Writing against Erasure: Native American Boarding School Students and the Periodical Press, 1880-1920

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century.