize the reservation as a place of both comfort and tension, in contrast to the prison-like schools, forms the bulk of my ensuing analysis. Francis La Flesche, Zitkala-Ša and Ah-nen-la-de-ni effectively subvert readers’ preconceptions of the two-dimensional traditional Indian that needed saving, and the beneficence of the school system meant to do the saving.

“We Loved it as Our Country”: Francis La Flesche, Borderlines and the Boarding School in The Middle Five

The United States’ rhetoric regarding civilizing the savage Indian was deeply embedded first in the boundary between the colonial settlements and the frontier, and later in the border between the reservation and everywhere else. Early nineteenth-century ideologies imagined a clear borderline that separated the states from the frontier, the civilized from the savage. Jeremy

Bentham, in his Principles of the Civill Code, exemplifies this common western ideology, and in doing so uses the land to define the differences between savage and civilized:

North America presents to us a striking contrast. Savage nature may be seen there, side by side with civilized nature. The interior of that immense region offers only a frightful solitude, impenetrable forests or sterile plains, stagnant waters and impure vapors; such is the earth when left to itself. The fierce tribes which rove through those deserts without fixed habitation always occupied with pursuit of game, and animated against each other by implacable rivalries, meet only for combat, and often succeed in destroying each other. The beasts of the forest are not so dangerous to man as he is to himself. But on the borders of these frightful solitudes, what different sights are seen! We appear to comprehend in the same view the two empires of good and evil. Forests give place to cultivated fields; morasses are dried up, and the surface, grown firm, is covered with meadows, pastures, domestic animals, habitations healthy and smiling. Rising cities are built upon regular plans; roads are constructed to communicate between them; everything announces that men, seeking the means of intercourse, have ceased to fear and to murder each other. Harbors filled with vessels receive all the productions of the earth, and assist in the exchange of all kinds of riches. (56)

Bentham’s description of America reinforces the early nineteenth-century conceptions of savage space verses civilized space and defines savage space as that which is not colonized by European settlers and is thus an empty, “sterile” space of “solitude.” He characterizes the frontier as wild,

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“the earth when left to itself.” No one has tamed the land through cultivation, ranching, western architecture, landscape and industry. Capitalism does not operate. The markers of civilization, according to Bentham’s quote, are non-existent on the frontier, marking indigenous lands as savage space.4

Less than a decade prior to The Middle Five, Fredrick Jackson Turner presented his

Frontier Thesis at the Chicago World’s Fair, declaring the frontier “closed.” Turner argued that while there once was a clear geographic line between civilized and savage, and that “the frontier was the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” white expansion into the frontier not only pushed the line to non-existence, but created a unique Americanism born from settlers’ needs to adopt and adapt some characteristics of the Indian in order to survive and eventually conquer nature and savagery. However, Pratt and other Indian reformers argued that a borderline between civilization and savagery still existed in the boundaries of the reservation, and the

United States had to civilize this savage space if it expected to civilize the Indian. To argue that the reservation impeded any efforts to civilize the Indian, these reformers used similar rhetoric as

Bentham to conceptualize savage verses civilized space.5 For example, compare Bentham’s description of the frontier from 1803 to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz’s essay from 1881:

“What we can and should do is, in general terms, to fit the Indians, as much as possible, for the habits of and occupations of civilized life, by work and education; to individualize them in the possession and appreciation of property, by allotting to them lands in severalty, giving them a fee simple title individually to the parcels of land they cultivate” (14). Like Bentham, Schurz

4 This common rhetoric has characterized American colonization since its beginning and is embedded within the European legal doctrine, vacuum domicilium, which states that land that is not occupied is open to settlement and civilization. 5 See Chapter 3 for a fuller discussion of the rhetoric of the reservation as savage space.

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identifies the markers of civilization: the “appreciation of property” through the cultivation of land. Only through owning and cultivating property could American Indians participate in capitalism and become a part of the country; only through the civilizing of land and body could the United States kill the Indian and save the man. Thus, the Dawes Act was proposed and passed in February 1887 as an attempt to “produc[e]…civilized space.” Eric N. Olund argues that “reformers were seeking the transformation of prairie into property” through the law (138).

Only through property could American Indians have citizenship, and only through citizenship could they become civilized and assimilated. The United States’ control of indigenous land and education only added to the nation’s obsession with the vanishing Indian as discussed in the previous section.

In his novel, The Middle Five, Francis La Flesche reconceptualizes the spaces of the reservation and the boarding school to challenge his readers’ notions of the savage/civilized dichotomy. La Flesche uses Americans’ fascination with the “vanishing Indian” to attract an audience and engage them to rethink the idea of the reservation as an empty space of “frightful solitude,” and the boarding school as a civilized place. Through his boarding school story, La

Flesche forces the reader to ask: who and what is savage, who and what is civilized?

Like many American Indians born in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Francis La

Flesche struggled to figure out what it meant to be an Indian in a white world. His father, Joseph

La Flesche, or Instamaza, believed that assimilation was necessary for Native survival. Joseph was born to a French father and a Ponca mother but lived most of his life as an Omaha after

Omaha principal chief, Big Elk, adopted him. Joseph converted to Christianity and established a small village where Christian Omaha could live in wood-frame houses and participate in agriculture. As Joseph La Flesche became more involved in Christianity and the Presbyterian

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Mission at Bellevue, he became less involved with Francis’ mother, a full-blood Omaha named

Ta-in-ne, or Elizabeth Esau.6 This divorce wounded Francis. He had already felt marginalized by many Omaha who disagreed with his father’s push toward assimilation and now he also felt deserted by his father.7 Joseph was instrumental in creating the Bellevue Mission boarding school, the school that Francis attended and wrote about in The Middle Five. The exact dates of

Francis’ attendance are unknown; however, it is believed he attended the school in the mid-

1860s after the mission moved from Bellevue to Thurston County (Baerreis viii, xiii).

By using the language of national boundaries in his preface to The Middle Five, La

Flesche breaks down the ideological boundaries between savage and civilized. In his preface, La

Flesche directly challenges those, like Bentham, who thought of the plains as empty wilderness:

“The white people speak of the country at this period as ‘a wilderness,’ as though it was an empty tract without human interest or history.” La Flesche not only describes the land as full with trees, rivers, people and traditions, but he also speaks of the land in terms of boundaries. He argues that the land has always been clearly “defined”: “we knew the boundaries of tribal lands, those of our friends and those of our foes; we were familiar with every stream, the contour of every hill, and each particular feature of the landscape had its tradition. It was our home, the scene of our history, and we loved it as our country” (xx). While Bentham speaks of a straight border dividing civilized from savage, La Flesche argues that the borders of the plains are

6 Joseph La Flesche was married to three women simultaneously. Ta-in-ne was Joseph’s second wife. 7 For background on La Flesche, see Garrick Bailey’s introduction to The Osage and the Invisible World, David A. Baerreis’ introduction to The Middle Five, Joan Mark’s “Francis La Flesche: The American Indian as Anthropologist,” and Sherry L. Smith’s “Francis La Flesche and the World of Letters.”

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national. Just like other national boundaries, the landscape is familiar and full with people and tradition.

In his discussion of how white settlers, from their point-of-view, delineated civilized space from savage space, Nicholas Blomley argues that the cartographic survey created borders that were thought to create order out of a landscape of chaos. Drawing from Kain and Baigent’s

The Cadastral Map in the Service of the State, Blomley argues that “the development of accurate surveys was a priority in many colonial territories, serving to ‘organize, control, and record new settlement of ‘empty’ lands, a process which in the New World often involved wresting control from indigenous peoples’” (“Law, Property” 128). This process of taking and organizing indigenous land is best exemplified in the Dawes Act, as indigenous lands were divided and allotted to individuals and families. La Flesche challenges the idea that indigenous land was chaotic and in need of division and organization by arguing that the frontier already contained boundaries and borders. If, according to La Flesche, the frontier already contained national borders, then it already had characteristics of civilization: law, political structures, culture, and tradition. By using the rhetoric of nations and national boundaries, La Flesche can assert that indigenous land is civilized, full, and good; not savage, empty and evil.

Challenging the ideology that tribal land was savage and cultureless space allows La

Flesche to highlight the similarities between American Indians and Euro-Americans and argue for a common boyhood regardless of race and cultural background. He dedicates the novel “To the Universal Boy,” and further explicates this message in his preface, which begins:

As the object of this book is to reveal the true nature and character of the Indian boy, I have chosen to write the story of my school-fellows rather than that of my other boy friends who knew only aboriginal life. I have made this choice not because the influences of the school alter the qualities of the boys, but that they might appear under conditions and in an attire familiar to the reader. The paint, feathers, robes, and other articles of Indian savagery to the European, and he who

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wears them, however appropriate or significant they might be to himself, finds it difficult to lay claim to a share in common human nature. (xv)

Focusing his novel on his time at school and telling the stories of his school friends was a strategy La Flesche designed to present his reader—his white readers in particular—with a relatable image of boyhood. While his Euro-American readers may not be able to relate to living on a reservation and dressing in “paint, feathers and robes,” readers can no doubt remember attending school, possibly dressed in uniform. Setting the scene in a schoolhouse allows white readers to relate to the characters’ stories of learning, story-telling, and mischief-making. By breaking down the barriers between American Indian schoolboys and their Euro-American counterparts, La Flesche emphasizes the similarities of all boys regardless of race.

La Flesche’s novel may have also proven relatable to Euro-American readers because it mimicked some of the tropes of the popular English schoolboy adventure novels. While English schoolboy novels did not see the same popularity in the United States as they did in England, the lack of anti-piracy laws ensured that the most popular were widely published and distributed in the States. Perhaps the most popular schoolboy adventure novel, Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s

School Days, was published by 79 different publishing companies in America between 1857 and the early 1900s (Tom Brown Series). The Middle Five adopts some of the formula of the schoolboy novel such as learning the social order of the school, friendship, adventure, bullies and unfair teachers.8 The Middle Five begins with young Francis’ (called Frank in the novel) culture- shock upon entering the school as he looks in “wonder” at the light fixtures, clock and cupboards and attempts to understand his first meal at a table (4). Brush, an older boy, takes Frank under his

8 For more on the school in children’s literature, see Gillian Avery’s Behold the Child and Seth Lerer’s Children’s Literature.

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wing and adopts the role of big brother. There are also bullies, such as Jim and Gideon, and by the end of the novel Gray-beard plays the role of the unfair teacher.

Yet, it is through their adventures that La Flesche reminds the reader that these boys are not just school children, but Indian school children. Unlike the English schoolboy adventure novels where the characters’ adventures center on sports, many of the Middle Five’s adventures are uniquely “Indian.” They return home to the reservation on the weekends, they attempt to join the annual buffalo hunt and they eat pemmican. However, these are not savage acts, as La

Flesche describes them in a way still relatable to white readers. The boys do not just return to the reservation, but return home for mom’s cooking (16). They do not just run away from the school to partake in a buffalo hunt, but to join their family and friends in tradition and adventure (83-

92). When the boys escape the school in the night, enter a house in the village, and perform a ritual to command a woman to give them pemmican, it is written as common mischief and childish superstition (111-8). While La Flesche is always careful to remind the reader that his characters are Indian school children, he strives to ensure that their adventures are always relatable to his dominant white readership.

Because La Flesche crafts the book to read like a schoolboy adventure novel, many scholars have called it “quiet” or even “ambivalent” (Smith 582, Coleman xi). However, I argue that this “quietness” is rhetorical, and that La Flesche is far from ambivalent. La Flesche’s rhetorical brilliance lays in his ability to subtly compel a Euro-American audience to strongly relate to Indian boys so that by the final two chapters of the novel the reader feels deeply affected by the bad things that happen to these boys and joins La Flesche in questioning who the real savages are. Through two affecting moments, Joe’s arrival at the school and Brush’s death, La

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Flesche argues that savage acts happen in spaces deemed as civilized, thus further complicating the reservation/savage, school/civilized dichotomy.

La Flesche introduces Joe in chapter fifteen of the sixteen chapter novel. Joe arrives at the school naked and crying. His elderly grandmother attends him, “crippled” and “feeble.” She comforts Joe by telling him that the missionaries will take care of him because she no longer can.

La Flesche describes this scene as “pitiful,” and writes, “Speaking in the kindest and gentlest of tones, with inflections of the voice hard to describe, but which brought to one’s mind the twittering of a mother bird to its young, and passing her crooked fingers and wrinkled hands over the brown back of a miserable, naked, little boy who was digging his chubby fists in his eyes to squeeze away the tears that flowed incessantly” (132). The sentimental language and imagery of this scene causes the reader to sympathize with Joe and his grandmother, so when she pleads with Gray-beard, the superintendent of the school, “I beg that he be kindly treated. That is all I ask,” we hope that everyone at the school treats Joe with kindness. But Gray-beard does not treat

Joe with kindness. In fact, he beats Joe’s hand with a wood board after Joe accidently pelts him with a dirtball. The scene is horrific: “Catching a firm grip on the hand of the boy, Gray-beard dealt blow after blow on the visibly swelling hand. The man seemed to lose all self-control, gritting his teeth and breathing heavily, while the child writhed with pain, turned blue, and lost his breath. It was a horrible sight” (138). Gray-beard is not simply unkind to Joe, but at this moment in the novel he turns into an uncontrollable savage. La Flesche reminds his readers of

Joe’s grandmother’s plea to Gray-beard to treat Joe well, and her promise to Joe that he would.

Frank loses all respect for Gray-beard, and the reader realizes that boarding school is more than an adventure. In fact, at this point in the novel the reader begins to question how civilized Gray- beard and the space of the boarding school really are.

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The final tragedy of the novel occurs to the other orphan at the school, Frank’s best friend, Brush. La Flesche characterizes Brush as a sweet boy. He is the first to befriend the crying Frank when he arrives at the school and remains his loyal friend and bed-mate throughout.

Because he is an orphan, Gray-beard allows him special privileges, such as access to the belfry, and Frank often brings him home on the weekends. A sweet boy and a model student and

Christian, Brush helps the other children with their schoolwork and encourages them to learn. He tells the other children stories at night and he is “a genius whittler.” Brush is, perhaps, the most lovable character in the novel. So when Frank returns to school after a day with his parents and finds Brush dying in the infirmary, the reader feels just as startled and saddened as Frank.

Brush’s death scene mimics the overly sentimental death scenes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and breaks the reader’s heart. La Flesche ends the novel with Brush’s death, simply concluding, “We moved toward the school—no longer The Middle Five.” Brush’s death, not a wholly uncommon fate for boarding school students at this time, calls into question the idyllic “vanishing Indian” and prompts the reader to question the civility of a school system where good children become mortally ill.9

As an ethnographer and a novelist trying to make a career in a predominantly white profession, La Flesche took advantage of the ethnographic moment at the turn of the twentieth century to tell his boarding school story. He uses the language of borders and national organization to define indigenous land as civilized, thus challenging the popular notion that

American Indians and their land were savage. Then, by tapping into the idea of universal

9 Preston McBride recently estimated the student death rate at Carlisle Indian Industrial School to be around 500 students between 1879 and 1918. Brenda Child notes that “between 1881 and 1894, seventy-three Shoshone and Arapaho children left Wind River Reservation, WY to attend Carlisle, Santee or Genoa. Only 26 survived the experience (57). I was unable to find the death rate for Belleview Mission School.

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humanity, La Flesche characterizes the school space, a space presumed to be civilized, and its administrators as savage. Thus, La Flesche’s The Middle Five serves as an early example of how

American Indian writers challenged the reservation/savage, school/civilized binary through the rhetoric of borderlines. Other American Indian writers such as Zitkala-Ša and Ah-nen-la-de-ni adopt and build upon this rhetorical strategy in their boarding school stories by arguing that the boarding school space is savage because it is carceral.

