Killing a culture to save a race: Writing and resisting the discourse of the Carlisle Indian School (Pennsylvania, Luther Standing Bear, Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove, Richard Henry Pratt, Frances Campbell Sparhawk).

摘要

In 1879, Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian School, the first all-Indian, off-reservation boarding school designed to educate and assimilate the American Indian. For the next twenty-five years, Pratt promoted his school by crafting a discourse to persuade the public that "killing" the culture of Indian people through a boarding school education would save them as a race.; This dissertation examines that discourse both in how whites shaped it and how Native Americans refuted it. Part One of this study describes the historical context of Pratt's discourse and analyzes the development of it in the pages of the Carlisle Indian School newspapers. Pratt's discourse influenced many people involved in the Indian reform movement, and it inspired a white woman reformer, Frances Campbell Sparhawk, to incorporate it into two novels she wrote about Carlisle-educated Indians: A Chronicle of Conquest (1890) and Onoqua (1892).; Pratt used a variety of rhetorical strategies to promote his school and build its reputation, but he also used these strategies to control his students and battle his political opponents. Most importantly, he constructed a discourse of dysfunction to justify the lengthy separation of Indian children from their parents that his boarding school ideology required. Pratt and the editor of his newspapers, Marianna Burgess, published articles that repeatedly use tropes of disease and dysfunction to construct Native culture as a malady that could be cured by a boarding school education.; Pratt's discourse did not go unopposed by Native American writers. Part Two of this dissertation examines works by Luther Standing Bear, Zitkala-Sa, and Mourning Dove, three writers who were either affiliated with Carlisle or who took up the school as a subject in their writing. Although these writers were ambivalent about the tactics and outcomes of the boarding school method that became known as the "Carlisle Way," all of them wrote to refute the argument that Native culture was dysfunctional. Through their letters, autobiographies, essays, and fiction, these writers used the literacy they acquired through their boarding school education to prove that Native culture was no malady but a dignified, healthy, and intelligent way of life that needed to be preserved.