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  • Reading Lessons: Sentimental Literacy and Assimilation in Stiya: A Carlisle Indian Girl at Home and Wynema: A Child of the Forest
  • Janet Dean (bio)

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“Educating the Indians—a female pupil of the government school at Carlisle visits her home at Pine Ridge Agency.” Wood engraving from a sketch by a corresponding artist, on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 15 March 1884, 49.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-100543.

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In “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (1900), Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša recalls the “four strange summers” after she returned to her reservation from an Eastern “Indian school” and confronted the effects of her assimilationist education. Caught between childhood and adulthood in “the unsatisfactory ‘teenth’ in a girl’s years,” Zitkala-Ša finds herself equally caught between the culture of her birth and the culture her schooling imposes upon her. Her literacy makes the pain of liminality particularly acute: “My mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse,” she laments, “and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write.” Her mother’s offer of an “Indian Bible” makes matters worse: “My enraged spirit felt more like burning the book, which afforded me no help, and was a perfect delusion to my mother. I did not read it, but laid it unopened on the floor.”1 Assimilation—a project aimed, in keeping with the stated goal to “kill the Indian . . . and save the man,” at separating Native Americans from their birth cultures—is marked by the assimilating subject’s ability to engage with the written (English) word.2 The daughter’s literacy and the mother’s experience of letters as “perfect delusion” define their separation. At the same time, Zitkala-Ša’s refusal to read and her violent rage indicate the profound crisis produced by learning to read. If reading makes her a stranger in her own [End Page 201] home, “the white man’s papers,” as her mother calls them, provide no answering refuge.3

By describing the trauma of assimilation as a function of reading, Zitkala-Ša draws attention to the use of literacy training in the late nineteenth-century national effort to “civilize” Native Americans. Together with acclimating subjects to the English language, Christianity, private property, and Euro-American vocations, developing their literacy was a cornerstone of assimilation programs. Speaking to reformers at Lake Mohonk in 1895, the U.S. Commissioner of Education promised that learning to read would have transformative effects on Native American children: “We will give them letters and make them acquainted with the printed page. . . . With these comes the great emancipation, and the school shall give you that.”4 But such education did more than acquaint Native students with English texts; it also shaped their specific affective responses to what they read, through what Laura Wexler terms “sentimental reeducation.”5 Deployed in assimilationist schooling, this reeducation worked through the conventions of literary sentimentalism, not to effect a “great emancipation” for nonwhites, but to inculcate dominant cultural values and social structures.

Sentimental reeducation required sentimental literacy: students would need to know not only how to read but how to feel about their reading. Through reading white-authored texts, subjects of assimilation were to cultivate sympathies and antipathies in line with the elevation of white, middle-class, domestic culture.6 In directing readers’ feelings, sentimental reeducation operates like other kinds of sentimental culture. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe famously calls for her readers to “feel right,” to be appropriately moved by her story and to work to put an end to the abuses of slavery she exposes.7 Proper feeling depends on the “right” kind of reading; as Elizabeth Fekete Trubey notes, “by combining calls for reader-character identification with detailed metatextual instructions, Stowe schools her implied audience in the correct way to interpret the novel and to respond to its political exhortations.”8 Sentimental reeducation similarly pressures nonwhite readers to “feel right” by reading “right”—that is, to feel the sympathies and antipathies [End Page 202] that support the aims of assimilation through the sentimental...

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