“Semblance of Civilization”: Zitkala-Ša’s The Atlantic Monthly Trilogy

Bentham and Schurz identify the main difference between civilized and savage space as the taming of nature and the production of property. Bentham continues his argument by asserting that these markers of civilization lead to Americans’ sense of security: “Who has renewed the surface of the earth? Who has given to man this domain over nature—over nature embellished, fertilized, and perfected? That beneficent genius is Security. It is security which has wrought this great metamorphosis” (56 emphasis in original). According to Bentham, it is man’s command over nature that creates property, agriculture, and industry. These things necessitate labor, which subsequently create a sense of security against violence (violence as a characteristic of savagery, not civilization).

Of course, Bentham’s ideas on property and civilization are embedded in an early nineteenth-century Eurocentric view of Native/white relations in the Americas. While Bentham and others may have believed that property resulted in security, many others have countered that the more accurate theory of property acquisition positions ownership as an act of violence, with the claiming and seizure of indigenous lands offered as the most obvious example. For instance,

Jacques Derrida argues in “Force of Law” that law is inherently violent both in its founding (the institution and positioning of the law) and in its maintenance (981). Geographer Nicholas

Blomley points out, “For many classical European writers on property, the space of the savage

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was one of the absence of law and property and the concomitant presence of violence.” Savage space, according to Blomley, was space outside the boundaries of law. Therefore, law had to be enacted and enforced on the land through property ownership in order to civilize the frontier

(124). Ironically however, property acquisition necessitated violence against American Indian peoples (128-9). As Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) and other American Indian studies scholars point out, American colonization of indigenous land is often synonymous with violence. Vizenor uses

Turner’s Frontier Thesis to highlight Euro-Americans’ collective forgetfulness of their violence against Native peoples. Vizenor argues, “Turner’s celebration of a national character did not include war crimes against natives or the premeditated breach of treaties” (Native Liberty 110).

Ward Churchill insists that “contentions over land usage and ownership have served to define the totality of U.S.-Indian relationships from the first moment to the present day, shaping not only the historical flow of interactions between invader and invaded, but the nature of ongoing domination of native peoples in areas such as governance and jurisdiction, identification, recognition, and education” (139-40). Churchill argues that the United States’ attempt to control

Native people through its policies of assimilation originated with violence enacted on the land.

The act of colonizing a populous land, removing and relocating its people, imposing law, and drawing new national borders, is inherently violent. If a population gains security through land, and land is acquired through violence, then it is important to consider who this violence is enacted upon and at what cost a population benefits from such security.

Gertrude Bonnin, under the pen name Zitkala-Ša, addresses these issues of land violence and security in three short stories published in the January, February and March 1901 issues of

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The Atlantic Monthly.10 In her stories, she challenges the United States’ policies of removal, reservations and education and argues that these policies did not provide security for her people, but were acts of violence that displaced her tribe, her family and herself. Like La Flesche, she uses her stories to question the popular dichotomy of civilized verses savage by illustrating the savageness perpetrated upon her people by government, settlers, and the boarding school. Most importantly, Zitkala-Ša does explicitly what is only faintly implied by La Flesche: deliberately employs the metaphor of the prison when describing the Carlisle School in order to emphasize the savageness of this space meant to civilize American Indian children. In so doing, Zitkala-Ša established a trope that other former boarding school students and descendants of students adopted when writing about the boarding school experience.

Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was born on Yankton Agency, South Dakota in 1876 and attended the Presbyterian day school on Yankton Agency before leaving for White’s Manual

Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana at age eight.11 She left White’s at age eleven and returned to

Dakota Territory for approximately three years where she periodically attended Santee Normal

Training School. She returned to White’s and graduated from the school in 1895. She immediately enrolled at Earlham College, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana where she excelled as a student and competitive orator. She left Earlham in 1897 because of ill-health, and was hired as a teacher at Carlisle later that year (Spack 144-5). Zitkala-Ša resigned after only eighteen months of teaching music at Carlisle and moved to Boston where she began writing her

Atlantic Monthly trilogy.

10 Zitkala-Ša gave herself the pen name, meaning Red Bird in Lakota. The fact that Bonnin chose a Lakota name, despite being Nakota, perhaps references a larger Sioux identity (Katanski 114). 11 1876 was also the year that Richard Henry Pratt arrived at Fort Marion with his southwestern prisoners. See Chapter 2.

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In her Atlantic Monthly stories, Zitkala-Ša uses the character of her mother to show how the production of property does not create security, but rather enacts violence against indigenous land and people. The first story in the trilogy, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” begins with

Zitkala-Ša’s mother’s condemnation of the “palefaces.” A young Zitkala-Ša accompanies her mother to the river to gather water. She characterizes her mother as “sad and silent,” her “lips compressed into hard and bitter lines, and shadows fell over her black eyes.” Zitkala-Ša notices her mother crying, and her mother tells her of how the tribe was “driven like a herd of buffalo” and how Zitkala-Ša’s sister and uncle died as a result of the difficult move. She cries, “There is what the paleface has done! Since then your father too has been buried in a hill nearer the rising sun. We were once very happy. But the paleface has stolen our lands and driven us hither.

Having defrauded us of our land, the paleface forced us away.” 12 Zitkala-Ša’s mother’s invocation of the sentimental tropes of the dead child and husband, coupled with the otherwise stoic woman’s tears, prompts the reader to feel sympathy for her mother and the tribe. This sympathy is further exploited when young Zitkala-Ša tells her mother that she will help carry water when she grows big enough, and her mother replies, “If the paleface does not take away from us the river we drink” (38). Zitkala-Ša’s mother’s anger reflects her attitude about the breakup of the Great Sioux Reservation, the forced removal to Yankton Agency, and the high rate of death that resulted from the United States’ endeavor to transform indigenous land into property.

Zitkala-Ša’s mother once again represents the effects of dispossession and government intrusion midway through the third story, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians.” Several years

12 Bonnin’s father was actually a French trader by the name of Felker. She took her mother and brother’s name (Hafen xiii).

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have passed since Zitkala-Ša had been home. Her mother no longer lives in the canvas wigwam from “Impressions” but in a log cabin that she cannot afford to weatherproof. Zitkala-Ša’s brother lost his job at the government clerk’s office, rendering his boarding school education useless and leaving the family without income (384). As Zitkala-Ša and her mother gaze out over the village one night, Zitkala-Ša notices lights scattered along the horizon. Her mother tells her of the “poverty stricken white settlers, who lived in caves dug in the long ravines of the high hills across the river….‘That is a white man’s lodge where you see the burning fire,’ she said” (385).

Her mother’s subsequent curse on the palefaces mirrors her curse from the beginning of the trilogy:

My brave daughter, beware of the paleface. It was the cruel paleface who caused the death of your sister and your uncle, my brother. It is this same paleface who offers in one palm the holy papers, and with the other gives a holy baptism of firewater. He is the hypocrite who reads with one eye, “Thou shalt not kill” and with the other gloats upon the sufferings of the Indian race….She sprang upon her feet, and, standing firm beside her wigwam, she sent a curse upon those who sat around the hated white man’s light. (385)

Although several years have passed in the trilogy’s timeline, Zitkala-Ša shows that not much has changed for her family on the reservation. Her mother is cold and hungry despite moving into a log cabin and sending her children to boarding school. Her brother cannot find work regardless of his boarding school education. And despite moving onto reservation land, the threat of white encroachment continues. As Zitkala-Ša shows, there is no security for her people on the reservation, not because of a lack of property ownership but because of physical displacement for the purpose of white property ownership on the frontier. Through her mother’s curses on the paleface, Zitkala-Ša challenges Bentham’s Eurocentric notion of security through property by questioning to whom this security actually pertains.

The violence exhibited in The Atlantic Monthly trilogy is not one of savage violence between Indians, but a violence imposed on Native peoples from the outside. In fact, throughout

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“Impressions” Zitkala-Ša inverts the popular narrative of Indian/savage, white/civilized by arguing that the education she received at home is more “useful” than the education she received at boarding school.13 Through her mother and her tribe, young Zitkala-Ša learns important lessons in respect, virtue, and hospitality, which Molly Crumpton Winter argues reflect the value of her tribe (71). Above all, her mother teaches her to have “no fear save that of intruding myself upon others,” which she exhibits when visiting her neighbors’ teepees and listening to her elders’ stories (37-9). Through these scenes, Zitkala-Ša shows her reader that she was not raised as a savage but learned to respect others and to know her place within her community. Her lessons in beadwork also teach her how to be a virtuous young woman. Ruth Spack argues that because a

Sioux girl’s virtue and power lay in her ability to create original designs, Zitkala-Ša’s beadwork lessons taught her respectability, similar to Euro-American girls’ needlepoint during the same period. As Ruth Spack cleverly states, “It would appear that Native people on the plains had a

‘cult of true womanhood’ of their own” (155). Zitkala-Ša’s lessons in women’s work and feminine virtue came from her mother on the reservation, not from Euro-American women at the boarding school. Perhaps most importantly, Zitkala-Ša’s mother teaches her that she is a

“dignified little individual”; however, this individuality is stripped from her once she leaves the reservation and enters the white world (37).

Zitkala-Ša continues to play with her white reader’s stereotypes of American Indian savagery by simultaneously characterizing herself as a stereotypical Indian child and a civilized human being. Ron Carpenter argues that Zitkala-Ša both presents the readers with Indian stereotypes and introduces the “civil Indian” who does not fall into the stereotype of savage (3).

13 The word “useful,” pertaining to how boarding school was thought to transform American Indians into people of use to the country, is one that Pratt repeats in his autobiography, Battlefield and Classroom.

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For example, at the beginning of her first story, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-

Ša describes herself as a stereotypical Indian girl: “I was a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer” (37). Here, Zitkala-

Ša plays off of the stereotype of the “wild,” “free” and “spirited” Indian, dressed in buckskin and moccasins and aligned with nature. However, as Carpenter points out, she also continuously exhibits a “civil” respect for others, particularly elders and storytellers (Carpenter 3).

This civil respect, according to Jessica Enoch, contrasts with Zitkala-Ša’s characterization of Euro-Americans as savage and “break[s] down asymmetrical power relations” by showing how “civil” white society transgresses Native social codes (“Resisting”

126-7). I build on Enoch’s claim by arguing that that by “break[ing] down asymmetrical power relations” Zitkala-Ša challenges her readers to see beyond Pratt’s simulation of civilized education and to see Carlisle as a space where white teachers perpetrate savage acts upon

American Indian children. Zitkala-Ša constructs the character of the savage Euro-American primarily by contrasting the lessons in civility learned on the reservation (respect, hospitality, individuality) with the savage way her teachers treat her at school. Young Zitkala-Ša feels embarrassed and disrespected the moment she arrives at school: “As I was wondering in which direction to escape from all this confusion, two warm hands grasped me firmly, and in the same moment I was tossed high in midair. A rosy-cheeked paleface woman caught me in her arms. I was both frightened and insulted by such rifling” (186). This teacher does not treat Zitkala-Ša as a “dignified little individual” but as a “plaything.” Zitkala-Ša describes how she feels assaulted by the loud unfamiliar noises and the institutional environment, and she uses words such as

“embarrassed,” “fear,” “not happy,” and “uncomfortable” to describe the experience of culture

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shock. She witnesses her friend beaten by a teacher for misunderstanding English, and like all boarding school students, she undergoes a haircut, despite hiding and “resist[ing[ by kicking and scratching wildly” (187). For Zitkala-Ša, the reservation acted as a civilized space of learning while the boarding school proved to be a space of violence and savagery.

One crucial way that Zitkala-Ša rescripts the boarding school as a savage space is through her use of prison imagery. For example, in “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Zitkala-Ša describes her room like one might describe a prison cell: “a small, carpeted room, with ghastly walls and ceiling. The two windows, both on the same side, were curtained with heavy muslin yellowed with age. A clean white bed was in one corner of the room, and opposite it was a square pine table covered with a black woolen blanket.” As she sits in one of “two stiff-backed chairs,” she looks about the room and tries “hard to imagine years of contentment there” (382).

The room is “ghastly.” The furnishings are sparse, old, heavy and dark. This is not a comfortable bedroom for someone to live, but a prison cell. Near the end of the story, when Zitkala-Ša has reached her breaking point with the school, she reflects on this space by directly invoking the prison, recollecting “the small white-walled prison which I then called my room” (386). The white walls and bed of Zitkala-Ša’s room invoke the feeling of a prison cell.

The field of carceral studies and contemporary theories of carceral space help us to understand the importance of Zitkala-Ša’s metaphor. Monika Fludernik argues that in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature the “experience of imprisonment…rel[ies] on the container metaphor,” in other words, in the contrast between the outside world and the inside of the prison

(46 emphasis in original). In “An Indian Teacher Among Indians,” Zitkala-Ša clearly demarcates the idyllic exterior of the Carlisle School from the interior, thus representing the boarding school as a prison. When she first arrives at the school, she feels excited about how the campus seems a

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“quaint little village”: “Upon entering the school campus, I was surprised at the thickly clustered buildings which made it a quaint little village, much more interesting than the town itself. The large trees among the house gave the place a cool, refreshing shade, and the grass a deeper green.

Within this large court of grass and trees stood a low green pump” (382). Here, the campus is not imposing, but welcoming. The natural landscape is lush and beautiful, “cool” and “refreshing.”

The water pump in the middle of the courtyard adds to the “quaintness” of the “little village.” On first impression, Carlisle appears to be a welcoming, comfortable place; however, this impression fades once Zitkala-Ša enters the school. Fludernik also argues that the modern prison focused on punishing prisoners through deprivation of civilized comforts, and no doubt do the plain table, stiff chairs, and old dirty fabrics of Zitkala-Ša’s room invoke discomfort. Even the windows, her link to the outside, are dirtied by the age-stained curtains. Fludernik argues that in the prison cell, “The window…serves to underlie the contrast between nature (light, air) and symbolic death (in the prison tomb), and between animacy (voices, human and animal life) and the enforced inanimacy of the prisoner” (54). However, Zitkala-Ša’s windows do not even provide a contrast of light and air for her room but exude symbolic death as they are draped by heavy, old, dirty curtains.

This language of imprisonment and captivity continues when “the imposing figure of a stately gray-haired man,” no doubt a characterization of Pratt, asks Zitkala-Ša to return to

Yankton to recruit students for the school. She recalls him exclaiming, “I am going to turn you loose to pasture!” (383). No longer is Zitkala-Ša the “bounding deer” from “Impressions,” but a tamed animal “turned loose to pasture.” Not only does the man animalize Zitkala-Ša, but

“turning her loose” implies that she is currently captive. This moment in the story acts as Zitkala-

Ša’s realization that she gave up her freedom as a child for the temptation of the “land of big red

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apples.” If, as Fludernik argues, “Carceral spatiality is a metaphorical site signifying physical liminality” (66), then in “An Indian Teacher” the reservation acts as a liminal space in which

Zitkala-Ša can question her childish choice to give up her freedom for “the white man’s papers.”

She realizes that “the large army of white teachers in Indian schools had a much larger missionary creed than I suspected” (384). She calls out this “army of white teachers” for acting hypocritically against the Christianity they preach in the school: the “opium-eater,” the

“inebriate” doctor, and the “white…teacher who tortured an ambitious Indian youth by frequently reminding the brave changeling that he was nothing but a government pauper” (385).

