Dr. Amanda Zink
Interviewee: Dr. Amanda Zink
Interviewer: Doug Exton
Description: In this presentation, we'll look at some writings of American Indian women who encountered the colonial, domestic education propagated by federal Indian schools and white women reformers who lived and worked in Indian communities throughout North America. We'll see how these Indian women writers altered the course laid out for them by these reformers and teachers, for in learning to practice the rituals of domesticity they also learned to write about those domestic rituals and sentimental values in syncretic ways. Dr. Amanda Zink is Associate Professor of English at Idaho State University where she teaches courses in ethnicity, indigeneity, sexuality, gender, and intersectionality in literature. Her research and teaching focuses on American literatures from the margins, with particular emphasis on American Indian literature from the late-19th century to the present. Her first monograph came out in 2018 from the University of New Mexico Press and is titled "Fictions of Western American Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950". With the support of an IHC Research Grant, she is currently compiling an anthology of literature written by students at the Indian boarding schools in Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.
Date: 2020-08-11
Topics:
The visual topic map is hidden for screen reader users. Please use the "Filter by Topic" dropdown menu or search box to find specific content in the transcript.
Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for tonight's Connected Conversation, a program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho Humanities Board. I'd like to remind you all that you may submit any questions using the Q&A feature located at the bottom of the screen. With me tonight is Doctor Amanda Zink from Boise State University.
It's an honor to have you with us tonight. And I turn it over to you.
Dr. Amanda Zink: All right. Thank you so much, Doug, for moderating us tonight. And to Jennifer Holly for inviting me and to, of course, the IHC for sponsoring this series of talks that's helped us stay connected during this very strange summer. Before beginning, I'd like to acknowledge that the state of Idaho occupies the unceded homelands of the this Shoshone, Bannock, Paiute, Coeur d'Alene, Kootenai, and Nez Perce peoples.
I'd also like to acknowledge, particularly as I am a non-Native scholar, that the terminology I'm using tonight is historically fraught. You'll hear me reference the indigenous peoples of North America interchangeably as Native American, Native American, Indian, Indian, and indigenous. Whenever possible, I use tribally specific names. You'll also hear me read the word squaw in quotation, and when referring back to the quotations, I would never use this word in my own vocabulary, as it has similar historical weight to using the N-word.
I was told I have about 40 minutes to talk to you before the Q&A, so I'll do my best to stay under that mark. So without further preamble, let me share the screen so that you can see, the PowerPoint presentation and follow along with me. In this talk tonight, we'll look at some writings of American Indian women who encountered the colonial domestic education propagated by federal Indian schools and white reformers who lived and worked in Indian communities throughout North America.
I use the term propagate and its association with breeding and reproduction. And intentionally, as I show federal officials used domestic education to reproduce American Indian women as copies of Anglo American women by virtue of their newly acquired domestic skills and sentimental values. Newly domesticated Indian women would in turn propagate American values among their families and communities. I also choose propagate for its etymological relation to the word propaganda.
Both words that find their origins in the Catholic Church and 18th century treatises for disseminating the faith. Some critics describe the curriculum for the federal boarding schools as thinly disguised colonial propaganda. The Indian women writers I discuss here altered the course laid out for them by these federal reformers and teachers for learning to practice the rituals of domesticity.
They also learned to write about the domestic rituals and sentimental values. I begin by contextualizing my readings of boarding school literature at a historical intersection where Indian reform movements and the rise of public domesticity collide. From there, I interpret articles and poems written by young girls at various Indian schools around the country. I argue that the school girls practice of writing about domesticity laid the groundwork for American Indian women writers to engage the rhetorics of sentimentalism and domesticity that characterize much of the writing about Indians by Euro-American women.
In the decades surrounding the turn into the 20th century through their curriculum of domestic education. Female reformers and school officials did their best to control how Indian girls learned, practiced, and propagated the rituals of Anglo-American domesticity. But once taught to write, these Indian girls matured into professional writers who could influence their own responses to their domestic education and would manipulate the sentimental discourse in ways reformers and officials could never have predicted and would have never desired.
The Indian women writers I discuss later in this chapter, and that will just touch on towards the end of the talk tonight, are Estelle Armstrong and Nez Perce, Sophia Alice Callahan, Creek, Morning Dove, Okanogan, Ella Deloria, Dakota Sioux, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Paiute, and ... Yankton Sioux, all who engage the sentimental and domestic rhetoric to narrate and negotiate complicated responses to their domestic educations, positing a syncretic, sovereign domesticity.
It is no coincidence that the Indian education efforts, especially the education of Indian girls, centered on home and domestic life. As Jane Simonton points out, several historians argue that domesticity was an imperial construct used by the white middle class to uphold its power in a diversifying and expansionist nation. Among others, Amy Kaplan, Anne McClintock, Margaret Jacobs, Peggy Pascoe show how domesticity and women's work were indispensable tools for Americanizing the indigenous peoples of the North American landmass we now know as the United States.
Religious groups such as Council of Women for Home Missions, non-denominational reform clubs such as the Women's National Indian Association, and groups associated with the Works Progress Administration and the Indian New Deal, gave white women from the mid-19th century to the mid-twentieth century the opportunity to take up the cause of the Indian less fortunate and extend their own influence beyond the confines of their home and immediate familial social circles, and out into the public sphere.
