Recovering Native American writings in the boarding school press / edited by Jacqueline Emery.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, selected by Choice

Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press is the first comprehensive collection of writings by students and well-known Native American authors who published in boarding school newspapers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Students used their acquired literacy in English along with more concrete tools that the boarding schools made available, such as printing technology, to create identities for themselves as editors and writers. In these roles they sought to challenge Native American stereotypes and share issues of importance to their communities.

Writings by Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), Charles Eastman, and Luther Standing Bear are paired with the works of lesser-known writers to reveal parallels and points of contrast between students and generations. Drawing works primarily from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Pennsylvania), the Hampton Institute (Virginia), and the Seneca Indian School (Oklahoma), Jacqueline Emery illustrates how the boarding school presses were used for numerous and competing purposes. While some student writings appear to reflect the assimilationist agenda, others provide more critical perspectives on the schools' agendas and the dominant culture. This collection of Native-authored letters, editorials, essays, short fiction, and retold tales published in boarding school newspapers illuminates the boarding school legacy and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, Native American literary production.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Emery (SUNY, Old Westbury) presents texts recovered from Native American boarding-school newspapers, texts that add new complexity to understanding of ways Native Americans have responded to domination by "mainstream" American society and to various uses Natives made of English literacy imposed on them in the name of "civilizing" them. The typical view of the Indian schools is one of systematic deracination, especially from 1870 to 1930, the period from which these writings are drawn. The texts--those in part 1 letters, essays, editorials, and short stories by boarding school students, those in part 2 speeches, argument, folktales, autobiography, and so on by Native public intellectuals--go a long way toward showing the degree to which some embraced assimilationist rhetoric and others saw literacy and publishing as means to adapting, surviving, resisting, "talking back," and ultimately claiming agency over their own futures in a society that, to differing degrees, saw their existence as a problem to be solved. Both sections are loosely chronological. This book complements Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of Early American Indian Poetry to 1930, ed. by Robert Dale Parker (CH, Nov'11, 49-1317), and resonates interestingly with Laura Furlan's Indigenous Cities (2017), which demonstrates Native adaptation and survival in contemporary urban America. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Michael F. McClure, Virginia State University