She realizes that these teachers far outnumber the well-intentioned and that she was powerless to change the system. This is the moment she decides quit “searching for the latent good in my white co-workers,” leave Carlisle, and regain her freedom.

Characterizing Carlisle as a carceral space allows Zitkala-Ša to ask her readers to look beyond what Pratt and other reformers present for the public gaze. While the outside may represent a civilized space by appearing like a “quaint little village” with “cool” and “refreshing” landscape, even resembling the Chicago World’s Fair in miniature with its large whitewashed buildings, central courtyard and manicured lawns, the inside is much more bleak in design and practice. She concludes her trilogy with a call for her readers to “pause to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization” (386). Zitkala-Ša’s challenge to readers to see Carlisle as a “semblance of civilization,” or what Jean Baudrillard would call a simulation, questions the boarding school mission and her readers’ preconceptions of the boarding school experience. Baudrillard argues that simulation is “a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real…a perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” and that “simulation threatens the

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difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (2-3). Zitkala-Ša’s trilogy exposes Carlisle’s civilized appearance and its methodologies as a façade, and in doing so reveals the difference between the “true” and “real” savage and carceral nature of the school, and the “false” and “imaginary” front of civilization. In other words, in revealing that the boarding school’s attempt to transform children from savage to civilized is really much more savage than it appears, Zitkala-Ša unmasks the boarding school as a simulation, or “a semblance of civilization.”

Zitkala-Ša used her reputation as a “representative Indian” to create an audience among those who hungered for the voices of the “vanishing Indian.” However, instead of praising the boarding school system for transforming her into a civilized American, as was no doubt expected, Zitkala-Ša illustrates the violence perpetrated upon her people by the “paleface.” She uses her mother to argue that violence enacted through land is inseparable from violence against a people. Zitkala-Ša highlights the effects of removal on her tribe and her family; the very policies that made it possible for many of her readers to live on former Indian land are the same policies that violently displaced her people. Similarly, she challenges her readers’ blind support of the boarding school system by arguing that the schools are not civilized spaces. Zitkala-Ša strips the façade from land policy and boarding school policy and forces her readers to question how civilized these policies really are, who they really benefit, and who gains security.

“A Stranger and a Nobody with No Possibilities”: Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “Prison Scenario” in “An Indian Boy’s Story”

Ah-nen-la-de-ni, given the name Daniel la France at boarding school, is a core figure for seeing the ways that the first generation of boarding school writers used the metaphor of the prison. In “An Indian Boy’s Story,” Ah-nen-la-de-ni uses prison metaphor to tell the story of his education at the Lincoln Institute in Philadelphia; however, unlike Zitkala-Ša, Ah-nen-la-de-ni

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does not use the metaphor to challenge the civilized/savage binary, but to argue that freedom for, not imprisonment of, American Indians is necessary to the United States’ civilizing mission. The wider purpose of using the metaphor then, is to highlight his own imprisonment and to argue for students’ agency and choice.

Putting Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s story in conversation with Monica Fludernik’s definition of the prison scenario in literature helps us to understand why Ah-nen-la-de-ni uses prison imagery in his boarding school story and how this imagery helps him characterize himself as a prisoner, or as he argues, “A stranger and a nobody with no possibilities.” Fludernik observes that even though the modern prison’s model of silence, order, and regimentation dominated prison architecture and management since the early nineteenth century, nineteenth- and twentieth- century writers continue to invoke the dungeon, or “old jail,” metaphor in literature. Fludernik argues that writers use the “old jail” scenario because the “’old’ and ‘new’ prisons are not so different after all” when it comes to the “personal experience of the prisoner.” The experience of the prisoner is “physically and mentally unendurable” and the prisoner’s movement is restrained in both models (45). Fludernik defines the prison scenario:

Prison scenarios naturally focus on the passive mode of being locked up in the prison (external agency impinging on the victim) or on the frustration of agency (not being able to get out). Within the base metaphor (container) the specific prison metaphor therefore anthropomorphizes the spatial coordinates as ingress, egress and transcendence (and/or transgression), and it typically concerns a subject whose experiential self-identity structures the carceral space. (47)

The “external agency” of whom Ah-nen-la-de-ni calls “the authority” at Lincoln “impinges” on his lack of agency as they continually deny him permanent release from the school and even lock him in the school jail. In other words, Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s story focuses on his “frustration of agency” at “not being able to get out.” Throughout “An Indian Boy’s Story,” Ah-nen-la-de-ni seeks career paths that will allow him to become “useful” once released. He enrolls at the local

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public school, works for a lawyer, and takes stenography classes at the YMCA. Although “the authorities” at Lincoln allow him to work and attend school, he and others were still “kept at the school” to “serv[e] as show scholars.” He repeatedly refers to these other students as “inmates.”

This language of bondage, similar to the language of slavery or indentured servitude, reinforces

Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “frustration of agency” over his eight years of forced residency there (three years past his obligation). Furthermore, Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s story emphasizes his loss of self- identity as “the authority” cuts his hair, burns his clothes, forbids the use of his language, and finally changes his name. Just as Zitkala-Ša “lost [her] spirit” when her hair was cut, Ah-nen-la- de-ni became “a stranger and a nobody with no possibilities” once the school changed his name

(1783). Thus, as Fludernik might argue, Ah-nen-la-de-ni experiences his time at the Lincoln

Institute as carceral.

However, despite Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “servitude” to the school and the school’s success at making him feel like “a stranger with no possibilities,” Ah-nen-la-de-ni continues to reconstruct his self-identity and ceaselessly attempts to create his own possibility. He seeks out “new situations” and thrice petitions the school to release him, first to work with the Red Cross during the Spanish-American War, second to attend the Carlisle School, and third to attend a nurse training school in New York City. “The authority” rejects all three petitions. While Fludernik argues that one’s “experiential self-identity structures the carceral space,” for Ah-nen-la-de-ni the forced removal of his self-identity and his search to regain a new identity despite his confinement constructs the space of the Lincoln Institute as carceral.

Ironically, Ah-nen-la-de-ni finally realizes his escape and freedom when he is imprisoned in an actual jail. Ah-nen-la-de-ni was “placed” in the school jail in the rear of the stables after school authorities charged him with throwing his nightgown out of a window, an act that he

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claims he was framed for after complaining about the conditions of the school to the Indian

Rights Association. The school jail mirrors the conditions of the “old jail” in its makeshift placement, high barred window, and in his meals of only bread and water. It is in this jail where

Ah-nen-la-de-ni receives a letter stating his pending acceptance into a nurse training school; however, he realizes his imprisonment means missing the required entrance exam (1785).

Coincidently, on July fourth Ah-nen-la-de-ni realizes his own independence and freedom when a guard accidently leaves his cell door open. He escapes the school and “flees” to New York where he finally uses the language of freedom in his story, declaring, “This new life was very much to my liking. I was free, for one thing, and was working for myself with good hope of accomplishing something” (1786). Here, Ah-nen-la-de-ni insists that he is not only physically free, but mentally free to pursue his own self-identity in the white world.

While Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “prison scenario” clearly echoes some of the imagery of the old jail, primarily in recounting the conditions of the school, his treatment there, and his time in the school jail, much of the imagery in “An Indian Boy’s Story” reflects the modern prison. In this way, Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s “prison scenario” contests Fludernik’s central argument that modern literature draws far more upon the “old jail” than the modern prison for its carceral effects. In this regard, Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s privileging of more carceral tropes, those that resulted from the rise of the penitentiary in the early nineteenth century, would be notable and distinct in literature.

For example, he is bathed and redressed immediately upon entering the school, and students’ uniforms are marked with their identification numbers, much like prison uniforms are today.

Fludernik argues that while the old jail focused on punishment of the body, that the new prison focuses on “derivational techniques that which focus on the curtailing of prisoners’ rights” (62 emphases in original). Ah-nen-la-de-ni not only shows how “the authority” curtails his rights

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through his forced indenture to the school, but also through the school’s methods of surveillance.

In his story Ah-nen-la-de-ni creates a sense of constant monitoring. Some older students act as captains that police the dormitory: “It was his duty to teach and enforce the rules of the place in this dorm.” This surveillance also extended into the playground: “Out in the school yard there was the same sort of supervision. Whether at work or play, we were constantly watched, and there were those in authority over us” (1783). The superintendent also reads letters between students and the outside world, yet Ah-nen-la-de-ni mentions a “secret channel” students used to send out important letters, such as his application to the nurse training program (1785). He expresses a feeling of disrespect regarding this surveillance when he claims, “This displeased us

Mohawks, who were warriors at fourteen years of age” (1783). The joint goal of the Indian boarding school and the modern prison was to transform social others into proper citizens, and surveillance was one method these institutions employed to attain this goal.

Surprisingly, Ah-nen-la-de-ni does not disapprove of boarding school education for

Native children in his story and even approves of the progress narrative of savage to civilized when he marks his peoples’ loss of traditions as “progress” (1786). In fact, he unsuccessfully petitions to attend the Carlisle School because he had “heard [it] was good” (1784). He reassures his audience, “The whole [Indian] community is changing and when the change advances a little further it will be time to open the reservation gates and let in all the world” (1786). In other words, he does not oppose the eventual white settlement of reservation land because civilization of Native people will render reservations obsolete. The purpose of Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s story then is that Indian citizenship cannot be realized when students’ right to privacy is “curtailed” and when they are made to feel like a “nobody.” Only through freedom can the boarding schools achieve their goals of transformation and citizenship of Native peoples.

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By using his Indian name and recounting his Indian upbringing, as well as characterizing himself as a “representative Indian,” Ah-nen-la-de-ni caters to his audience’s desire for the vanishing Indian by giving them both the Indian of the past and the civilized Indian. He agrees with his audience about the benefits of civilization and boarding school education; however, he argues that the opening of the reservations and education in boarding schools must benefit

American Indians. By mixing the metaphors of the old jail and the modern prison, Ah-nen-la-de- ni argues that a carceral environment undermines the mission of the boarding school. Students can only become productive citizens when free to make their own choices about how they use their education as evidenced by Ah-nen-la-de-ni, who can only succeed as a civilized American once he escapes the prison-like Lincoln Institute, makes his own choices and starts his own career as a nurse. He not only succeeds as a nurse, but his freedom gives him the drive to continue to succeed. The last paragraph of his story states, “When I first began to learn I thought that when I knew English and could read and write it would be enough. But the further I have climbed the higher the hills in front of me have grown. A few years ago the point I have reached would have seemed very high. Now it seems low, and I am studying much in my spare time. I don’t know what the result will be” (1787). By concluding his story with these words, Ah-nen- la-de-ni exhibits how his freedom has made him hungry for more education. This quotation leaves the reader with the sense that Ah-nen-la-de-ni is no longer “a stranger and a nobody with no possibilities,” but a man with a whole life of possibilities ahead of him.

The Impact of Boarding School Stories

The rhetoric that American Indians needed to be civilized through the medium of education for the purposes of citizenship and property ownership continued well into the twentieth century. Consider this quotation from the Meriam Report published in 1928:

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Commissioner Burke says in his foreword to “The Red Man in the United States”: Practically all our work for the civilization of the Indian has become educational: Teaching the language he must of necessity adopt, the academic knowledge essential to ordinary business transactions, the common arts and crafts of the home and the field, how to provide a settled dwelling and elevate its domestic quality, how to get well when he is sick and how to stay well, how to make the best use of his land and the water accessible to it, how to raise the right kind of live-stock, how to work for a living, save money and start a bank account, how to want something he can call his own, a material possession with the happiness and comforts of family life and a pride in the prosperity of his children. (348)

According to Commissioner Burke, the purpose of Indian education is to include American

Indians in capitalism through agriculture, labor and eventually property ownership. This language mirrors that of both Bentham and Schurz a half century to a century before. The

Meriam Report, more formally titled “The Problem of Indian Administration,” was commissioned in 1926 by the United States Secretary of the Interior and funded by the

Rockefeller Foundation for the purpose of investigating the effectiveness of federal Indian policy after the implementation of the Dawes Act and educational policies. Investigators and writers of the Meriam Report found many Indian policies ineffective at best, detrimental at worst, and set forth a set of proposals meant to improve American Indian communities. Some of these recommendations influenced the Indian Reorganization policies under John Collier in 1934.

While the Meriam Report repeated much of the same rhetoric as early reformers regarding the end-goal of American Indian education, it also recommended improved methods for reaching that goal. Interestingly, much of what the investigators found regarding the conditions of the schools mimics what boarding school writers described more than twenty years prior. For example, the Report’s argument that boarding school administrators need to recognize that American Indian children are fellow humans and not inferior beings mirrors Francis La

Flesche’s call for a common humanity in the preface to The Middle Five. The Report asserts that schools cannot treat children as lesser people and then expect them to adopt the schools’

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teachings: “It is the task of education to help the Indian, not by assuming that he is fundamentally different, but that he is a human being much like the rest of us, with a cultural background quite worthwhile for its own sake as a basis for changes needed in adjusting to modern life” (354). The Meriam Report publically advocated for what La Flesche asserted twenty-eight years earlier in The Middle Five, “to lay claim to a share in common human nature”

(xv). Like in La Flesche’s and Zitkala-Ša’s stories, the Meriam Report also addressed the health concerns of the schools, calling them “deplorable” (392). The Report exclaims that, “Anyone who reads the statements in the course of study is bound to get a shock when he goes to the schools and sees the most elementary health principles violated and not even sufficient nourishing food supplied” (372). The Meriam Report made official what both La Flesche and

Zitkala-Ša exhibit in their stories, “deplorable” health conditions that led to illness and even death.

The most significant problem the investigators of the Meriam Report found was the lack of properly trained teachers and administrators. The theme of violence against students perpetrated by school staff runs throughout boarding school stories. The Report states that

“routinization,” i.e. the regimentation of students’ schedules, and severe punishments show that the schools lack “any real knowledge of how human beings are developed” (382). Zitkala-Ša remarked on the detriment of the “iron routine” on children in “School Days of an Indian Girl,” and even blames the death of her “dear classmate” on it (190). Zitkala-Ša’s stories of the “iron routine,” the “civilizing machine,” the death of her friend, and the other horrible things she witnessed help her testimony that the daily reality of the schools is more sinister than it may appear to the outside world. The Meriam Report also sought to reveal this façade and urged schools to eliminate the “show” by presenting “less of the marching and regimentation that

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look showy to the outside visitor but hide real dangers” (406). This seemingly references the martial routine and drill hour that many boarding schools adopted from the Carlisle School.14

The biggest problem that the Meriam Report had with “routinization” was that it hindered individuality. According to the Report, students would not become self-sufficient individuals when “The whole machinery of routinized boarding school and agency life works against the kind of initiative and independence, the development of which should be the chief concern of

Indian education in and out of school. What all wish for is Indians who can take their place as independent citizens” (351). The Report suggests smaller classrooms, sleeping quarters, and of course, better trained teachers. It even lists one of the worst violations of individuality as administrators “opening pupil’s mail from home” (406). This argument that schools do not treat students as individuals not only mirrors Zitkala-Ša’s horror at her own mistreatment as a

“dignified little individual,” but also Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s assertion that student success necessitates individuality and freedom. It also shows that Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s depiction of surveillance was not unique to the Lincoln Institute but a larger systematic practice.

We do not yet know if Francis La Flesche’s, Zitkala-Ša’s, or Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s stories influenced the Secretary of the Interior’s decision to investigate boarding schools; however, these authors’ voices contributed to a collective testimony that reflected the American Indian education policy of the time and influenced American Indian writers for at least a century after.

Contemporary writers recall and record similar stories, use similar arguments and formulas, and as will be discussed in the following chapter, employ many of the same metaphors, including that of the prison.