Ironically, the very confines they sought to transcend the private sphere of home and family provided the tools and values they used to colonize Indian women. Peggy Pascoe and Siobhan Senier argue that these white women reformers were likely more motivated by their own desire for moral authority and self authorization than by philanthropic or compassionate impulses to better the lives of those around them.
Allison Bernstein questions the appropriateness of the methods of such programs as the Women's National Indian Association or the Indian New Deal, arguing that replacing Indian gender roles with white gender norms was indeed a cultural imposition, even though its participants saw it as progressive, working to replace tribal gender roles with Euro-American ideals. White women lived and worked in and near Indian communities all over the United States, and this work spilled over, not surprisingly, into the curriculum of the federal Indian schools, especially at the boarding schools, to lesser or greater extents.
Nearly every historian and critic of the boarding school points out the intentional efforts among school officials to instill domestic values in female students. These scholars have established comprehensively and inarguably, the centrality of the ideology of domesticity to the school's express purpose, which was to kill the Indian and save the man. Indeed, Richard Pratt and other boarding school officials imagined that the most direct course to saving Indian men was chiefly through their women.
The Indian schools received standardized curricula from Washington, D.C., a course of study for the Indian schools of the "U.S. Industrial and Literary" was written by Estelle Real in 1901, and shows that this training and domesticity was organized at the federal level and was equally prioritized alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic. Perhaps domesticity even held higher priority, for in the housekeeping lesson, reel instructs teachers thus, if there is time for nothing else, housekeeping must be taught.
The domestic curriculum, real and others wrote and implemented, was founded on the white racist assumption. Assumption that Indian parents, and particularly Indian mothers, were sorely lacking in their ability to raise children who could in any way adapt to life under the new regime of settler colonialism. Mollie Gaither, a school official from Oregon, captures this assumption in her report for the superintendent of schools in 1897, and she writes, the Indian girl comes to us from a home where the mother is the drudge and beast of burden.
And if the daughter thinks at all on the subject, she knows that this is the part expected of her in the life which lies before her. Hence, the most readily accepted training in our schools is that which, in their providence of nursery for true womanhood, searches. The young girl teaches the young girl not only to knit and sew, to bake, and to mend, to wash and to scrub, to care for the young, the old, the sick, but also gives her the strength of character to become an independent, self-reliant, capable of assuming any burden that life in its manifold chances and changes may lay upon her.
Once an Indian girl was removed from her own mother's supposedly inept influence, the boarding schools provided replacement mothers, school matrons usually, but not always, white women whose job was to serve as a more wholesome replacement for the girl's darker and immoral natural mothers. If the superintendent was the stern patriarch of the institution, the matron was its instinctive mother.
One of the patriarchs of, Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Moses Friedman, was superintendent and editor of its publications in 1909. And here, you can see this quote that distills the stories of the civilizing progress that Carlisle presented to its readers. In particular, the last sentence really kind of sums up, not only Friedman, but the the reformers attitudes towards native home life in general.
This last sentence, where he writes, the Indian girl herself believes that her greatest work is in elevating her own people. It is her function to arouse the red man from his lethargy. Carlisle's Domestic Education and Outing programs, where the Indian girl is placed in some well recommended household, strove to transform Indian girls into Indian women by supposedly rescuing them from the reservation that would turn them into squaws in the passage above.
Squaws apparently do not qualify as women.
And Indian girls do not become Indian women until they have graduated from Carlisle's program. After graduation, Indian women were to perform the critical work of returning home and American izing their communities. I argue here that Friedman used Carlisle's publications to reproduce and reinforce the domesticating work of Carlisle's programs. The programs domesticated Indian girls during their years at school.
The publications served not only as textbooks on domesticity for students at school, but also as dictatorial, do it yourself domestic manuals for students who had already returned home. And it wasn't just the the officials at the boarding schools who were propagating this message. I'm going to read to you part of an excerpt from George Reid's address, at a commencement at Carlisle in 1909.
George Reade was then the president of Dickinson College, which gives us an idea of the ways that these these narratives were being, shared and, and, kind of circulated at all levels of, of society. Reid says, I think this is the finest commencement I have ever witnessed since I have been to Carlisle. And that's 20 years.
It shows the splendid progress you were making, and I learn a great deal every time I come here as to the progress of the Indian. I was delighted to see a young lady and other young ladies with her, with her hair dressed ala pompadour, and of the most pronounced character. And I also noticed that these ladies were wearing the latest director gowns.
These are the representatives of the Indian race, and I am absolutely sure that no young lady who parades around here today with a direct, far gone gown on, will ever go back to the Indian blanket. I heard one of the young ladies say that the ambition of her life was to be a neat housekeeper. And then she added, I wish to be economical.
And I thought, what a sense of relief must pass over the minds of these Indian braves when they heard a woman absolutely state that she desired to be economical. I watched with considerable interest the process of making that bed over there. You are learning all these beautiful arts of housekeeping here and all about the economies of life. And I'm sure you will put into splendid practice by and by the lessons you have here acquired.
