"A Squaw or a Woman:" Gender and Indian Agency in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Newspapers, 1879-1900

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"A Squaw or a Woman:" Gender and Indian Agency in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Newspapers, 1879-1900

Smith, Erin - Thesis

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title: "A Squaw or a Woman:" Gender and Indian Agency in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Newspapers, 1879-1900

creator: Smith, Erin

subject: Academic theses.

description: This study contributes to the relatively small body of literature that focuses primarily on gender in the American Indian boarding school experience. By following in the footsteps of those scholars who have increasingly found value in boarding school periodicals, as well as those who have explicitly or implicitly lent their support to the use of Bhabha's concept of mimicry, I hope to complicate ideas about assimilation, resistance, and Indian agency at the turn of the century. Chapter One provides an introduction to the Pratt administration's construction of ideas about Indian and American gender roles as seen in Carlisle's periodicals. Historians Amelia Katanski and Jacqueline Fear-Segal convincingly argue that Carlisle used its newspapers as instruments of disciplinary power, providing modern-day readers with "telling details about how the 'civilizing' campaign was conducted."78 As such, Carlisle's newspapers can provide a window into how Pratt's administration used gender training as a key component of their assimilationist aims. This is especially true with the Indian Helper, as this paper was intended primarily for a student audience, both on Carlisle's campus and elsewhere. However, Carlisle also attempted to educate a white audience – not only about the goings-on at Carlisle, but also about why schools like Carlisle were necessary. For white readers, Carlisle's newspapers created an image of Indian men and women as degraded and savage, demonstrating the need for reformers' intervention. Thus, Pratt and other administrators used the pages of Carlisle’s newspapers to educate white Americans about Carlisle’s success in removing children from the horrors of reservation life, as well as Indian students about the necessity of adopting American gender roles. Chapters Two and Three use Bhabha's concept of mimicry to explain the gendered content of Carlisle's periodicals and provide a gateway for reading Indian agency in these sources. Chapter Two complicates the concept of an "assimilated" Indian. Pratt used Carlisle's newspapers to prove the efficacy of the school's methods and display the acculturation of its students. Yet authors used various rhetorical devices to portray full assimilation as unattainable, thus creating a distance between assimilated Indians and whites. Students used this distance to show that their acceptance of some American gender roles did not necessarily entail their rejection of Indian culture, allowing modern readers to relocate Indian agency within the periodicals. Chapter Three adds nuance to the idea of Indian resistance to assimilationist aims. Carlisle's periodicals included accounts of students and other Indians who defended Indian customs, or explicitly rejected American gender norms. School administrators included these accounts for their own reasons, yet these accounts provide evidence of Indian resistance and individual choice. This resistance, however, was often incomplete and sometimes impermanent.

publisher: Simmons College (Boston, Mass.)

contributor:

date: 2012

type: Text

format: 1 PDF (89 Pages)

identifier: td_ha_2012_es

source:

language: English

relation:

coverage:

rights: Material from the Simmons University Archives collections are made available for study purposes only. For more information, or to request rights to reproduce or reuse any material, contact the University Archives at archives@simmons.edu.

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