14 The Carlisle Indian Industrial School closed in 1918.

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CHAPTER 5 CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN WRITERS REIMAGINE THE BOARDING SCHOOL EXPERIENCE

In 1968, N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) published the novel House Made of Dawn, sparking what Kenneth Lincoln termed the Native American Renaissance. In their edited collection named after Lincoln’s influential study, The Native American Renaissance, Alan R. Velie and A. Robert

Lee argue that only nine novels by American Indian authors had been published prior to

Momaday’s publication (Velie and Lee 3). When Lincoln published his book in 1983, the number of novels published by American Indian authors had grown to the hundreds. Today it is over one thousand (Lincoln “Tribal Renaissance” 339).

While scholars have discussed the importance of the American Indian Movement (AIM) to the development of the Native American Renaissance, few have noted the importance of prison reform to AIM members in the 1970s. For example, Velie and Lee couch the Native

American Renaissance in the politics and economics of the 1970s, and attribute the rise of the

American Indian novel to “the recovery of sovereignty in matters of tribal governance…the revival of traditional tribal religions, the emergence of the American Indian Movement (AIM) as a political activist movement, the establishment of the multibillion-dollar casino gaming industry from Connecticut to California, the Choctaw Revolution, or Hopi and Navajo mining” (4). Thus according to Velie and Lee, the changes in politics, economics, cultural pride and organization sparked by social movements such as AIM in the 1960s and 1970s created a social and cultural environment open to American Indian publishing. AIM was established in Minneapolis,

Minnesota in 1968 to combat racial profiling and harassment by Minneapolis police. The group’s mission quickly grew in scope and included political activism regarding treaties and policies; the creation of community healthcare, housing, and employment services; and the struggle over the media’s stereotyped portrayal of American Indians.

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In the early 1970s, AIM was in full-swing (the infamous Occupation of Wounded Knee occurred in 1973) and, I argue not coincidently, American Indian boarding school enrollment was at its height; at this time approximately 60,000 American Indian children attended boarding schools (Treuer). AIM was invested in American Indian education as evidenced by its original by-laws. The St. Paul, Minnesota chapter by-laws from 1976 required members to “work for a balanced and informed treatment of the Indian in public school curricula. Support proposed improvements in Indian education that will strengthen, not weaken, Indian personality and cultural identification as well as prepare him for economic fulfillment.” In addition, an article in

AIM’s national by-laws lays out the conditions for establishing a post-Bureau of Indian Affairs

(BIA) school system (“’Self-Determination’”). The attention garnered from American Indian activism led to the 1972 Indian Education Act, which created the Office of Indian Education within the already established Office of Education, and allocated funds toward Indian education beyond what was already provided by the federal government. Moreover, the 1975 Indian Self-

Determination and Education Assistance Act allowed various government agencies to provide grants and other funding directly to Indian tribes and allowed tribes to run BIA programs, including schools. As a result, many tribes took possession of the schools from the BIA; many of these schools are still operational today (Reyhner “American Indian/Alaskan Native Education”).

The American Indian education reform movement directly inspired the American Indian prison reform movement. Laurence Armand French, a psychology professor who worked alongside American Indian prison activists, argues that AIM targeted penitentiaries for being run like boarding schools. In speaking of the Nebraska Penal Complex, French asserts:

The Nebraska Penal Complex was run much like the old boarding schools where any act of Indianism (language, dress, tradition) was readily punished. Not only were Indian inmates punished for being and acting Indian, but unlike their White, African American, and Hispanic counterparts, they were denied any special

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recognition as a whole. They were even punished for seeking each other’s company….The process of isolation and harassment led to the actions by the AIM faction in the early 1970s. (28)

These actions to eliminate the punishment for “being and acting Indian” culminated in 1972 when American Indian prisoners in Nebraska filed a class-action suit that became Indian Inmates of the Nebraska Penitentiary v. Charles L. Wolff, Jr. in 1974 (French 28). This suit resulted in a consent decree allowing American Indians to wear their hair long and granting access to medicine men and spiritual leaders. The prisoners behind the suit in Nebraska, Charles LaPlante and Perry Wounded Shield, subsequently created the Native American Spiritual and Cultural

Awareness (NASCA) group, which spread across the Nebraska penitentiary system and included the women’s prison. The group’s primary purpose was to organize American Indian spiritual and cultural events in the prisons (29).

While the oppressive boarding school-like conditions of the prison motivated the consent decree, the new programs targeted toward American Indian prisoners were inspired by education reforms. For example, French worked alongside LaPlante to found the Native American

Correctional Program in 1977 (LaPlante was no longer a prisoner but director of Lincoln Indian

Center’s Ex Offender Program). French and LaPlante’s program was inspired by the American

Indian Survival School, a school that focused on participatory methods of learning for American

Indian primary and secondary students in St. Paul, Minnesota. This program used the Survival

School method to foster self-worth and a sense of pride through its American Indian Alcoholics

Anonymous program and life skills seminars. Thus, the American Indian education and prison movements of the 1970s informed each other in order to work toward a new era of American

Indian self-determination.

This chapter examines the felt legacy of this moment when boarding school enrollment and American Indian social justice movements were at their heights, and explores how the

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boarding school and the prison intersected in the literature of the Native American Renaissance through the imagery of the prison. Contemporary American Indian writers Laura Tohe (Diné),

Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) use the imagery of the prison in their literature in order to combat the cultural trauma and loss resulting from the boarding school. In imagining and representing the boarding school as a carceral space, these authors create a space in which their characters can reject victimry, and survive and resist the boarding school experience. In this way, these characters embody what Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) terms, “characters of survivance.” I begin this chapter with a discussion of cultural and historical trauma and the legacies that this trauma leaves behind, paying particular attention to the effects of the boarding school on descendants of students. I then transition into a discussion of writing as a way to confront this trauma and as a tool of what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance” before applying this framework to Tohe’s No Parole Today (1999), and Erdrich’s Little No Horse novels. In the final section, I examine how characters in Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) create what Edward Soja reappropriates as thirdspace in order to escape the trauma of the boarding school and become characters of survivance.

The Boarding School’s Legacy of Cultural Trauma

In their foundational article titled “The American Indian Holocaust: Healing Historical

Unresolved Grief,” Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart (Hunkpapa/Oglala Sioux) and Lemyra M.

Debruyn argue that colonization has caused “historical unresolved grief,” which has resulted in many of the problems plaguing Native America today. In other words, they argue that the trauma experienced by one generation can impact subsequent generations and lead to lasting effects such as depression, alcoholism and suicide. While Brave Heart and Debruyn recognize that the history of trauma for American Indian peoples began at contact, they establish that the trauma precipitated by the American Indian boarding school is the cause of current American Indian

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cultural trauma. They argue that the abuse experienced by boarding school students led to larger cultural loss; students lost their sense of belonging and their identities, and lacked parental role models which made many ill-prepared to raise their own children (63-4). Brave Heart and

Debruyn emphasize that the children of American Indian survivors experience the “survivor’s child complex” in which descendants of survivors feel the anxiety, depression and guilt of their parents and “feel responsible to undo the tragic pain of their ancestral past” (66) and thus experience an “incomplete mourning” of loss (68).

Theresa Evans-Campbell argues that contemporary discrimination of American Indians through stereotyping and negative representation acts as re-victimization and reconnects individuals and communities with previous traumas (331-2). This idea of “accumulative trauma” is further developed by Amy Bombay and her colleagues, who conducted a study on children whose parents and grandparents attended boarding schools and concluded that “the more generations that attended IRS [Indigenous Residential Schools so-called in Canada], the poorer the psychological well-being of the next generation” (331). Similarly, in their study on how historical trauma impacts different generations of American Indian peoples, Les Whitbeck and his colleagues argue that loss and trauma are not concepts confined to the past, but are ever- present:

Ethnic cleansing did not end with military defeat and occupation of territory. Rather, it persisted for generations. This means that American Indian people are faced with daily reminders of loss: reservation living, encroachment of Europeans on even their reservation lands, loss of language, loss and confusion regarding traditional religious practices, loss of traditional family systems, and loss of traditional healing practices….The losses are not ‘historical’ in the sense that they are in the past and a new life has begun in a new land. Rather, the losses are ever present. (121)

Thus, according to Whitbeck and his colleagues, trauma for American Indians is not a historical concept, as past traumas result in a sense of loss still felt today. To determine this, Whitbeck and

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his fellow researchers interviewed adults who “were not part of the forced boarding school era” on two upper-Midwest reservations and, using what they call the Historical Loss Associated

Symptom Scale concluded that American Indians’ cultural trauma is partially due to an overall sense of loss resulting from the loss of family ties due to the boarding school (126). Their study shows “that perceptions of historical loss are not confined to the more proximate elder generation, but very salient in the minds of many adults of the current generation” and that

“thoughts about historical losses appear to be associated with symptoms of emotional distress”

(127 emphases in original). Thus, cultural traumas resulting from loss of land, language, religion, culture, etc., which were all at least partially perpetrated by the boarding schools, have a lasting impact on generations that may not have even experienced the boarding schools themselves.

Because the sense of loss is so pervasive in American Indian cultural consciousness and is directly tied to the boarding schools, the boarding school often acts as a subtext of characters’ consciousness, particularly in novels written by Louise Erdrich. For example, in Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum, minor character Seraphine String literally bears the scar of the loss of her home language. In chapter seven, Erdrich introduces the reader to Seraphine, the Child

Protective Services agent that interviews Ira.1 When Ira informs Morris that Seraphine visited her, Morris replies, “Seraphine, War wounds” referencing the white scar across Seraphine’s lips.

Ira asks Morris which war Seraphine was in, and Morris replies, “The one that was conducted on us where they took our children prisoner.” Ira immediately understands the reference: “She went to boarding school then” (236). Later in the chapter we learn that Seraphine, who “had been raised in a traditional way by her grandparents and…spoke little English” was sent to boarding

1 As in most of Erdrich’s novels, the characters are all interrelated; Seraphine is also John’s wife and Morris’ sister-in-law.

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school upon her grandparents’ deaths. Erdrich characterizes the school as a bleak place where

“the children in the rows of beds cried at night and it was the saddest sound…ever heard.” The matrons become particularly incensed when the children speak “Indian,” and:

One day, Seraphine forgot or rebelled and began to speak her own language and would not stop. The matron was showing girls how to mend cushioned chairs. In her hand there was a thick needle for sewing together upholstery. She turned and struck Seraphine. The needle ripped across the girl’s face, and although the doctor who sewed the wound together was sensitive and careful, the scar of speaking her language remained across her lips all her life. (250-1)

The characterization of the school as a prison and the corporal punishment that Seraphine endures emphasizes the general cruelty perpetrated on children in the boarding schools.

However, Seraphine’s boarding school experience is not ordinary, but symbolic, as she was not only punished for speaking her home language, but the scar across her lips acts as a traumatic reminder for her and for those of her tribe of the cultural loss of language. Furthermore, in The

Painted Drum, the story of this loss is passed down to younger generations. The story of

Seraphine’s scar concerns Ira’s daughters as exhibited when they ask their mother what a matron is. When Ira assures the girls that she will not send them to boarding school, the oldest daughter replies, “That’s good” (240). Because Seraphine bears the burden of cultural memory and trauma of the boarding school on her face, her story becomes symbolic of the loss of language experienced by the tribe and by the younger generations.

It is important to note that not every student was traumatized by the boarding school and some even felt that they benefitted from it. K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Creek) argues that students had diverse reactions to their experience depending on their ages and the stability of their home lives. She explains, “Boarding school students had the resilience of children, and in many cases, found happiness in their surroundings. Some people hated and endured their boarding school years; others hated and did not endure: they ran away. Some count their years at school among

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the happiest and most carefree of their lives” (They Called it Prairie Light xiv). Brenda Child

(Ojibwe) asserts that some Native children in Minnesota and Wisconsin preferred boarding school over public school because of the overt racism of white classmates. Some students also preferred boarding school because of the educational and vocational opportunities it offered (22-

3). Yet, Lomawaima recognizes that despite the “relatively humane” practices of some schools, the schools’ mission of erasing Indian-ness was inherently violent (“Tribal Sovereigns” 15). In other words, the fact that some individual students may have enjoyed their boarding school years and benefitted from their educations does not negate the overall impact and sense of loss felt by tribal communities resulting from colonialist and assimilative policies put into practice by the

BIA’s implementation of the reservation system and boarding school.

Scholars of trauma theory, such as Brave Heart and Dominick LaCapra argue that this sense of communal loss must be grieved and mourned in order for the community to survive.

While LaCapra is mainly concerned with testimony and problems of historical accuracy, not literary narrative, he argues that one can use narrative to rewrite memory in order to mourn and

“work through” trauma:

A larger question here is the complex relation of acting out, reliving, or emulatively enacting (or exposing oneself to) trauma and working it over as well as possibly working it through in a manner that never fully transcends or masters it but allows for survival….The problem that clearly deserves further reflection is the nature of actual and desirable responses in different genres, practices, and disciplines, including the status of mixed or hybridized genres and the possibility of playing different roles or exploring different approaches in a given text or “performance.” (109-10)

Thus, according to LaCapra, narrative, and I argue literature, can be used as a space to “act out” trauma in order to work through and ultimately survive trauma. Narrative/literature provides the writer with the space to respond to the trauma through various lenses in order to create meaning and understanding of the traumatic event. Or, as Cathy Caruth demonstrates, articulating an

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abstract and incomprehensible notion such as trauma through narrative gives a victim the ultimate power of controlling the story (153-4).

These narratives are what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance stories,” which he defines as the “renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (1 “Aesthetics of Survivance”). In other words, survivance stories resist a narrative of American Indian subordination and victimry in favor of a narrative of resistance and survival. In this chapter I will examine Tohe, Erdrich and Silko’s texts as

“survivance stories” and illustrate how they use their writing to confront and combat the historical trauma of the boarding schools by representing the boarding schools as carceral spaces.

In doing so, these authors create a narrative space in which to encounter, “act out” and work through a “legacy of victimry” by reimagining the boarding school story as one of survivance.

“Generations of Indian People Spent Time in These Schools”: Prison Metaphor and Cultural Trauma in Laura Tohe’s No Parole Today

In 1999, Diné writer Laura Tohe published her collection of poetry and prose titled No

Parole Today, which addresses the cultural trauma and legacy of the American Indian boarding school. Tohe grew up on the Navajo Reservation west of Albuquerque, New Mexico and is a fourth-generation boarding school student. Tohe’s writing has been widely celebrated and No

Parole Today was awarded Poetry Book of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native American

Writers and Storytellers. Thus, Tohe’s experience as a boarding school student, a descendant of students, and a writer on the subject of the boarding school makes Tohe’s No Parole Today vital to understanding the felt legacy of boarding school students.

Tohe’s collection mirrors the arguments made by Whitbeck and his colleagues that cultural trauma is a result of loss when she blames the boarding school for the loss of Diné culture: “The most crippling legacy of the boarding schools is the devastation of our native

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languages and culture. We are still trying to recover from that loss. Separation from home, land, and culture equals loss of identity and language” (x). Tohe’s collection is an act of survivance against this loss, as it serves as a space for her to confront the history of oppression perpetrated by the boarding schools and to address some of the lasting implications of the schools.

