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Feeling Good Inside: Benevolent Happiness in The Trail of the Go-Hawks
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 39, Number 3, Fall 2014
- pp. 341-358
- 10.1353/chq.2014.0039
- Article
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“Feeling Good Inside” examines the trope of playing Indian in Emily Blackmore Stapp’s 1908 children’s book The Trail of the Go-Hawks. Over the course of the novel, the Go-Hawks, a playgroup whose members are predominately upper middle-class white children, learn that to be happy they must help others. My essay links their education in happiness to the education of American Indian children in “civilization” at off-reservation boarding schools established in the late nineteenth century to facilitate assimilation. Although Stapp’s novel does not include one character that could be identified as American Indian, I argue that it nevertheless models its benevolent enterprise on the off-reservation school program to restrict happiness and civilization to its privileged white children.