We want you to become good citizens of the Republic. That is what the whole school is for. To train young men and young women to become good citizens. And we hope every one of you will become a citizen of the United States. And that you will be manly men and womanly women. It's worth noting that this address was given in 1909, and the Indian Citizenship Act was not passed by Congress until 1924 with an assist, in essence, forced citizenship upon all Native Americans.
So several of read statements reinforce the school's position that domesticity signifies an Americanized Indian woman, and they betray how much Euro-American and popular culture influences his measure of gender roles. Reid assumes that the Indian woman who has felt the joys of Anglo-American fashion, wearing a pompadour hairstyle and a direct... gown, would never abandon such fashionable attire for the so-called garb of black Indians.
His assertion that he overheard an Indian girl say her life's ambition was to be a neat and economical housekeeper not only underscores the girl's internalization of the school's dogma, but echoes the sentiments found throughout popular women's magazines of the period and elsewhere in this book. I write a lot about, popular magazines. Finally, that he jokingly refers to the Indian braves who will be relieved that their potential mates value meat and economical housekeeping.
Also shows Reid's assumptions that assimilated Indians, though he assume Indians will only marry other Indians and that they will be heterosexual, will appropriate the Euro-American, gender roles modeled in magazines that by 1909 had already become go to guides for American consumer culture. The inclusion of Reid's address in this issue of The Indian Craftsman was but one of many such editorial decisions Friedman made with the apparent goal of reiterating the school's dogma of domesticity.
Reid says that he watched with considerable interest the process of making that bed over there, undoubtedly referring to the industrial talks that the school included in their commencement programs to demonstrate what the students had learned. This image reproduces a photograph that appears in the same issue of The Craftsman, a few pages after Reid's address. The photo captures the commencement demonstration that was meant to prove the domestic assimilation of female Indian graduates to those who attended the commencement, which no doubt included community members.
Carlisle students and faculty, and perhaps even family members of the graduating students. The intended unintended effects of these performances would be three fold. Community members might watch this performance and be moved to participate in what Carlisle called the outing program by hosting students in their own homes. Underclass students in the audience might watch it and look forward to the day when they, too, could participate in the outing program.
And if there were family members in the audience, they would see that their children had learned and what habits they might bring back to their tribal communities. Publishing a photograph of this demonstration would have had similar intended effects, with the added benefit that everyone who received the publication could be influenced by this commencement demonstration. If, as Amelia Kaczynski argues, we can assume that Carlisle students and 9000 households around the United States read the Carlisle publications, then thousands of people might have seen this photograph of Indian women wearing the correct wires and pompadour while making beds, sewing clothes and setting tables.
Initially, these photographs might be viewed as novelty. They might say, look at the Indian women dressing and acting like white women. But eventually these photographs would lose their impact. I would argue that this is exactly what Friedman and the other producers of the Carlisle publications counted on, that reading essays and seeing photographs about Indian women and domesticity would be both normalizing and routine to Indian and white gazers alike, and that whites can be secure in the knowledge that Indians women would always be almost the same, but not quite the same as white women, to use a formulation of postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha.
Ultimately, then, the photographed Indian students, willingly or not, will turn into regulatory agents of Anglo-American femininity and domesticity to each other.
As the original caption of this image implies. Friedman used this photograph to tell a story of Carlisle's success. The Indian students dressed in Anglo American clothes are not anomalies, but represent the appearance of the student body at large. The visiting Blackfeet, in their traditional regalia, recognized the students style of dress as a material product of their education and that it is good a benefit.
Quite literally, the subjects in these photos are trading gazes. In turn 1913, readers who view the photograph would notice the contrast between the American and the Indian fashions. Two of the three Americanized girls are literally standing a step above the Blackfeet people, figuratively signaling the superior of both white culture and Americanized Indians. If the Blackfeet are the old Indians, then the gowned girls are the new Indians.
The federally educated want to blend into Euro-American culture, and let it not be overlooked that these new Indians in the photograph are all women, despite the fact that they are supposed to represent the general students of Carlisle from the 1880s to the early 1900s. White reformers thought that they could most effectively assimilate American Indians by first converting Indian women to Euro-American habits.
Affection, and domesticity. Otis Mason, a famed anthropologist, wrote in his book "Women's Share in Primitive Culture" that savage tribes can now be elevated chiefly through their women, to this regulatory and normalizing end. The Indian craftsmen are craftsmen, and its later incarnation, the Red men, contain essays and notes about Indian women and domesticity, and nearly every issue between 1909 and 1912 includes dozens of photographs of Indian domesticity and the homes of Carlisle's former students.
Many of the essays and photos concerning domesticity focused on Carlisle's outing program. As we already saw in the February 1909 issue of The Craftsman. Friedman writes an update about the outing system, arguing that for years it has been one of the most important features of the school's work, and that because of Carlisle's geographical position in the East, it is likely to be more successful than the outing programs in the West.
Publishing essays like that would have served multiple purposes. They challenged schools in the western U.S. to implement outing programs. And by the way, the Chemawa School in Salem, Oregon was open just a year after Carlisle was opened, and it's still running today. It's the longest, and oldest continuously operating boarding school in the US. They encourage to see the benefits of participating in the programs, fostered pride among the families who housed the students and enforced reinforce the school's legitimacy and progress in solving the, quote unquote, Indian problem.