The way that Tohe structures her collection allows her to introduce a greater argument regarding cultural trauma and its legacy on her community and then organize the collection to first highlight the oppressive nature of the boarding schools (Part I) before illustrating how the boarding schools have left a “devastating” legacy. Tohe’s collection is divided into four parts:

“Introduction,” “Prologue,” “Part I: Kill the Indian, Save the Man” and “Part II: No Parole

Today.” “Introduction”; a four page open letter to Richard Henry Pratt, the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first off-reservation, government- funded, boarding school; introduces the reader to the topic of the boarding school, cultural trauma, and more subtly to its lasting impacts. Thus, the introduction lays the groundwork for the collection as it introduces the cultural trauma and history of the boarding school that Tohe develops in the “Prologue” and “Part I” before exploring the boarding school’s residual legacy of incarceration in “Part II,” which she foreshadows with the section’s title, “No Parole Today.”

Tohe uses her introductory letter to Pratt to talk back to the assimilationist policies of the boarding school and to argue that the boarding schools left a lingering cultural trauma that continues to affect American Indians today. She begins this letter: “While American history portrays you as a well-intentioned administrator of Indian education, the legacy that you founded would ultimately work to devastate the indigenous cultures of this country. The assimilation policies you put into place to turn Indian people into civilized white American citizens…still affect us today” (ix emphasis in original). Tohe’s letter begins by rewriting Pratt’s legacy and

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characterizing him not as a “well-intentioned administrator” but as a “devastator” of American

Indian culture. Just as she characterizes Pratt as the devastator, she positions herself, her parents and her grandparents, all of whom attended boarding school, as “survivors.”

Tohe continues her letter by expounding on what she and her forbearers survived. To do so, Tohe uses the prison as a metaphor to not only paint a horrifying image of the carceral treatment of school children, but to also set up her argument for “Part II,” that the high rate of imprisonment of American Indian peoples is among the lasting legacies of the boarding school.

Tohe’s use of prison imagery begins in the second paragraph of her introductory letter to Pratt when she writes, “Generations of Indian people spent time in these schools….Living in boarding schools was similar to serving a sentence” (ix). Emphasizing the word “time” with italics and then following that statement with the more overt link to incarceration introduces the reader to the connection between the boarding school and the prison that she develops in the next prose piece, “Prologue: Once You Were Signed Up,” which narrates Tohe’s grandmother’s boarding school story. Tohe/her grandmother, Julia Barton, creates an image of a three-year-old girl, so small she cannot even reach the sink to wash her hands, imprisoned at the school at Fort

Defiance (which was also the site of a prison camp for Diné/Navajo “hostiles” in the 1860s).

Tohe/Barton characterizes this little girl as a prisoner, dressed in an outfit reminiscent of a prisoner’s uniform: “a denim-striped dress, white and blue.” Barton’s experience becomes more carceral when she transfers to Haskell Institute in fifth grade, and she trades her prison-striped dress for “uniforms and shoes made by nameless prisoners,” presumably other students whose jobs entailed sewing and cobbling, which she reinforces in the following sentence, “Always it was work, work, work” (xiv).

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Tohe/Barton continue their story with a discussion of the school jails. Barton describes the girls’ “dungeon”:

There were two girls in there already, in that dungeon, and it was a real dark place. The rooms were about from here to here, two of them. One on this side and one on that side. They had windows just on this side with little tiny holes. That’s the only window they had. Both sides just like that. There was just one bed with a mattress on it and one blanket….They had a light bulb, just barely enough to see. They didn’t have a toilet but a bucket. They had a bucket down there for them. These two girls used to yell at night. We used to hear them yelling and crying….They usually stayed about a month down there, a whole month. (xiv)

Tohe/Barton’s description of the girls’ dungeon is horrifying. Her reiteration of the darkness, “it was a real dark place,” the lack of windows, the dim light bulb, invoke fear, fear that is reinforced by the prisoners’ cries and yells which also haunt the other girls at night.

Tohe/Barton’s use of repetition in this horrific scene: the darkness, the bucket, the whole month, in combination with the cold, the implied small size of the cells, the crying and the use of the word “dungeon,” all filtered through the lens of a child, creates a horrifying image of what these children survived at boarding school.

Tohe/Barton’s juxtaposition of the girls’ dungeon with the boys’ jail reinforces the carceral nature of the school. She describes the boys’ jail as located right in front of the schoolhouse so that students could see the prisoners as they went to class: “The front part would be open, with bars….During the day we used to see who was in jail as we went into the classroom” (xiv). Presumably, the location of the boys’ jail acted as a way to humiliate offenders and to scare children into behaving, much like the pillory and whipping post were used in old

England. However, like the description of the girls’ dungeon, Tohe/Barton tells the story from the perspective of the girls: “They wouldn’t let us visit them. At that time they wouldn’t even let you look at your boyfriend. You couldn’t even speak to them” (xiv). For Barton, the punishment for the girls, both in terms of the dungeon and the boys’ jail, was not humiliation, but separation

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and loneliness. Yet, one carceral punishment affected both the girls and boys who ran away:

“They balled and chained us just like in those old silent movies” (xiv).

Tohe uses prison imagery in “Introduction” and “Prologue” to locate the origins of cultural/historical trauma in the boarding school, an argument that she continues to develop as she writes of her own experiences in boarding school in “Part I: Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” titled after Pratt’s famous quotation that summarizes his philosophy on assimilation. However,

Tohe’s use of prison imagery in the beginning of her collection also grounds “Part II: No Parole

Today,” in which she argues that incarceration of American Indian peoples is part of the lasting legacy of the boarding school. In her poem, also titled “No Parole Today,” Tohe relates her boarding school experience to that of a prisoner’s, which causes her to sympathize with the Santa

Fe prison rioters in 1980. Tohe writes:

I awoke trying to remember what was said about Santa Fe and prison the blood and emotions spilling over I dressed and poured a cup of coffee

then I remembered

my own scars lying on bunk beds and listening to floor polishers whirling and the bell that drove me to sneaking behind cars and freeways (38)

By indenting the one line, “then I remembered,” within its own stanza, Tohe clearly links her boarding school experience to the Santa Fe prison riot. Just as the “blood and emotions spill[ed] over” the prisoners caused them to riot, Tohe remembers the sound of the floor polishers and the school bell that led her to “sneak” away. In the following stanza, Tohe’s tone becomes increasingly anxious and agitated, and the reader can feel the “blood and emotions” beginning to

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“spill over”: “I swore then I would never / scrub no more walls / and porches at midnight / not for the woman / who sits sideways in auditorium chairs / and steals bacon from the back door / as easily as she could steal your confidence / I’m not from here / no more rubber meat and showering on cement floors / I learned early that my life / was separated by walls / and roll calls”

(38). Beginning this stanza with “I swore then I would never” begins a defiant stance against the work, the confidence-stealing woman, the living conditions and the carceral nature of enclosure and surveillance. Tohe’s own experience as a prisoner at boarding school causes her to relate to the prison rioters.

The titles of Tohe’s two sections, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” and “No Parole

Today,” create a narrative outline for what Tohe uses her poetry to argue: that American Indians are not “paroled” from the trauma perpetrated upon Native children through the assimilatory methods of the boarding school. She uses the poems throughout “Part II” to argue that the hardships faced by American Indians today are lasting legacies of the boarding school. In

“Conversations in Passing” these legacies include alcoholism, violence, police brutality and imprisonment. Other legacies of the boarding school discussed by Tohe in this section include early death, domestic violence, suicide, desecration of land and loss of language. All of these adversities are losses that Whitbeck and other trauma theorists agree has led to the historical trauma of American Indian people.

However, Tohe’s collection is just as uplifting as it is haunting because she uses her writing as a way to speak out against the boarding school and to begin to heal from the effects of the school’s carceral and assimilationist policies. Amelia Katanski argues, “Storytelling, in Diné or in English, guarantees personhood and tribal nationhood and provides the means of recovering all that the schools tried to strip away from their students.” By telling her story, and addressing

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that story to Pratt, “she [Tohe] pointedly discredits the aims and disproves the predicted outcomes of boarding-school policy” (3). However, Jessica Goodkind and her colleagues argue that many Diné prefer to keep the past in the past in order to avoid re-victimization (Goodkind

1022). Goodkind argues that for Diné, “Forgetting is also a part of collective social memory”

(1032). However, Tohe declares that she will “no longer [be] invisible, and no longer relegated to the quiet margins of American culture.” She will not forget, but will write as “a way for me to claim my voice, my heritage, my stories, my culture, my people, and my history” (xii). In writing and publishing her collection, Tohe chooses to break the silence in an act of survivance in order to begin to heal.

This silence is first broken by Tohe’s grandmother, Julia Barton, who tells her story to

Tohe; however, in writing the story and publishing it Tohe opens the story to the community, thus allowing for public healing. Goodkind argues that Diné healing involves recognizing past trauma and transitioning from that trauma to an acknowledgement of control and responsibility for one’s own life. She argues that this involves community ceremony in which the community helps the person heal and return to personhood. Tohe’s collection gives her and her grandmother a space for public healing, as it not only provides the space for Tohe to recognize past trauma but also resist the assimilative practices of the boarding school, thus illustrating how her community has taken back control and demonstrated survivance.

In her collection, Tohe asserts her own and her people’s existence, thus creating what

Vizenor calls a “character of survivance.” According to Vizenor, “The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry” (1 “Aesthetics of

Survivance”). Tohe most clearly demonstrates this character of survivance in her introductory letter to Pratt. Tohe asserts, “A hundred years after you made your statement to the Baptists, we

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are still here. We have not vanished, gone away quietly into the sunset, or assimilated into mainstream culture the way you envisioned” (xi). In conjuring the stereotypical images of the

“vanishing Indian” common of late nineteenth-century popular culture and using the pronouns

“we” and “you,” Tohe fights against assimilatory policies that attempted to erase Indian-ness and asserts American Indian “presence over absence [and] nihility.”2 Tohe concludes her letter:

I voice this letter to you now because I speak for me, no longer invisible and no longer relegated to the quiet margins of American culture, my tongue silenced. The land, the Diné, the Diné culture is how I define myself and my writing. That part of my identity was never drowned; it was never a hindrance but a strength. To write is powerful and even dangerous. To have no stories is to be an empty person. Writing is a way for me to claim my voice, my heritage, my stories, my culture, my people, my history. (xii)

Tohe is not writing herself as a victim but as a survivor and a resistor of assimilation. She breaks the silence by talking back to Pratt in her letter and recognizes that doing so can be dangerous because writing creates power and strength by claiming and preserving “my voice, my heritage, my stories, my culture, my people, my history.” Thus, in writing herself as a character of survivance, Tohe can fight against the very loss that trauma scholars argue perpetuates cultural trauma and begin to heal.

Goodkind writes: “Thus, it seems that narratives about historical trauma and survival are related, and might have value because they both inherently and explicitly emphasize transcendence from past oppressive, genocidal, sociopolitical forces. This is important, because these concepts foreground U.S. Government policies that intentionally attempted to destroy

Native peoples and cultures, while also emphasizing the resilience of those who survived”

(1033). Laura Tohe’s No Parole Today exemplifies the relationship between narratives of historical trauma and survival, or as I would argue, survivance as it is through the narrative of

2 See Chapter 4 of this dissertation for a more developed discussion of the “vanishing Indian.”

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survivance that one can confront historical trauma and begin to heal. However, while Tohe’s narrative does not transcend the past, it connects the past to the present and in so doing confronts the boarding school, reveals the trauma of its assimilatory practices, and “emphasize[s] the resilience of those who survived.”

“They Could Not Cage Me Anymore”: Imprisonment and Escape in Louise Erdrich’s Little No Horse Novels

In The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People, Connie Jacobs argues that the loss of cultural heritage due to land allotment and the boarding school leaves a lasting legacy of cultural discontinuity (88). This loss of cultural heritage is seen most clearly through Erdrich’s character Lulu Lamartine, whose boarding school story is told in the novels Love Medicine

(1984), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little

No Horse (2001). In Tracks, Lulu’s surrogate father/grandfather, Nanapush, tells Lulu the stories of what she missed while away at boarding school: land allotment, feuds between families over property rights, and the increasing influence of Catholicism. Lulu’s loss, as Jacobs contends, is not only loss of heritage and land, but the loss of her mother and her potential status as medicine woman. By developing Lulu’s boarding school story throughout several novels and representing her boarding school experience as carceral, Erdrich connects Lulu’s trauma across generations and demonstrates through Lulu’s son, Gerry Nanapush, that one of the lasting legacies of the boarding school for American Indians is imprisonment. Thus, Erdrich is useful to thinking about incarceration as a legacy of the boarding school as she makes it a substantial plotline of several novels.

Erdrich entered the literary scene in 1984 with her collection of poems, Jacklight, which she quickly followed with her first and award-winning novel, Love Medicine. Love Medicine is the first of Erdrich’s Little No Horse novels, the novels discussed in this section, which trace one

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long fictional story of the Turtle Mountain band across several generations. The success of Love

Medicine marked Erdrich as a “rising star in the newly emerging Native American Literary

Renaissance” (Jacobs 2). Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; however, Erdrich attended a local

Catholic school. She was one of the first women to attend Dartmouth College in 1972, which was also the year Dartmouth began its Native American Studies program. At Dartmouth, Erdrich majored in English and creative writing, but also took classes in Native American studies. After graduating from Dartmouth, Erdrich offered writing workshops at local schools, prisons and hospitals in North Dakota. No doubt then does Erdrich’s firsthand knowledge of the boarding school as well as the prison inform her writing.

Erdrich’s narrative voice sets her apart from the other popular American Indian novelists of the Renaissance, such as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. Rather than centering her stories on a central character or narrator, Erdrich places the reader in the middle of a story without introduction and often without context. As Greg Sarris argues, “The reader experiences long and entangled personal histories acted out, for better or worse, as if the reader were suddenly in the middle of the action” (1). Erdrich achieves this by foregrounding the perspectives of multiple characters and narrators and interweaving characters’ stories through multiple generations, which some scholars have dubbed a “tribal perspective.”3 Lorena Stookey emphasizes how Erdrich weaves particular characters and families together throughout the novels by specific images; for example, Erdrich associates the Pillager family with wolves (18).

3 For scholarship on Erdrich, see Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin’s Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich edited by Allan Chavkin, Lorena Stookey’s Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion, Connie Jacobs’ The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People, and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Louise Erdrich edited by Greg Sarris, Connie Jacobs and James Giles.

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Significantly, I stress that if we also look at how Erdrich weaves together particular spaces, we can see how spatial imaginaries also link characters, families and communities. For example, in this section I will examine how Erdrich uses the imagery of the prison to connect Lulu’s boarding school trauma to her son’s fate of imprisonment.

In the novel The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Lulu narrates her boarding school story and uses carceral metaphors to represent the boarding school space as one of imprisonment. Lulu first uses prison metaphor by referring to the school as a “pit.” When Lulu recalls arriving to town with her mother, Fleur Pillager, to board the cars for school, Lulu says,

“My mother had always picked me up, given me what I wanted, rocked me, never let me weep.

And why did she teach me all this tenderness, this love, if she then threw me in a pit? For that is what the school would be, and better if she slapped me from the first and taught me to be hard”

(The Last Report 243). Lulu’s reference to the school as a pit, a common slang term for prison, helps her express her devastation over her abandonment by her mother, and it is at the thought of this prison that Lulu cries for the first time. However, Lulu’s tears are not ordinary; they leave her feeling as if she is “floating downstream in a roiling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping.

Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out my eyes….my throat was filling, filling” (243). According to Lulu, this trauma is affected by her mother “throwing” her into the carceral space of the boarding school.

