Indian Boarding School : The Runaways

An emphasis on family is one of the central facets of Native American culture. There is a sense of community between Native American. Louise Erdrich, a Chippewa Indian herself, writes a gripping bildungsroman about a thirteen year old boy named Joe who experiences all forms of family on the Native American Reserve where he lives. He learns to deal with the challenges of a blood family, witnesses toxic family relationships, and experiences a family-like love from the members of the community. In her book, The Round House, Louise Erdrich depicts three definitions of the word family and shows how these relationships affect Joe’s development into an adult.

Theodore Fontaine is one of the thousands of young aboriginal peoples who were subjected through the early Canadian system of the Indian residential schools, was physically tortured. Originally speaking Ojibwe, Theodore relates the encounters of a young man deprived of his culture and parents, who were taken away from him at the age of seven, during which he would no longer be free to choose what to say, how to say it, with whom to live and even what culture to embrace. Theodore would then spend the next twelve years undoing what had been done to him since birth, and the rest of his life attempting a reversal of his elementary education culture shock, traumatization, and indoctrination of ethnicity and Canadian supremacy. Out of these experiences, he wrote the “Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools-A Memoir” and in this review, I considered the Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd publication.

In the late 1800s, Captain Richard Henry Pratt set out to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”(A Plea to “Citizenize” Indians). The goal to erase Indian cultures and replace it with white American culture was sought to be achieved through boarding schools. Pratt was the creator of the first Indian boarding school: Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. These government-funded boarding schools would take children from their homes on reservation, often for them to not see their family again until they are grown(lecture). Pratt’s goal was to eliminate the Indian culture and incorporate the Indian people into the more “civilized”(Marr) American culture. This meant forcing the Indian students to speak only English and to give up all cultural traditions, religions, names and take up Christianity and American sounding names. Students were put into these boarding schools with little or no contact with their families for “eight to nine months of the year” (Marr). These schools operated with minimal funds, so the education was very insufficient. It was clear from the beginning; the actual goal was not to give quality education for the Native American children but to get rid of the Indian culture.

In American Indian Stories, University of Nebraska Press Lincoln and London edition, the author, Zitkala-Sa, tries to tell stories that depicted life growing up on a reservation. Her stories showed how Native Americans reacted to the white man’s ways of running the land and changing the life of Indians. “Zitkala-Sa was one of the early Indian writers to record tribal legends and tales from oral tradition” (back cover) is a great way to show that the author’s stories were based upon actual events in her life as a Dakota Sioux Indian. This essay will describe and analyze Native American life as described by Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, it will relate to Native Americans and their interactions with American societies, it will

To expand on the intricacy of the speaker’s life, symbolism is applied to showcase the oppression her ancestors etched on her quilt were facing for their “burnt umber pride” and “ochre gentleness” (39-40). Once again, the theme of absence is introduced as there is a sense of separation among the Native American culture as their innocent souls are forced onto reservations and taken away from their families. This prolonged cruelty and unjust treatment can be advocated when the speaker explains how her Meema “must have dreamed about Mama when the dancing was over: a lanky girl trailing after her father through his Oklahoma

In her book American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Sa's central role as both an activist and writer surfaces, which uniquely combines autobiography and fiction and represents an attempt to merge cultural critique with aesthetic form, especially surrounding such fundamental matters as religion. In the tradition of sentimental, autobiographical fiction, this work addresses keen issues for American Indians' dilemmas with assimilation. In Parts IV and V of "School Days," for example, she vividly describes a little girl's nightmares of paleface devils and delineates her bitterness when her classmate died with an open Bible on her bed. In this groundbreaking scene, she inverts the allegation of Indian religion as superstition by labeling

Zitkala-Sa’s The School Days of an Indian Girl is an autobiography that was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1901. The autobiography in detail describes her experience in her community, the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota as a child and later her journey ravelling with European-American missionaries to attend a Quaker Missionary School that teaches speaking, reading and writing in English. Upon her arrival at the missionary led school, Sa felt ostracized, fearful, and terrified of every little adjustment or ordeal that appeared to be foreign or unknown to her based upon her cultural identity and heritage. Her trauma often led to many nights where she would sob and cry herself to sleep. Her daunting experiences of having her heritage ripped away ensued when Sa caught word that her “long and heavy” hair was to be cut (314). From the teachings from her Mother, Sa understood that “only the unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy” (314). She cried and shook her head with anguish but as her thick braids were cut she then “lost her spirit” (315).