Here's a collage of photos originally published in the May 1910 issue of The Craftsman, which depicts Indian girls performing a series of tasks associated with Anglo-American domesticity. The two images on the left hand side show the girls engaging in modern mechanical methods of doing laundry and processing milk. The girls perform both tasks outside in a conspicuously manicured lawn contained by a quintessential white picket fence.
The placement of these girls in such artificially natural settings might resonate with contemporary readers who, prior to Carlisle's civilizing efforts, were more used to seeing Indian girls photographed or illustrated in wildly natural settings. The two images on the right hand side show the girls performing the indoor women's work of childcare, embroidery and needlework that all the girls are wearing white dresses.
That one is rocking a presumably white child, that two are working near a whitewashed picket fence, and that one is sewing near a starched white bed. Tells the viewer that these Indian girls have been whitewashed, literally and figuratively, as before. These photographs serve several functions to assure the reading public that Carlisle is in the business of American Indians.
To remind student readers of their proper places and performances, and to advertise to Pennsylvania home owners and potential employers the tasks they could expect Carlisle Indian girls to perform.
Indeed, the work of the boarding schools exemplifies Homi Bhabha's assertion that colonial mimicry is the is the desire for a reformed, recognizable other as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite the goal of the boarding schools domestic education programs. Some argue, was to create Indian women who were near approximations of white women. They could perform Victorian domesticity, but the performances they enacted would be as servants in white women's homes under the watchful eye of the lady of the House.
But while at school, the Indian girls also drafted sentimental literature.
Annie Goyitney, a Laguna Pueblo and graduating student at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, asks in her 1901 commencement address what should be the aim of the Carlisle Indian girl? As part of the answer to her question. Rights. The Indian girl perhaps does not realize the value of her education, for she does not know what it is to struggle for a living, as other girls do, who have had no aid to depend upon.
Yet many of us are afraid to start in life for ourselves. But we should be womanly and face whatever comes. If a girl finds that she must go home to her parents, she can be a great help to them, as she can teach them the right ways of living and make the home comfortable and cheerful for them. She may at first find hardships in their way of living, but her aim should be to show them that the ways of the white people bring more comfort and happiness.
Indian students... that Goyitney's address smacks of the rhetoric of colonialism, and the dogma of domesticity is no accident. She would not have been allowed to speak otherwise. Indian students were taught to to read right, to feel right about the right ways of living and their colonial educations. The next lesson was learning to write right. Structuring the rest of this argument, is that unwittingly, the boarding schools trained a generation of native women writers who repurposed the dominant, feminized discourses in the United States in the decades surrounding the turn into the 20th century through their curriculum of domestic education.
Female reformers and school officials did their best to control how Indian girls learned, practiced, and propagated the rituals of Anglo-American domesticity. But once taught to write, these Indian girls became professional women writers. Some of them did, who shaped their own responses to their domestic education and would manipulate the sentimental discourse in ways reformers and officials did not anticipate.
Reading boarding school writing in this way, as Beth Piatote writes, helps make visible the resilience of the tribal national domestic by centering the intimate domestic, the Indian home and family as the primary site of struggle against the foreign force of U.S. national domestication. And by the way, Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce from our very own southeast Idaho.
She's now a professor at Berkeley. The sentimental tasks texts that I give you examples of, here for the rest of the talk show how writing into such, dominant discourses is central to the Indian students survivants and so subverts the before and after aims of the boarding schools, thus disrupting not only the plot of domestic ideology, but the conventions of sentimental form.
If we look at this archive of boarding school texts as a product of a writing circle that spans decades, student writing like Annie Goyitney needs becomes foundational to the more widely circulated work of Estelle Armstrong that college and others students write. Other students read that writing. More students read what graduates wrote. Some continue reading writing and the circle continues.
In this way, boarding school writing perpetuated discursive circle, in which American Indians narrated and read about their own lives as lived out in a colonial context, finding themselves in a physical and discursive space that sought to annihilate them, at least culturally and linguistically, when not corporately. Boarding school students wrote for self-determination. The sovereign domesticity they drafted with their pens and paper was the result of, and the motivation for the syncretism that shaped their writings.
Many of the essays, poems and stories do seem merely to ventriloquize Anglo and domestic rhetoric like Courtney's does. But if we read them not as ventriloquism but as mimicry, we see that Barber's concept of ambivalence characterizes the students writing for a while. They are grounded in the rhetoric of domesticity. Their mimicry continually produces its slippage, its excess, its difference.
In particular, the student writers disrupt the before and after transformation plot of domestic ideology and replace the discrete space time settings of conventional sentimental writing with a sense of longing for elsewhere and else time. With these methods, whether in combination or separately, they subvert the ironically depersonalized model copy logic of both domestic ideology and sentimental writing, and blur that line of supposed distinction between the model and the copy of American Womanhood that Gilles Deleuze theorizes in his concept of the simulacrum.
So we're going to look at a few other texts by Indian girls at school, and whether constructing fictional characters or narrating personal experiences. Each of the writers that I discuss in the in this chapter, maintains her subjectivity and those of her characters by drafting pieces that are almost the same, but not quite replicas of sentimental convention. Students Mott Cooke, a Mohawk from New York, and Agnes Hatch, a Chippewa from Michigan, co-wrote "Our Cottage" for Carlisle's Publications, a poem that disrupts the replication process of the Model Cottage program and the Model Cottage program.