This metaphor of the prison continues when Lulu is at school and her classmates literally throw her into a pit, or a “hole.” After a teacher tells the class they could theoretically dig a hole to China, Lulu’s classmates dig a large hole behind the girls’ dormitory and throw Lulu in for no stated reason. Here, the hole holds double meaning, as it is not only a physical hole dug into the ground, but also a slang term for solitary confinement. Solitary confinement in prison leaves

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prisoners alone with their own thoughts, which theoretically encourages penitence. Like a prisoner in solitary confinement, Lulu experiences “regret” that “sliced” through her. She goes

“into a low grief…a black dejection.” The purpose of solitary confinement is to break someone’s spirit in order to make them more compliant, and, as Lulu confirms, “I was again lost in my spirit.”4 However, it is also through Lulu’s spirit, whether of her or belonging to her, that Lulu overcomes her sense of victimry. A spirit visits Lulu during her second night in the hole. Lulu whispers, “I am pitiful” and the spirit agrees, “You are pitiful.” This is Lulu’s first encounter with “a spirit who kept me company from then on out,” not just in the hole, but throughout her life. Lulu says, “But it was that spirit who taught me that to laugh or to cry was all the same, and who gave me the strength to spit pain in the face and love the world in joy. I sat with that spirit, who would never leave me” (247). The spirit does not traumatize Lulu, it does not haunt her.

Rather, it acts as a guide throughout her life, helping her remain optimistic and survive.

In Love Medicine, Lulu, now an adult, tells of her return to Little No Horse from the boarding school and once again uses language of imprisonment:

I came back to the reservation after long years gone, I saw the leaves of the poplars applaud high in the wind. I saw the ducks barrel down, reaching to the glitter of the slough water. Wind chopped the clouds to rolls that rose and puffed whiter, whiter. Blue Juneberry, tough diamond willow. I watched my own face float over the grass, traveling alongside me in the dust of the bus window, and I grinned, showed my teeth. They could not cage me anymore. (69)

Lulu’s juxtaposition of the school’s images, a cage and a dirty bus, with the freeing images of nature reinforces the captivity Lulu experienced at the school. No longer is she “caged” at the boarding school but is welcomed home with the applause of the leaves, the freedom of flying

4 Compare Lulu’s quote “I was again lost in my spirit” to Zitkala-Ša’s reaction upon receiving her first haircut: “Then I lost my spirit.” See Chapter 4 of this dissertation for a discussion of Zitkala-Ša.

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ducks and the glitter of water. The knowledge that she had finally escaped the imprisonment of the boarding school and returned home makes Lulu smile so large she shows her teeth. While

Lulu leaves home having cried for the first time in The Last Report, she returns home smiling in

Love Medicine.

Erdrich also foregrounds the carceral nature of the school through Lulu’s escape attempts, which Lulu narrates in all three novels. Lulu details her first escape attempt in The Last

Report. In The Last Report, Lulu decides to run away once she realizes her mother did not send for her for summer break. She first escapes the school by clinging to the engine support underneath the bus returning to Little No Horse. However, the bus driver catches Lulu a few hours in and returns her to school. As punishment, the matrons force Lulu to scrub the sidewalks on her hands and knees while wearing “the longest, ugliest worst dress on earth—the punishment dress—a solid block of green reaching to my ankles, shapeless and embarrassing” (The Last

Report 250).5 In Love Medicine and Tracks Lulu’s punishment dress is the “hot-orange shame dress.” Lulu remembers in Love Medicine:

I ran away from the government school. Once, twice, too many times. I ran away so often that my dress was always the hot-orange shame dress and my furious scrubbing thinned sidewalks beneath my hands and knees to cracked slabs. Punished and alone, I slept in a room of echoing creeks….I lived by bells, orders, flat voices, rough English. I missed the old language of my mother’s mouth. (Love Medicine 68)

The corporal punishment, solitude, and routine Lulu narrates mimics that of the penitentiary, and the orange shame dress calls to mind the orange jumpsuits worn by prisoners.6 Nanapush recalls this same scene in Tracks:

5 Erdrich also uses the image of a runaway girl scrubbing sidewalks in a green punishment dress in her poem “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” (2003).

6 See chapters 1, 2 and 3.

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Your braids were cut, your hair in a thick ragged bowl, and your dress was a shabby and smoldering orange, a shameful color like a half-doused flame, visible for miles, that any child who tried to run away from the boarding school was forced to wear. The dress was too tight, too small, straining across your shoulders. Your knees were scabbed from the punishment of scrubbing long sidewalks, and knobbed from kneeling hours on broomsticks. (Tracks 226)

Lulu’s body testifies to her escape attempts. She escaped so many times that she outgrew the punishment dress. Her knees were marked from hours of scrubbing sidewalks as punishment.

Through haircuts, shame and punishment, the boarding school attempted to make Lulu into a

“half-doused flame,” like the color of her dress. Yet, when she arrives home, she greets

Nanapush with a “bold smile” and springs toward him (Tracks 226). In spite of all the school’s attempts to civilize Lulu, Lulu’s release from the “cage” and her return home finally free her.

Yet, once home Lulu must cope with the post-traumatic aftermath of her boarding school experience despite her ability to both survive and resist the boarding school. In all three novels,

Lulu’s trauma centers on her mother’s abandonment; however, Lulu’s loss of her mother is not only a personal loss, but represents a larger cultural loss. Connie Jacobs asserts:

Lulu, the only child of the most powerful medicine woman on the reservation, Fleur, is sent away and consequently does not acquire the healing powers that should have been passed on to her. Nanapush has to assume a grandfather’s role in order to fill Lulu in and try to make her understand how tribal events have affected her life and caused her mother to send her away far from revenging Lazarres and Morrisseys who might harm her….Even so, Lulu abrogates her Pillager heritage, maintains a separation from her mother throughout her lifetime, and only in her later years does she begin to esteem traditional values and work for their continuity. (88)

Because Fleur sends Lulu to boarding school, Lulu does not acquire her mother’s healing powers and status as medicine woman within the tribe. She loses her tribal stories, stories that Nanapush tells her in Tracks, and, as Erdrich argues in an interview with Mickey Pearlman, Lulu also loses her language. Thus, Lulu’s loss of her mother represents Lulu’s larger cultural loss as perpetrated by the boarding school.

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Lulu blames her mother for her abandonment and loss, which causes Lulu to divorce herself from her mother for the rest of her life. As already mentioned, readers first witness Lulu’s trauma when Fleur sends Lulu to boarding school and Lulu cries for the first time. When Fleur eventually comes for Lulu, Lulu tells the school principal, “She ain’t my mother.” The more her mother comes to withdraw her, the more Lulu feels the pull to leave, but the power of her spirit keeps her strong. Lulu says, “I had to call on my spirit, the one who came from the earth, to strengthen me whenever I had to meet my mother’s gaze” (The Last Report 252). Lulu continues to feel this pull once she returns home. In Love Medicine Lulu says, “I never grew from the curve of my mother’s arms. I still wanted to anchor myself against her. But she had tore herself away from the run of my life like a riverbank. She had vanished, a great surrounding shore, leaving me to spill out alone” (Love Medicine 68). Fleur’s abandonment traumatizes Lulu, as Lulu feels her mother “tore herself away” from her, leaving her alone to fend for herself in the carceral environment of the boarding school. Lulu cannot forgive her mother for abandoning her, and as a result Lulu separates herself from her Pillager heritage and becomes Nanapush’s surrogate daughter/granddaughter.

In a 1989 interview with Mickey Pearlman, Erdrich argues that the loss of language also precipitates Lulu’s trauma. Erdrich explains, “In government boarding schools during the time she [Lulu] would have been going to school, children would have been punished for speaking native languages….[Lulu is] punished for language, punished for being [her] most fluent and absorbing and interesting self, because self and language are so much the same” (154). Erdrich argues that language deprivation causes cultural loss, as it is through language that humans become intimately connected with their cultures.

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Lulu mourns the loss of her mother and regains some of her lost heritage through her union with Moses Pillager. When Lulu returns to the reservation in Love Medicine, she becomes frustrated with Nanapush’s wife and resolves to join her cousin, Moses Pillager, on his solitary island on Matchimanito Lake. In Love Medicine, Lulu states that she joined Moses to “disturb”

Nanapush’s wife by taking him as her first lover. However, in a 1991 draft of this chapter published as a short story titled “The Island” in Ms. Magazine, Lulu joins Moses Pillager because, “I needed to find a person who would tell me where I was from.” Allan Chavkin argues that this quote demonstrates how Lulu needed to “search for her language, her heritage and her identity, and since her mother’s abandonment, Moses was the only Pillager that could unite her with her heritage and help her “[burn] out the corrupt assimilationism that still clings to her after her residence at the government boarding school” (Chavkin 97-8). In other words, in the absence of her mother, Lulu turns to Moses Pillager to gain cultural knowledge and heal from the trauma of the boarding school. Furthermore, as readers learn in another Little No Horse novel, The

Bingo Palace, the ghosts of the Pillagers inhabited Moses Pillager’s island (The Bingo Palace

272-4). Thus, Lulu returns to her ancestors by returning to the island, and it is through this return that Lulu can begin to heal from the trauma of the boarding school.

Through her union with Moses, Lulu becomes pregnant with her first child, Gerry. In

Love Medicine, readers are introduced to Gerry, a convict who prolongs his three-year prison sentence for assault by continuously escaping prison. During one of these escapes, Gerry shoots and kills a state trooper on Pine Ridge and receives two consecutive life sentences. Gerry’s escapes make him a local hero, and he meets his wife, Dot, while on a speaking tour. Gerry’s son, Lipsha, describes Gerry: “famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert,

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escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups” (Love Medicine 341).

It is these characteristics that link Gerry most closely with Lulu, and Erdrich compares

Gerry to Lulu throughout the Little No Horse novels. Like Lulu, Gerry disliked his school experience, and is described as “testing the limits of the mission school system, at twelve” (Love

Medicine 117). When Bev, Lulu’s brother-in-law, visits Lulu after her husband’s death, he

“see[s] Lulu most clearly” in Gerry: “Lulu pointed Gerry out among the others. Bev could see

Lulu most clearly in this boy….His eyes were black, sly, snapping with sparks. He led the rest in play without a hint of effort, just like Lulu” (Love Medicine 117). In this quotation, Gerry is compared to Lulu twice, in both looks and spirit. Also in Love Medicine, Lulu reflects on her children and says, “Time went fleetingly by until every one of my boys was a grown-up man.

Some did me grief, though I was proud of them. Gerry was one. In and out of prison, yet inspiring the Indian people, that was his life. Like myself he could not hold his wildness in”

(Love Medicine 288). Here, Lulu implies a comparison between Gerry’s escapes from prison and her own escapes from boarding school, as neither could “hold [their] wildness in.”

Gerry’s escapes from prison mirror his mother’s escapes from boarding school, thus further linking the boarding school to the prison and demonstrating how the legacy of imprisonment is passed down through the generations. While Gerry’s various escape plans are both narrated and alluded to in the Little No Horse novels, Erdrich only details Lulu’s first escape by clinging to the engine support underneath the bus returning to Little No Horse. In The

Bingo Palace, Gerry escapes after the plane transporting him from the prison in Illinois to

Minnesota crashes. Lipsha exclaims, “Gerry Nanapush has foiled guards, shrunk himself through an opening no larger than a pie box, somehow managed to torque himself into the body of a truck

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that drives through gates with him clinging underneath….This time, it seems, he flew” (232 my emphasis). Gerry’s clinging underneath a truck to escape prison parallels his mother’s clinging to the engine support under the school bus to escape boarding school. By linking these two escapes between mother and son, Erdrich connects the boarding school and the prison as carceral environments from which Lulu and Gerry must escape. And, like Lulu, Gerry is good at escaping, but bad at getting caught. Gerry’s famous motto, “no steel or concrete shitbarn could hold a Chippewa” applies to his mother also, as it is the “wildness” that Gerry inherits from her that instigates their respective escapes.

By using the spatial imaginary of the prison when writing of Lulu’s boarding school experience and then characterizing Lulu’s son as a literal prisoner, Erdrich shows how cultural trauma is passed through generations. This link is most clearly exemplified at the end of Love

Medicine when Gerry says, “We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can” (357). Because of her own imprisonment at boarding school and the consequent cultural loss, Lulu deals Gerry the hand of imprisonment. Gerry “plays” this fate by continually escaping prison, which, ironically, also imitates Lulu’s escapes from boarding school. Relatedly, in Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace, readers see how this fate continues to be passed down through Gerry’s son, Lipsha. Although Lulu works to regain her sense of culture through her return home and her union with Moses Pillager, the cultural trauma enacted upon

Lulu by the boarding school continues to impact her family, as incarceration is a fate she passes down through the generations.

“This was No School, This was a Prison”: Escape in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

In Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999), sisters Indigo and Sister

Salt, the last of the fictional Colorado River Sand Lizard tribe, are captured by the Indian police

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during a raid on the Ghost Dance and forcefully taken to prison-like boarding schools. Indigo is taken to Sherman Institute in California, runs away, and is found in a neighboring orchard by

Linnaeus the monkey and Hattie Palmer, a “failed” religion scholar. Indigo accompanies Hattie and her botanist husband, Edward, on a trip to New York and Europe hoping to find her mother, who was last seen travelling east with the Ghost Dancers. Sister Salt is taken to the Colorado

River Indian agency, enrolled in the Parker Indian School (which is really just a laundry business), runs away and starts her own laundry business, spends three months in jail, eventually reunites with Indigo and returns home to the gardens in the dunes. In this section, I argue that the boarding school’s carceral setting is critical to Indigo’s escape, an escape which gives her the knowledge and resources necessary to ensure her own community’s survival. Furthermore, I use

Edward Soja’s notion of thirdspace to explore how Silko represents the boarding school and the reservation as prisons in order to create a space of oppression and dominance that the girls resist by running away and forming alternative communities where social “others” can oppose dominant power structures and find empowerment.7

Leslie Marmon Silko grew up in Laguna Pueblo, and while her great-grandmother and her Aunt Susie attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Silko attended a BIA school until the fifth grade when she enrolled in Manzano Day School, a private school in Albuquerque, New

Mexico. It was at Manzano where Silko began to write, and she continued writing throughout college at the University of New Mexico. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, Silko enrolled in the University of New Mexico’s Indian Law Program, but dropped out halfway through the program claiming that she could do more good for her tribe through her art than through law. In

7 For general scholarship on Silko, see Laura Coltelli’s Reading Leslie Marmon Silko, Brewster Fitz’s Silko: Writing Storyteller and Medicine Woman, and Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko edited by Ellen Arnold.

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1977, Silko published her first and highly accredited novel, Ceremony, which has become an accepted work of the American Indian literary canon. Silko credits her ability to publish to the popularity of American Indian art during the Native American Renaissance, yet dismisses her role in the Native American Renaissance as a “coincidence of time.” As she argues in an interview with Thomas Irmer and Matthias Schmidt, “From generation to generation people had been telling stories….we were just waiting for this” (151).

Silko’s literature is critical to understanding how American Indians heal from various cultural traumas, and Gardens in the Dunes is especially useful in thinking about community building for the purpose of healing from the cultural trauma of the boarding school. Scholars of

Silko often focus on how her characters work to restore personal and communal balance. This argument is most often made in reference to Ceremony, as scholars examine how Ceremony’s protagonist, Tayo, returns from World War II and undergoes his own ceremony to recover from post-traumatic stress disorder. Once Tayo restores personal balance, he works to restore communal balance as evidenced by the tracking and recovery of his family’s cattle.8 Returning home to restore balance is a common theme in American Indian literature, a pattern that William

Bevis calls “homing in.” While we cannot ignore the importance of Indigo and Sister Salt’s return to the garden in the dunes I wish to add that the restoration of personal and communal balance also lies in the intersections of their home knowledge and the knowledge they gain from other spaces. In Gardens in the Dunes, Indigo and Sister Salt restore personal and communal balance not only by returning home, but also by using the knowledge gained from their travels to create a new community at home.