The title for this selection of poems, “Old News”, reflects the theme of racism in this section of Miranda’s memoir. This title is ironic because the problems in these newspaper clips show “new” acts of discrimination against Native Americans. However, the violence depicted in these poems has been recurring for hundreds of years. Since the founding of the American colonies in the 1600s, Native Americans have had their land, families, and sense of safety stolen from them. These European settlers did not understand the culture and behaviors of Native Americans, and, as a

Lives for Native Americans on reservations have never quite been easy. There are many struggles that most outsiders are completely oblivious about. In her book The Roundhouse, Louise Erdrich brings those problems to light. She gives her readers a feel of what it is like to be Native American by illustrating the struggles through the life of Joe, a 13-year-old Native American boy living on a North Dakota reservation. This book explores an avenue of advocacy against social injustices. The most observable plight Joe suffers is figuring out how to deal with the injustice acted against his mother, which has caused strife within his entire family and within

The American desire to culturally assimilate Native American people into establishing American customs went down in history during the 1700s. Famous author Zitkala-Sa, tells her brave experience of Americanization as a child through a series of stories in “Impressions of an Indian Childhood.” Zitkala-Sa, described her journey into an American missionary where they cleansed her of her identity. In “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” Zitkala-Sa uses imagery in order to convey the cruel nature of early American cultural transformation among Indian individuals.

Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, America’s first Female Native American writer and poet, exemplifies a unique multicultural influence in her writing as a result of her intermarried parents. Robert Dale Parker (2009), in his paper “Contemporary Anticolonialist Reading and the Collaborative Writing of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft,” describes her controversial writings “as representing the cacophonous medley of internal contradictions that she lived in” (p.52). Specifically, that of her poem Pensive Hours, which exhibits the layered nature of her works, shown through her Anglo-American heritage (with an emphasis towards Christian) tones hidden alongside her native spirituality, establishes Jane Johnston Schoolcraft as an American poet influenced by more than English Romanticism.

Yesterday’s class was not only alarming but new information. It took me a day to process the impact of the Indian boarding school. The American felt so entitled and obligated to convert and oppression others to conform. They displaced thousand and even possibly millions of native Americans from the homes, culture, trade, etc. in order to make them the American idea of successful. The Native American’s were self sustaining and independent and successful in their own way, American ideals and trade were not needed. Only after Americans had destroyed the land and forced Native American on reserves did they begin to need American skills and even then those American skills contradicted their culture. If they really just wanted to help and make Indians

Throughout the history of the Native Americans, no one has suffered more because of the white man’s atrocity than the children of the Indians. Most of them, if not all, were taken away from their reservation to live in a boarding school. Whether they liked it or not, they were to follow and obey the school’s rules and regulations even though they deemed it unforgiving. In her poem, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Louise Erdrich meticulously depicted the sufferings of the Indian children at a boarding school created just for them to better assimilate with the white man’s culture. The speaker of the poem and the imagery used to describe this wonderful heart-warming literature made it possible to convey the real existence of the pain

my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.” This effected the women who were mothers greatly as their children became stripped of their culture, and what truly made them, them (Hewitt and Lawson 2013, 512-513). Native American women fought and pressed hard against this assimilation by producing publications to inform the public of what was truly going on in these boarding schools. Other individuals also put in their own voice with these publications to help reinforce what the Native American women were writing about (Hewitt and Lawson 2013, 627).

During their time rehabilitating there were some things to iron out, such as the struggles of fitting in, within both the short story and the forced assimilation of American Indians. While American Indians were in school teachers had wanted knowledge to be an Indian’s best weapon. Teachers thought that having the power of knowledge would help them get better jobs furthermore helping them adapt. Meanwhile at St. Lucy’s the girls were treated with rules gradually developing as the girls moved from stage to stage. Within each stage of the girl’s training there was a visible reaction for most girls, this gradual development would better prepare the girls for the outside world. Back with the American Indians, which had to get their haircut and