Was something that students did in their junior year before they would go out to work in the households of white people in Pennsylvania. So the model cottage was on campus, and the juniors would get to live in there, a few girls at a time and practice housekeeping and all that goes with it. And I'm going to read a couple of these stanzas aloud, and you can, read along.
The whole text is here on the slide for most of the poem, the speaker's hum, along with daffodils singing the joys of this model home banner, which teaches us so true the way of plain home life and happiness, to the planning and serving of different foods that would set grouchy people in pleasurable moods. Cooke and Hatch echo a central tenet of sentimentalists rhetoric that is simple.
Home life and home cooked meals can have restorative effects on even the most resistant and unhappy person, even though most of the poem is in fact the rhythmic needle skips here and there, possibly reflective of Indian students thinking and writing from two languages. But the rhythmic disruptions could also be metonymy for the ways the ideological recording machines that were the boarding schools never quite made full copies of domesticated Indians.
The needle skipped, and the girl's writings and lives are original by cultural composite compositions. To borrow a phrase of scholar Arnold ... after continuing to present other facets of domesticity in the middle of the poem, Cooke and Hatch's cheery dovetail duet shifts to a more subdued, perhaps ironic tone in the last stanza. The days come and go like swift airplanes, but this is no reason why we should complain.
For with each passing moment we all hope to gain a knowledge which may be both useful and sane. They might feel like complaining because their joyful stint in the model college cottage will soon be over. But if, as they say, this is no reason to complain, we might wonder, well then what is their reason to complain? Would they complain if they could?
The last two lines suggest an answer. The speakers might truly believe they are gaining useful knowledge with every passing moment. But here again though, usage of the word sane raises questions. Of course it rhymes with complain, which might be the simple reason that Cook and Hatch use it. But following the same line of questioning, might the word same also conjure the opposite?
Insane? If so, the lilting meter of the poem takes on a more maniacal tone, and the girls don't complain about how quickly their time in the cottage is going, because, despite their hopes, they either feel they have not had enough time in the cottage to master the new skills, or they cannot, cannot imagine a practical application of these new skills when they return home.
Even if school officials edited this poem before publication, and they likely did, a scuffling with domestic ideology and the sentimental form creeps through the lines and suggests a disruption of the copying process.
Here we see not only the beginnings of Della May John and Oneida students report on the dinner and reception, celebrating the opening of Carlisle's domestic science program. We also, Della May John's prose details the menu, the table settings, guests of honor toasts and musicians offerings, more interesting, though, I think, is the poem and illustration printed above John's article.
The drawings are initialed J.G. but the author, one author, is otherwise anonymous. The poem's last line reiterates the progressive theme of the two sketches, and let me just read that real quick. We may live without poetry, music and art. We may live without conscience and live without heart. We may live without friends. We may live without books. But civilized, civilized man cannot live without cooks, and argues that the domestic education that girls receive at Carlisle symbolizes Indians more effectively than any other discipline or program.
The drawings tell a before and after story centered on domesticity. On the left, the Indian woman cooks over an open flame with a spoon in her left hand and some other rude utensil in her right. She is outside and a dog sits near her cooking area. She wears a plain dress, flat boots and long braids, and her sunken cheeks, dark and deep set eyes and angular chin, neck and nose suggest a hard life of toil, hunger and exposure to the elements.
On the right, the new Indian woman stands at a modern counter, complete with drawers and shelf space and several Euro-American utensils at her disposal, and needs dough in a large mixing bowl. Some kind of modern appliance sits at the ready in the corner of the counter. She works inside in a presumably clean environment. There's no dog in this kitchen.
She wears a dress with a long coverall, apron and heeled boots, and her hair is tucked up under a lacy cap. Her plump arms, cheeks and neck suggest an easier workload, with plenty of food and protection from the elements. The woman also stands on a floor and has a window with the shade that shields her from direct sunlight.
This, the drawing suggest, is the potential of Indian civilization and the goal of every federal boarding school. But at the same time, as with other writings, disruptions in the ideological copying creep through the official redactions. While at first glance the poem affirms the transformation plot, the Indian woman can now be a real cook in a kitchen. The illustration shows us that both Indian women are actually cooks, whether inside or outside.
The same life sustaining task is being deformed, performed after and before domestication. Additionally, reading the drawing from left to right as we read words in English suggests a narrative of progress from savagery to civilization. But if we look up to the to the left and then up to the poem, we see that the that because the artist draws both women as cooks, the speaker's phrasing of civilized man applies to both whites and Indians.
Further, even if J.G. consciously drew this cartoon as a story of progress, she or he also makes the scenario on the left seem far more appealing if you look at their faces. The woman on the left has a little bit of a smile. Her her mouth is turning up at the corners here, and the woman on the right is definitely frowning.
In scale. The woman on the left appears larger, thus taking more visible space on the page and signifying greater importance. The woman on the right is small in comparison, and the straight lines on the walls and window, which is opaque, signified confinement, as if the kitchen imprisons her. That sense of restriction is heightened when one looks back at the image on the left.
