Feeling Good Inside: Benevolent Happiness in The Trail of the Go-Hawks

“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.