8 This line of argument is especially prevalent throughout essays in Allan Chavkin’s edited collection, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook.

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In Gardens in the Dunes, Silko reproduces the circumstances faced by many Native peoples of “hostile” tribes in the late nineteenth century: government authorities and Indian police arrest/capture adults and either send them to jail on the agency or to the prison-like reservation, and capture their children and send them to prison-like boarding schools. In each of these scenarios, the fate of American Indians is prison.9 Silko plays out both of these scenarios with Sister Salt and Indigo. By representing the boarding school as a prison for Sister Salt, Silko reinforces the idea that the school and the prison are identical and creates a contrast between the school and the freedom that Sister Salt later achieves. With Indigo however, Silko imagines an alternative to this no-win situation; Indigo runs away, explores the world, and finds her way back home with new knowledge that she uses on her own terms in order to survive.

Indigo is forced to board a train for Sherman Institute and Sister Salt is taken to Parker

Indian School after Indian police capture them during a raid on the Ghost Dance in Needles,

California. Sister Salt complains that “this was no school, this was a prison”: “The Parker Indian school superintendent called it a school, but he ran the place as a moneymaker for himself; he charged the soldiers and survey crews twenty-five cents per bundle for the dirty laundry that

Sister Salt and the other young women washed in the school laundry. After the first week, Sister

Salt began to mutter under her breath; this was no school, this was a prison” (206). Silko, from

Sister Salt’s perspective, characterizes Parker Indian School as a prison because the girls learn servitude and forced menial labor rather than academics. Silko also characterizes the surrounding reservation as a prison: the men are “required to show up every morning to be assigned their work for the day,” the superintendent manipulates the tribespeople into staying on the

9 See Chapter 2 of this dissertation for a discussion of how Pratt characterized the reservation as a prison in order to deflect his readers from the carceral space he made at Carlisle.

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reservation, and the women are sent to jail when they become restless and fight one another

(207). Sister Salt decides to run away from the prison-school/reservation and start her own laundry business with her twin friends, Maytha and Vedna. Every day the girls run away from school after roll call with a stash of laundry supplies to do the dam workers’ laundry at half price, which eventually leads to the girls’ serving a three-month sentence in the Yuma jail. Under white authority, Sister Salt cannot escape jail, as she is either confined in the prison-school or in an actual jail. It is only after Sister Salt is released from jail and sets up her own tent near the river that she finally feels free: “Now, free of the agency rules, she used her sharp flint blade to cut away the high buttoned neck on the school blouse, then severed one long sleeve after the other” (213-4). Silko represents Sister Salt’s freedom from white authority through the destruction of her European-style clothing and her refashioning of it into something more practical. Yet, at the river Sister Salt is never quite free from the white world as she relies on the white men’s laundry for money and witnesses the devastating effects of the dam they build. Her lover, an African American man named Big Candy, becomes increasingly greedier as he makes more money off of the white men; greed that she eventually loses him to. Silko writes, “Angry tears filled her [Sister Salt’s] eyes; this place was almost as bad as the reservation at Parker”

(214). Sister Salt’s escape, then, is not complete until she returns home to the gardens in the dunes.

Silko also represents Sherman Institute as carceral and, like Sister Salt, Indigo must escape from the boarding school in order to achieve freedom. The reader first sees the carceral nature of Sherman when the school matron and janitor, two mission Indians, punish Indigo for speaking the only English words she knows: swearwords. The matron and janitor wash Indigo’s mouth out with soap and lock her in the mop closet overnight. This scene in Gardens in the

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Dunes mimics the scene in D’Arcy McNickle’s 1936 novel, The Surrounded, when Mike is locked in a closet at the mission school and is visited by ghosts that traumatize and haunt him throughout the story. However, unlike Mike, and similar to Lulu, Indigo finds solace in the darkness and quiet of the closet and in the ghosts of three Alaskan girls she watched die at the school. The girls send the message: “She [Indigo] had to get away or she would die as they had”

(70). By representing Sherman as a carceral space, Silko emphasizes the urgency of Indigo’s escape.

Indigo runs away to Hattie and Edward’s orange groves where Linnaeus and Hattie find her hiding in the bushes. Silko continues to underscore the carceral nature of the boarding school through Edward and Hattie: “Edward had alerted [Hattie] to the runaways from the Indian school a few miles down the road. No danger. No cause for concern. Only the first-time students tried to run away; after the first year they were not so wild, he said, and she laughed gaily and replied,

‘Thank goodness we haven’t got a penitentiary next door!’” (74). Ironically, Hattie’s joke that the school is not a penitentiary only calls the reader’s attention to the fact that it is. Silko again reinforces the carceral nature of the school when Hattie becomes infuriated over Edward’s intention to recapture Indigo, bind her with a rope, and return her to school: “Hattie became determined the child would not be bound and dragged away like a criminal” (108). Criminals are sent to the penitentiary, not to school. Hattie’s solution, then, is to convince the school that

Indigo should accompany her and Edward on a trip to New York and Europe as a lady’s maid, although Hattie treats Indigo more like a daughter. Indigo readily consents, as she believes she can find her mother out east with the Ghost Dancers. Through Indigo, Silko reimagines the consequences of students’ escape from imprisonment. Rather than recapture and punishment,

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Indigo’s escape means adventure and survival. Thus, Indigo’s escape and subsequent adventures seem even more fantastical against the backdrop of the prison-like Sherman Institute.

Throughout her adventures, Indigo gathers knowledge and resources that later become essential to her own community’s survival, which notably is only made possible by Indigo’s escape from boarding school. Indigo meets Hattie and Edward’s families in Oyster Bay, New

York, Hattie’s eccentric Aunt Bronwyn in Bath, and Bronwyn’s friend Professora Laura in

Lucca. Each of these relationships in each of these places centers on gardens, which link Indigo to the women that cultivate them. As Mary Magoulick argues, “Throughout the novel we see gardening as a fundamental means for building community and learning life’s most important lessons, especially from the point of view of women” (30). Indigo tours the gardens of Edward’s sister Susan, Aunt Bronwyn and Laura and collects knowledge, both positive and negative, from each of these women. Indigo learns about conspicuous consumption from Susan’s garden; she learns about different plant and animal species, antiquities, and stories from Bronwyn and Laura.

While Indigo absorbs experiences and information from these women, these women, particularly

Hattie, can potentially learn from Indigo. For example, when Indigo, Hattie and Edward arrive in

England, Edward becomes uncomfortable with the site of the old slave market in Bristol. To this,

Indigo replies, “My sister and I know how to hide from the slave catchers.” When Hattie expresses disbelief, Indigo insists, “I’ve seen them, Hattie…We were on the hilltop with

Grandma Fleet. Off in the distance there we saw the children tied together in a line!” (233).

Whether Hattie believes Indigo or not, Hattie has just as much opportunity to learn from Indigo’s world as Indigo has experiencing and learning from Hattie’s.

The knowledge that Indigo acquires from these women and her experiences is represented through the seeds that she collects from their gardens, particularly the hybrid

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gladiolus seeds given to her by Laura. Throughout Gardens in the Dunes, Indigo collects seeds, animals (she is given Linnaeus and a parrot named Rainbow) and alliances. At the gardens in the dunes, Indigo reunites with Sister Salt and her baby (called the little grandfather), Maytha and

Vedna. Hattie considers joining the girls after Edward’s death, but she moves to Bath with

Bronwyn after realizing she does not belong. Indigo plants her seed collection at the gardens in the dunes and the hybrid gladioli only grow Indigo’s hybrid community. As Barbara Robins argues, “Silko embraces the possibility of text as both resistance and survival strategy….Indigo represents survival/hybridity, a cross pollinator of cosmopolitanism. The skills and seeds Indigo acquires will become survival through hybridity” (43). As we read on the final pages of the novel, these seeds not only become the girls’ food and survival (they eat stew made from “a little of everything” with red amaranth tortillas), but the gladioli help keep peace in the community after the dam results in a massive flood around the church at Road’s End, where Maytha and

Vedna purchased their aunt’s property. Maytha and Vedna’s presence at Road’s End angers the

Christian townspeople because Maytha and Vedna “were Lagunas and did not belong,” but this anger becomes confrontational when the church floods and Maytha and Vedna’s home does not.

In order to maintain peace, Maytha and Vedna “took an old bucket full of freshly cut flowers to the brush-covered shelter the flooded Christians used as a church. At first the twins weren’t sure if their peace offering would be accepted by their neighbors. But the next week, they found the old bucket at their gate, so they filled it with flowers” (477). And, as Indigo finds, the gladiolus spuds could also be eaten! The seeds collected from Indigo’s adventures represent Indigo’s hybrid communities—the communities of women she fostered with Hattie in Europe and her new community with Sister Salt, the little grandfather, Maytha, Venda, Linnaeus and Rainbow.

The seeds nourish this community both physically and spiritually.

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In creating a community in the gardens in the dunes, Indigo and Sister Salt create what

Edward Soja calls “thirdspace.” Soja builds from Henri Lefebvre’s theory of thirdspace in order to argue for a social space where the oppressed can find community and enact change. Soja interprets Lefebvre’s thirdspace as a space where the real (firstspace) and the imagined

(secondspace) come together. Soja argues that thirdspace is “simultaneously real and imagined and more (both and also…), the exploration of Thirdspace can be described and inscribed in journeys to ‘real-and-imagined’ (or perhaps ‘realandimagined’?) places” (11). In other words, thirdspace is not merely the combination of both first and secondspace (both real and imagined), but is the offspring of first and secondspace—where the real and imagined become one-in-the- same. Soja interprets this thirdspace to mean a space for “potentially emancipatory praxis, the translation of knowledge into action in a conscious effort…to improve the world in some significant way” (22 emphasis in original).

By using the imagery of the prison, Silko establishes a sense of thirdspace where power, according to Soja, “is contextualized and made concrete.” For both Indigo and Sister Salt, the boarding school is an oppressive space dominated by repressive authoritarianism. However, by running away, both Indigo and Sister Salt construct a thirdspace, a space full of “possibilities for community, resistance, and emancipatory change” (Soja 87). Through the imagery of the prison,

Silko establishes a dichotomy between the first/secondspace of the boarding school and the thirdspace Indigo and Sister Salt create. Through their gardens, Indigo and Sister Salt translate the knowledge gained from their separate experiences into action and improve their community by first building an alternative and welcoming community at the gardens, and second by sharing the fruits of their gardens with the surrounding community. Indigo and Sister Salt’s thirdspace community is informed by, and inclusive of, the multiple people and communities Indigo and

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Sister Salt encounter on their travels, by Sister Salt’s friends, by Sister Salt’s African American lover and their baby, by the ghost dancers, by the Christians at Road’s End, among others.

Furthermore, the community Indigo and Sister Salt form at the gardens rejects white oppression while still making space for all who are oppressed regardless of race, specifically Hattie. While this thirdspace is highlighted by the carceral first/secondspace of the reservation and the boarding schools, in running away and forming a community of “empowerment and multiplicity,” Indigo and Sister Salt are able to create an alternative life free from the carceral conditions of the reservations and the boarding schools.

In a similar way as the gardens in the dunes represent a thirdspace for Indigo and Sister

Salt, it also represents a space of survivance. Chris LaLonde argues that Vizenor’s survivance “is an active stance taken in light of and against the will to power and dominance. It captures the critical quality of resistance to domination, a resistance that is rooted in ‘active presence’” (214).

By running away from the boarding schools, by Sister Salt starting her own business, and by

Indigo gathering information and seeds, both of the sisters take an active stance against power and dominance. In fact, so does Hattie when she leaves Edward after realizing that he used her and Indigo as a front to illegally cut citron in Corsica.

Moreover, in writing Gardens in the Dunes, Silko perhaps uses her own writing as survivance. In an interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko tells of how she often incorporates heard stories into her writing. For example, Silko tells Arnold, “My grandfather, Henry C. Marmon, went to school at Sherman Institute, and the early part of where Indigo talks about the Alaska girls who came and got sick and died, Grandpa told me that. That really happened. So a lot of what this is, is a kind of accretion, a gathering slowly of all these things I’ve been interested in,

I’ve heard about, I’ve read about, a book someone’s given me” (164). In Gardens in the Dunes,

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Silko rewrites and reimagines the deaths of the Alaska girls. While they are no doubt victims of an illness contracted at Sherman, Silko gives the girls’ death purpose and “active presence,” as only in death can they warn Indigo to escape. Kathryn Hume argues that, “Rewriting one’s experience…involves assuming responsibility for one’s own outlook and refusing to accept any sense of victimization” (129). Thus, in imagining Indigo’s escape from the Sherman Institute,

Silko rewrites the legacy of Sherman students not as one of victimization but one of survivance.

By representing the boarding schools and the reservation as a prison, Silko creates thirdspace where people from different backgrounds can come together and learn from and empower one another. Imagining the spaces of the boarding school and reservation as prisons creates a contrast to the community that the sister’s build, a community that only happens because of their escapes from the carceral space of the boarding schools. Through the sisters’ escapes, Silko imagines an alternative to the boarding school and to the fate of incarceration, as it is through their adventures after running away that the sisters gain the knowledge needed to take action and create community.

Conclusion to Chapter 5

The popularity of American Indian literature, sparked by the Native American

Renaissance, provided American Indian writers with opportunities to publish their own stories.

Among the stories these authors told is the story of the American Indian boarding school experience. Trauma scholars have argued that the boarding school is at least partially responsible for American Indian cultural trauma, as its assimilatory mission forced Native communities to feel a sense of loss regarding their cultures and languages. By using the imagery of the prison when writing of the American Indian boarding school experience, Laura Tohe, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko actively confront this trauma and rewrite the boarding school narrative as a narrative of survivance.

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In No Parole Today, Tohe directly challenges Richard Henry Pratt’s assimilationist practices and uses her poetry and prose to assert an active presence. By linking the boarding school to the prison, Tohe argues that one of the lasting legacies of the boarding school is the high rate of incarceration of Native peoples. Erdrich exhibits this legacy through her characters,

Lulu Lamartine and Gerry Nanapush. For other students, such as Silko’s Indigo and Sister Salt, survivance is in escape from the prison-school and in the creation of thirdspace.

In an interview with Per Seyersted, Silko asserts that the Native American Renaissance impacted American Indians whose “self-worth [was] somehow undermined, or wounded, by schools….I think it made them feel free to talk about their culture…And the younger people because of this revival, are not afraid or not ashamed” (32-33). Thus, in writing the boarding school experience, Silko, Tohe and Erdrich also enact survivance, because in re-writing the boarding school story as a story of survivance these authors have inspired generations of

American Indian people to reject shame and embrace active presence.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

In Chapter 1 of this dissertation I asked the question: why do American Indian writers use the imagery of the prison when writing about the American Indian boarding school? I have used this dissertation to show how the origins of the American Indian boarding school were influenced by the prison reform movements of the nineteenth century, specifically the theory that a criminal (or a “savage”) could be transformed into a “useful” American citizen through the proper environment, architecture, surveillance, labor and education. Examining this literature through the lens of the spatial imaginary of the prison allowed me to place Pratt’s adaptation of a carceral environment into conversation with students who experienced that environment. In other words, I revealed how Pratt created a carceral space out of the Carlisle Indian School and also demonstrated how former students and descendants of students experienced and represented the space as carceral.