This woman is outside. The sun is shining. Her dog. Another life form is nearby, and the round lines of her body, the cattle, the sun and the mountains exude an expansiveness and freedom that is missing from the image on the right. So what, at first glance, seems nothing other than one more example of boarding school indoctrination is, in fact, a subtle subversion of the transformative and improving power of domestic ideology and sentimental convention.
Annie Goyitney, Cooke and Hatch and J.G. and, the other student writers, that I don't have time to talk about tonight, structure their essays around Euro-American rituals of domesticity that they learned at school and will supposedly perform after they return home or in job placements. That college structures her essay, essays around the domestic rituals that her mother already performs.
Penelope Myrtle Kelsey argues that Zitkala-sa subversion of sentimentality, has roots in Dakota familial and gender norms, and that by centering her narratives around domestic issues of home and family, Zitkala-sa intentionally places her autobiography within a larger discussion about Dakota nationhood and sovereignty. Katherine Koontz's reading goes beyond characterizing that Zitkala-sa's mother as a sovereign figure and merely ... her as a deity by likening her mother to the Judeo-Christian God that Shaw simultaneously unsettles the foundation of racism, patriarchy, and theological hierarchy.
In this ways, Zitkala-sa uses literary sentimentalism in much the same ways as white women writers from the same period, by both sanctifying and politicizing motherhood. Writers claim a space for national influence in the public sphere, for women who lived their lives primarily in the private sphere. In what reads like an apologetics for Native American domesticity Zitkala-sa recalls in impressions of an Indian childhood that every morning, noon, and evening, her mother retrieved water from the Missouri River for their household to use every day.
Her mother built a fire to cook a simple breakfast of dried meat with unleavened bread and strong black coffee. At their noon meal, passers by regularly stopped to rest and to share our luncheon with us, for they we they were sure of our hospitality. The young narrator loved best the evening meal, though, because then, is when the family and neighbors gather to share food and the old legends.
She recalls long evenings where she curled up in the warmth of her mother's lap, listening to her grandmother and uncle tell stories. And then another similar day would dawn and her mother would begin beadwork or making moccasins for her. The arrival of white missionaries ultimately interrupts the comfort and consistency of this domestic scene, when they take the young girl away to boarding school, where a pale face woman, who turns out to be a cruel woman, replaces the mother's rituals with the school's iron routine that was next to impossible to leave.
Once the civilizing machine had begun its days buzzing. The student writers likely had no choice but to write about the civilizing machine of their domestic education as the welcome introduction of routine in order to their previously unkempt lives, and likely felt pressure to commit in writing to educating their own supposedly uncivilized mothers and the virtuous values of Anglo-American domesticity.
But Zitkala-sa having left school and secured sustaining work and a sympathetic publisher was freer to write something that surely more closely resembles the truth of the matter. The Atlantic's motives for publishing that culture's work may have matched those of Pratt. The guy who said kill the Indian, save the man who used Carlisle's newspapers to showcase how well the school carried out the federal assimilation program.
Perhaps the Atlantic editors viewed Zitkala-sa, an Indian women writer as a novelty, to be collected as if the magazine were a cabinet of curiosities. Patricia Ochre argues that the culture's canonization ironically began with the popular fascination with the exotic Indian at the beginning of the 20th century. Regardless of The Atlantic's motives, readings Zitkala-sa's autobiography, autobiographical stories within their original contexts strengthens an argument that she was indeed seeking to educate a reading public that, like federal education officials, assumed that Indian women were either squaws or drudges or tribal princesses.
Zitkala-sa reverses reformist assumptions that the Indian woman is benighted by her superstition and mired in ineffective rituals, by calling Christianity a superstition and modern medicine a ridiculous cure all. Jane Hafen notes that the college Shaw's essays show the complexity of popular sentimentality when mixed with oral tradition and political indignation, and argues that her stories are meant to influence and change Euro-American opinions about Indians, opening eyes to abuses.
Ruth Spak points out that the college test case aptly exemplifies federal failures at making over Indian girls into paragons of domestic virtue. So Molly Gaither and other white reformers who dehumanized Indian women as drudges and beasts of burden met their rhetorical match ends at college track, who in return dehumanizes boarding schools and their officials, characterizing them as unthinking, unfeeling, civilizing machines that work to churn out equally unthinking, unfeeling, robotic Indian replicas of itself that would go back to the reservation and steer Indian families to its superior iron routine.
So Annie Goyitney, me and the other student writers that we discussed tonight realized that they were expected to narrate their plans to put their domestic education to its intended use. And because they were writing at school, they knew they had to follow the federal script for this narration. But once away from school, students such as Ella Deloria, Sarah Winnemucca and Zitkala-sa turned this script on its head and used sentimentalists rhetorical devices practiced during their educational experiences to carve out different courses for themselves that resisted the federal demand that Indians must assimilate.
We see Indian writers building on the conventions of sentimental domestic fiction to craft a feminine ideal that predates coincides with, and menaces white domesticity and asserts a sovereign domesticity. Thanks.
Doug Exton: Thank you for that great presentation. And to start off the Q&A. Do you have any information about boarding schools in Idaho specifically?
Dr. Amanda Zink: I, have just a little bit. So my next project right now that actually that IHC is helping to fund, is I'm collecting more student writing from the boarding schools that existed here in Idaho, in Washington, Oregon and Montana. In Idaho, there were not any federally run, boarding schools such as Carlisle in Pennsylvania or Chemawa in Oregon.
There was a boarding school on the reservation at Fort Hall. That has a different kind of history than the off reservation boarding schools. And then there was one up in, Desmet that was run by the Catholic Church. And also because the church ran it and not the federal government. It has a different history as well.
So stay tuned for my book that will come out in a year or two. To see what I uncover about Idaho.
Doug Exton: And going off of that, do you know, with the not federally Ran boarding schools. Or is the quality of life different? Was the curriculum different as well assumed for the Catholic schools? Probably a lot more religious influence in the.
Dr. Amanda Zink: There was religious has religious education at both the church run and the federally run, boarding schools. But otherwise, from what I've read so far, the the curriculum is fairly similar. The girls learned this domestic kind of household stuff. The boys were often taught, kind of, manual labor type jobs such as carpentry, and eventually, plumbing and electricity.
With the idea that, these educated Indians would be a workforce. In the United States, there are some novels that talk about, that the characters, have experiences at Catholic boarding schools. One is, called "The Surrounded", and it's set at the flat on the Flathead Reservation up in Montana. Was written in the 1930s by Darcy McNichol, who himself went through to Chemawa boarding school in Oregon.
And his mother, Catherine. Sort of. You see this scene in the novel where she's sweeping her floor with a broom, and she's sort of thinking back to her education with the nuns and how how ridiculous all of this sweeping and dusting is when you live in the desert and all the the dust just comes right back in.
Doug Exton: Yeah. Just to, So were the schools coed and if so, did the young women end up making a white household with the men that also attended those schools typically.
Dr. Amanda Zink: Yeah. They were coed. And I, you know, sort of addressed that with a different curriculum that the boys and girls went through. And. Yes. I don't have them ready to show right now. But in the book, I include pictures. I think I referenced them during the talk. The Carlisle's publications, would feature photographs of the homes of graduates.
So they. So Carlisle would send someone out into the field, as it were, and take pictures of assimilated Indians who had been through their programs and again published those in the the publications from the school to show like this is what you're supposed to be doing. And so, yeah, sometimes the students, met each other. There's in the later issues of the Indian Craftsman or the Red Man.
There's editorials where former students had written in and, you know, they're like, oh, I, I enjoyed my time at Carlisle and I met my husband there and blah, blah, blah, so, so yeah. And I think this is a good moment to say as much damage, cultural damage as was done at the boarding schools. There's lots of individual stories of of people who this was their life.
Right. And so they're they're doing their best to find joy in the situations that life put them in.
Doug Exton: And do you mind clarifying where the young girls and the young men, forced to go to the boarding schools and leave the family, or were they just, like, kind of coerced into doing it?
Dr. Amanda Zink: Both. Sarah Winnemucca, her book "Life Among the Paiutes". She talks about when she was a child. Her, the the mothers in her community would bury the kids in the sand, with reeds to to breathe through because the federal officials would come in and I mean, literally kidnap the kids and put them on the wagon and take them to boarding school.
So, yes, forced in some, in some cases. But then you have the opposite extreme, Polingaysi Qöyawayma, in her memoir about, well, her whole life, but also her time at the boarding school, she is a Hopi woman. She went to Sherman Institute in, California. And she begged. She writes about begging her parents to go to school.
So, you know, just like anybody, people had different experiences, different outcomes, different motivations, for, for their time at the schools.
Doug Exton: And then how did the curriculum at the boarding schools differ from the curriculum at public schools where, like white girls would go to for similar topics?
Dr. Amanda Zink: You know, I haven't done a comparative study to say for sure. But you know what I know of having gone through American public education myself, is that home at was never really a whole program. Right. It's just one course, maybe two courses. So that's sort of my, you know, really anecdotal kind of answer. But I do know that the Indian girls were sort of shuttled into this, into this domestic education program with the express purpose of changing them.
You know, changing them from whatever their life was like, in their, in their tribal communities to something that more resembled Euro-American. And I didn't talk about this much in the talk, but home ownership, you know, sort of this individualist, capitalist idea where the land is something to be consumed. And that's something that had to be taught the students, too, because that's not that's not indigenous.
To the people on this continent.
Doug Exton: And then you mentioned, the school in Oregon, the longest running, boarding school, with that still being open now, is it still like a boarding school for Native Americans, or is it now like a public school?
Dr. Amanda Zink: It runs as both. It's operated as a day school, which means that the, native kids can come and go, you know, go back home in the evening. But there is there are dormitories still, that kids can go and stay and it's still run by the the Federal Bureau of Indian Education. I've just started to do research into that school, and actually, I applied to a job there, a part time job to go teach there during my sabbatical this year.
But, alas, I couldn't get my teaching documents in order in time. Otherwise I would have had some more firsthand, experience there. But I do know that, somewhere in the mid 20th century, probably in the 70s, the, the running of the boarding schools, there's a little bit more of a balance between being run by tribal personnel and being run by the federal government government.
But I don't I don't mean to imply that the federal government is not still in charge. They are still in charge. But a little bit, less heavy hand in a less heavy handed way.