In Chapter 2, I examined Colonel Richard Henry Pratt’s personal correspondence housed in the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in order to argue that Pratt was indeed inspired by the second prison reform movement, a movement that corresponded with his tenure as jailor to the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa and Comanche prisoners of war at Fort Marion in St.

Augustine, Florida between 1875 and 1878. I sustained this argument in Chapter 3 by asserting that Pratt continued with his experiments in architecture and space planning, surveillance, labor and education when he opened the first federally-funded, off-reservation American Indian boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. Thus, the first half of my dissertation answered the question why do contemporary American Indian writers use the imagery of the prison when writing about the boarding school by arguing that it is because the idea that the institution of the boarding school could transform a “savage” into a

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citizen through space planning and architecture, labor and education was inspired by the penitential notion that the prison could transform a criminal into a citizen through the same regimes.

If the regimes of the boarding school were modeled after those of the penitentiary, then it only makes sense that American Indian writers would use the imagery of the prison when writing about the boarding school experience. By using the imagery of the prison, the first American

Indian boarding school writers exposed the school as a space of cultural genocide, thus rescripting Pratt’s narrative that the schools freed students from their former savage lifestyles on the reservations. Contemporary American Indian writers continue to engage with carceral metaphors in order to re-write the boarding school story as one of strength, resistance and survival.

By locating the origins of the off-reservation boarding school at Fort Marion and tracing the schools’ effect through literature, I demonstrated that the boarding schools’ methods of assimilation left a legacy of cultural loss and trauma for many American Indian tribes. In this conclusion, I address how this trauma continues to impact American Indian education today. As I touched on in Chapter 5 through an analysis of Laura Tohe’s (Diné) No Parole Today and Louise

Erdrich’s (Ojibwe) characters Lulu and Gerry, a relationship exists between the cultural trauma perpetrated by the boarding schools and the high rates of incarceration of American Indian people today. The cultural trauma left by the boarding schools has had a negative impact on many American Indian students, which in turn has contributed to the high rates of incarceration.

Here I will discuss this school-to-prison pipeline and how American Indian communities are attempting to disrupt it through self-determination in education.

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According to a study conducted by the National Indian Education Association in 2009, only 82% of American Indian and Alaska Native students graduated with a high school diploma or equivalent, 8% less than the national average and 12% less than their white cohorts. Only 69% of American Indian and Alaska Native students received a high school diploma in four years.

American Indians have the highest dropout rate of any racial or ethnic group in the United States

(“Statistics on Native Students”). This statistic is not only startling, but is important to this dissertation in that it directly correlates with the history and cultural memory of the boarding schools and with today’s high rates of incarceration for American Indian peoples. According to the United States Bureau of Statistics, “On a per capita basis, American Indians had a rate of prison incarceration about 38% higher than the national rate” and could be as much as four times higher in local jails than the national average (Greenfield).

Melina Angelos Healey, Law Clerk for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of

Tennessee, calls the relationship between American Indian education and American Indian incarceration the “school-to-prison pipeline.” In her report titled, “Montana’s Rural Version of the School-to-Prison Pipeline School Discipline and Tragedy on American Indian Reservations,”

Healey argues that one of the lasting legacies of the American Indian boarding schools is a lack of trust in schools and education in general: “The sad history of public education for American

Indians has led to mistrust and skepticism of the system by tribal communities.” She also argues that the history of American Indian boarding schools may impact teachers’ concern for students:

“The legacy regarding tribal culture and traditions as inferior and unworthy of instructional time may also negatively impact how American Indian students are viewed by teachers and other pupils, and how the American Indian students respond academically to these negative stereotypes” (24). In other words, American Indian boarding schools may have also left a legacy

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of stereotypes that consider American Indian students bad students, a stereotype that teachers perpetuate and American Indian students internalize.

These stereotypes, as part of the lasting legacy of the American Indian boarding schools, are thus a factor in the high rates of suspension, expulsion, and dropouts for these students.

Healey’s study argues that American Indian students in Montana are twice as likely as their white classmates to fall below proficiency in math and science, and three times as likely to fall below in reading (28). American Indian students were almost five times as likely to be expelled from school and four times as likely to be suspended (30-1). Students who are suspended or expelled from school have a high risk of becoming involved with the criminal justice system.

Using data from a study conducted by the New York Civil Liberties Union, Healey argues that

“suspended students are 26% more likely to be involved with the legal system.” This problem becomes even more troubling considering schools’ tendency to suspend students of color.

Furthermore, when schools involve the police in their disciplinary procedures “schools move students directly into the juvenile justice system rather than allowing them an opportunity to correct their behavior before creating a court record” thus leading to “an ultimate fate of incarceration” (Healey 46).

Perhaps even more troubling is how this discipline relates to the high rates of suicide by

American Indian youth. Healey argues that this imbalance in discipline “not only push[es] children into the juvenile and criminal justice systems, [but] also contribute[s] to feelings of low self-worth that precipitate self-harm and suicidal ideation among youth” (41). Depression and thoughts of suicide, which are significant problems among American Indians, can be punished with jail time and a criminal record. For example, because of the lack of safe houses and mental health services on the Fort Peck reservation, Fort Peck “created a new criminal charge that

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allows prosecutors to detain persons threatening suicide.” Thus, children who seek help for depression and suicidal thoughts can incur jail time and a criminal record, which only deters those needing help from seeking help (40). This is a huge problem in a state where in 2010 11% of American Indian high school students on reservations reported attempting suicide. Healey limits her study to Montana, but no doubt her findings are reflective of a larger national problem.

What can we do to break the school-to-prison pipeline? Healey argues for the need to fund American Indian education programs, to train teachers on cultural sensitivity, and to increase mental health services. Many American Indian studies scholars stress the need for self- determination in American Indian education.1 In 1975, Congress passed the Indian Self-

Determination and Education Assistance Act, which allowed tribes to run their own schools in contract with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As of the 2007-2008 school year, the current Bureau of Indian Education funded 183 elementary and secondary schools on sixty-four reservations in twenty-three states and served 42,000 students. Of these 183 schools, 125 were operated by the tribes (“The Bureau of Indian Education”). Tribal schools give tribes more flexibility in determining their own educational needs and setting their own goals. In this way, tribal schools can teach students tribal and western knowledge using the methodologies the tribes and indigenous educators best see fit.

Daniel Wildcat (Creek) defines self-determination as the “indigenization of education,” meaning “the act of making our educational philosophy, pedagogy, and system our own, making the effort to explicitly explore ways of knowing and systems of knowledge that have been actively repressed for five centuries” (Deloria and Wildcat vii). Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock

1 For example, see Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat’s Power and Place: Indian Education in America, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty’s To Remain Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education.

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Sioux) argues that this indigenization of education must be embedded in the “history and culture of the tribe,” must teach knowledge within a cultural/tribal context, and must compare and

“reconcile” Indian and western perspectives (82-6). Deloria and Wildcat emphasize that these goals be accomplished through experiential learning, which stresses learning through living:

“Whatever information is obtained in higher education must, in the Indian context, have some direct bearing on human experience” (126). This stresses community service and emphasizes asking critical questions such as, “how does what we receive in our educational experience impact the preservation and sensible use of our lands, and how does it affect the continuing existence of our tribe” (110-1).

For example, many students at the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School, known as the Bug

School, on Minnesota’s Leech Lake reservation enrolled at the school because Ojibwe culture and language is at the core of the school’s mission. In a four-part editorial about the Bug School published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, staff writer Jill Burcum reports, “Language and culture are at the core of a BIE [Bureau of Indian Education] school day instead of at the periphery, offering an alternative educational approach for American Indian students, whose graduation rates have been the lowest among any ethnic group.” Thus, Burcum argues that BIE schools’ “culture-at-the-core” curriculum provides a solution to American Indian students’ low graduation rates. A large part of the Bug School’s mission is to keep the Ojibwe language alive and the school offers a language-immersion program in its elementary school. Burcum states the importance of language immersion: “By starting kids early, it’s [the school] hoped that they

[students] will achieve the fluency that their parents did not.” Along with a focus on language, the school’s literature classes analyze traditional stories and the school days often begin with a sage ceremony. Richard Armstrong teaches a “seasonal” class at the Bug School that focuses on

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outdoor activities such as gathering edible plants, building a sweat lodge and tanning hides.

Burcum also notes that many BIE schools have “flag-draped spirit poles where students can seek out peace during a hectic school day” (Burcum “’We’re Going to School’”). The Bug School’s full integration of Ojibwe language and culture into its curriculum helps keep students enrolled in the school and engaged in their educations. Burcum argues that “culture-based education…improve[s] outcomes” by keeping students involved and providing students with a safe space full of staff and students that understand and care about each other.

However, many BIE-funded tribal schools lack the money and resources they need to compete with their public school counterparts. For example, the Bug School’s dilapidated and unsafe facilities disrupt student learning, and many Leech Lake reservation community members fear that because of this the school will eventually fail to draw students or will be shut down completely. The Bug School’s high school building was not constructed to be a school; it is a pole-barn that originally housed an auto mechanic shop and school bus garage. The makeshift school’s buildings are rodent infested. The roof of the pole-barn partly caved in under heavy snow the winter of 2013, the floor is warped and leaks, the bathroom waste system backs up, the heating system is failing, the building contains mold, and the electric wiring is retrofitted. The pole-barn needs to be evacuated when winds reach 40 miles per hour. As one ninth-grader exclaims, “We’re going to school in a tin can” (Burcum “’We’re Going to School’”). Not only is the physical structure of the school in disrepair, but the classrooms lack equipment and other necessities. For example, the science classroom does not have lab tables or storage for hazardous materials, and it only has a few microscopes. The lack of adequate physical space and equipment

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is not only a problem at the Bug School but at many of the BIE’s 183 schools (Burcum “Separate and Unequal”).2

The physical space of a school is necessary to students’ success. While culture-intensive education has shown to increase American Indian student success, attending school in unsafe and cold buildings that lack basic equipment no doubt impedes learning outcomes. Furthermore, basic equipment is needed in tribal schools in order for these students to be competitive with their non-Native peers, especially at a time when the STEM fields are ever in demand and

American Indian students fall behind in math and science. This is why Burcum argues that “what they [the Bug School’s students] need foremost is a safe, structurally sound building.” Burcum quotes Anton Treuer, the executive director of the American Indian Resource Center at Bemidji

State University: “Physical space matters. You become who you hang out with, and you become what you hang out in” (Burcum ‘”We’re Going to School’”). The Bug School and other tribal schools have shown how a culture-based curriculum has provided American Indian students with the support system necessary to their success; however, tribal schools cannot reach their full potential when they lack a physical space conducive to learning. Self-determination in education can only be fully realized in a safe place filled with the proper equipment.

Ironically, the BIE has reopened several nineteenth-century boarding schools, including

Flandreau Indian School, Chemawa Indian School, and Sherman Indian High School, and renovated them into spaces for American Indian education through self-determination. In their essay, “The Place of American Indian Boarding Schools in Contemporary Society,” Patricia

Dixon (Luiseño) and Clifford Trafzer (Wyandot) demonstrate how contemporary American

2 Burcum notes that sixty-three of the country’s 183 BIE schools, including twenty-eight of Arizona’s BIE schools, ten of South Dakota’s twenty-two BIE schools, and four of North Dakota’s eleven BIE schools, are listed in poor condition.

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Indian boarding schools can help disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. They argue that for some

Sherman students who have been expelled from other schools, “the school has become their last hope for social and educational redemption.” The authors recognize that not all students are

“redeemed,” but some of these students find “a space at the school that encourages Indian students through sports, clubs, cultural activities, and academics” (234). Like the tribal schools, boarding schools provide students with a culture-intensive education that supports and encourages students rather than punishing students for their tribal identities. Thus, while the nineteenth-century boarding schools were originally inspired by the penitentiary, the contemporary boarding schools have been transformed into spaces meant to prevent American

Indian imprisonment through self-determination.

Boarding schools do not only draw at-risk students, but also students seeking a culture- intensive education. Dixon and Trafzer explain that some students choose to attend Sherman because Sherman couches academics within a culturally competent environment. Others choose to attend because Sherman offers extracurricular activities that their previous schools did not, because they want the structure that Sherman provides, because they want to attend school with other American Indians, or because Sherman may provide them with “access to a college, university, or trade school that could not be as easily obtained if they remained at home.” Other students may wish to attend Sherman to escape the problems of alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and suicide on the reservations (235).

While students at contemporary boarding schools understand the difficult history of the boarding school, many argue that the schools have become “Indian” in that they “respond to the needs and objectives of Indian people” (Dixon and Trafzer 240). As one student writes, “These days boarding schools are trying to give back to the Native American communities…you can’t

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erase the past and that we can only move on and work to better boarding schools and use them to unite all the Native American tribes so that we can Stand tall…fight for everything that we have lost throughout history” (235). Thus, while students recognize Sherman’s former goal of assimilating American Indian children, current students believe that Sherman encourages them to be successful (in whichever way a student may define success) and American Indian.

As this student recognizes, the cultural memory and history of a space like Sherman continues to live on, even as it has acquired a new use. As I argued in Chapter 3 using the spatial theories of Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre, the memory of a space is never quite removed from a space. The memory of a space always remains, leaving behind traces of its history. While we cannot change the carceral histories of the boarding school and the ways that the boarding schools were constructed and experienced as carceral, we can change how the next generation of students experiences the schools. Transforming American Indian boarding schools into spaces of self-determination not only resists the original assimilative mission of the boarding schools, but also creates a new history and a new memory—a history and memory of opportunity, strength, and self-acceptance. The American Indian boarding schools created a legacy that contributes to the difficulties many American Indian students face in school today; however, ironically, boarding schools (and tribal schools) can potentially be part of the solution.

I am not arguing that contemporary boarding schools are better than tribal schools, or that

Sherman Indian High School is a “good” school whereas the Bug School is a “bad” school. What

I am doing is illuminating two models of contemporary American Indian education and arguing that the BIE continue to support self-determination in education by allocating needed funds to optimize student learning. Thus, to begin to break the school-to-prison pipeline, the BIE needs to continue to support self-determination and allocate the money necessary to make BIE schools

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competitive with their public school counterparts. Burcum reports that “$1.3 billion [is] needed to put all BIE schools into good condition” (“Separate and Unequal”). While this is a lot of money, the United States Government undertook the responsibility of American Indian education with the signing of various land treaties and should therefore work towards allocating the money to begin construction on these schools. Additionally, more research needs to be done on the success rates of contemporary American Indian boarding schools and the role American Indian boarding schools can play today. Improving American Indian education programs is necessary to breaking the school-to-prison pipeline. These schools create a space where students’ cultures are not just valued, but become a part of the curriculum, encouraging students to take stock in their own educations. This move to revive the boarding school as a space for self-determination is the latest in what this dissertation has shown is a long process of rescripting American Indian boarding schools to make them less carceral and more activist spaces.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sarah Hayes received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in the summer of 2015. She graduated with her M.A. from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota and with her B.A. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Hayes has received numerous awards, including the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and

Manuscript Library Graduate Research Fellowship, University of Florida’s College of Liberal

Arts O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship, University of Florida English Department Graduate

Student Teaching Award, and the University of Florida Writing Program Mentor Fellowship.

Hayes has presented her research at national conferences including the Society for the

Study of American Women Writers conference, the Conference on College Composition and

Communication, the College English Association conference, and the South Central MLA conference. Additionally, Hayes’ blog post, “The Factory Girl as Anti-Seduction Story,” appears in the American Antiquarian Society’s spring 2014 Just Teach One.

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