Doug Exton: And with the photo between like, the new Indians and the old Indians, focusing on like the attire. How old is the reception between the two different groups, you know, the older Indian, or Native American, my dad and or older Native American folk versus the women and the men that went through this boarding process.
Dr. Amanda Zink: There's lots of stories about this process. Short stories. Poems, novels. Where, you know, the characters are kind of reflecting on this experience. And like I said earlier, some students seem to kind of eat it up and think it was fun. You know, they're teenagers and they're trying something new. And some students, it was really traumatic for, I think I mentioned Estelle Armstrong.
She writes a story, called The Debut of Aloysius about him going to boarding school and, and just the all of the traumatic moments from when he first got there and kind of got through his first few weeks, cutting his hair, you know, putting him in a tub of water with this bar of soap that looks like it's appealing, but it's really toxic, right?
When he when it gets in his eyes and in his mouth and, you know, just kind of going through all of the rituals that in Europe, America, we take for granted. But can be but were really traumatizing for, for, a lot of the students and some of the students were, abused. And, you know, there was a lot there's a lot of trauma that happened at the boarding schools.
But at the same time, there's like I said, the students are living their lives and doing their best to balance what they're experiencing. But they also write about going home and how rough that is and how sometimes they feel like they don't fit, or they feel like everything they learned at school is sort of a waste and useless because they do want to fit back into their home community.
So it's really, a diverse body of literature and experiences.
Doug Exton: Yeah. And I think you bring up a really good point about that gray area of being in between the two different worlds. The indigenous world versus the Anglo world. Do you have any information on the survival rates for the women that attended the boarding school for International Abuse?
Dr. Amanda Zink: I don't off the top of my head, but I do know that those are becoming more accessible. For obvious reasons, the federal government sort of hid those statistics for quite a while. But they are, scholars are finding more and more of that kind of data. And it's it's sobering. There were many, many deaths at all of the institutions across the country.
And in Canada, too, I should say this is a this is part of, Canadian history with First Nations children as well.
Doug Exton: And how did refusing either going to the school or refusing the domesticity aspect of the education play out since they really didn't have that much of an option? Like, were they able to refuse?
Dr. Amanda Zink: I think while at school. No, they weren't able to refuse. Because there was always the fear of punishment. And that's why I think the literature that some of the pieces that I shared tonight and others that I talk about in the book, are so fascinating because you see these moments where it looks like the the writing is conforming to the narrative that they're supposed to be sharing.
But then there's these just the dropping of a word like saying, you know, it makes me think, well, wait a second, is this not sane? So so I think that that's why looking at this, body of literature is so important, because it does help us see how the students were reacting in a system that was very, sort of militarized, really.
It was run in a very military like fashion. Yeah.
Doug Exton: And then do you think the school served as a jumping off point for pan Indian activism and the experiences coming from those schools?
Dr. Amanda Zink: Definitely. And I didn't I don't think I really said this in the presentation, but the purpose of the schools was to mix everybody up. So students, kids who lived out here in Idaho would have been taken back to Carlisle in Pennsylvania purposely, even though there was a closer school in Oregon, or there was the the Catholic school up in Desmet.
Because they wanted to mix up the language groups, the students would get punished first for not speaking English. So if you know, if there's a Shoshone student and a, a mohawk student at Carlisle, they can't talk to each other until they learn English. So, yes, this is one of the real positive benefits to come out of the boarding school history is the pan-Indian movement that then, of course, led to, activism in the 70s, to reverse and reclaim, a lot of things that were taken away by the federal government in decades prior.
Doug Exton: And then beyond the platform for the activism, was there really anything else positive that came out of the education from these boarding schools for the native peoples?
Dr. Amanda Zink: Well, the students learned to read and write, in which I think as an English professor is positive. But but really, you know, the the realities of settler colonialism are grim, right? Like indigenous people here in North America were just overwhelmed by the colonial power and presence. And, I used the word survivants in my, in my talk, which is a term that Gerald Wizner and a national scholar, kind of used by combining survival.
First, let's see, survive in survival and resistance. And that, that sometimes in a colonial culture that is really just bent on annihilate you, the best thing you can do to resist is to survive. And so to survive in a settler colonial context, sometimes that means learning the ways of the oppressor, right? Learning the ways of the colonial power so that you can adapt so that you can survive.
Would it be better if white people had never colonized North America? Probably. But, you know, we all live with the history, the histories that happened. And so I think the positive thing that came out of the schools is even though the school officials saw the schools as a way, really to like Richard Pratt, one of the founders, said, kill the Indian and save the man.
Right. They wanted to exterminate any kind of Indian ness. It allowed Native American peoples to band together and have this shared, rhetoric to use to speak back and to push back. Right? And to fight back, to a government that is, is not easy to work with.
Doug Exton: Now, I think, really summed up your entire presentation really well. And that was that concept of being able to survive in the changing times and how that's even carried through to today with the activism component. But unfortunately we are out of time for tonight's talk. So I did want to say thank you again for joining me tonight.
And thank you for everyone for attending.
Dr. Amanda Zink: Thank you.
Doug Exton: Goodnight, everyone.
Dr. Amanda Zink: Bye bye.