Casting a Spell: Acts of Cultural Continuity in Carlisle Indian Industrial School's the Red Man and Helper

Behold! I am here with my pen and brains to pour out before you and display all the information I could find, my lessons seemed hard at first and many times I felt discouraged, but I pushed my way slowly like frozen molasses, and things are getting easier day by day.

"Extracts from Home Letters," Morning Star, 1886

By beginning with a demand, this anonymous student of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (1897-1918), insists on claiming the reader's attention, asserts his or her place in history, and narrates a version of the archetypal journey from challenge to discouragement to success. Within the walls of Carlisle and other off-reservation government boarding schools—which K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty have called "laboratories of domestication, the primary means by which Native languages, cultures, and identities were to be pounded out and reshaped," as part of the late nineteenth-century hope of conquest through assimilation—this student not only maintained and strengthened an individual voice and identity but also provided a legacy of cultural continuity to successors. ¹ Certainly, contributions such as this one to Carlisle's student newspaper, the Morning Star, a predecessor to the Red Man and Helper, "ventriloquized the social evolutionism and assimilationism" of Carlisle's founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt. ² However, they are also active syntheses of Pratt's agenda and student ways of interpreting and mastering their environments through storytelling. Just as autobiographer Luther Standing Bear has narrated and interpreted his experiences at Carlisle in a form that honors the traditions of his father and his people, the Sioux, this anonymous author and many of their peers serve not only as objects of Pratt's history but also as makers of their own histories. As Amelia Katanski has affirmed, they bide no binary distinction between oppression and resistance but instead "actively seek to transform the discourses into which they enter." ³ When another student contributor to the Red Man and Helper adds, "I want to fight my own way to get a good education," and yet another echoes, "I have been fighting with my mind all the time about going home and staying in the east as long as I can," they too announce the victory of Pratt's assimilationist program at Carlisle, illuminate its oppressive nature, and insist on their own victory, agency, intellect, and meaning-making powers. ⁴ To adapt the words of Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, they are not prisoners of the past: they are its coproducers. ⁵

At the same time that the Red Man and Helper served Pratt as propaganda and enabled vocational skill-building for the students, it also contested his hegemony in the form of what Michael Coleman has called a syncretic understanding of Western beliefs in indigenous terms. ⁶ Through stories, the contributors transform the master narrative, reinterpret truth, and, in Katanski's terms, turn "their ability to read and write English to their own use." ⁷ While the very presence of essays covering the food, dance, language, arts, and beliefs of indigenous peoples in a publication intended to advocate the boarding school's assimilationist ideals bears witness to the ability of the contributors to reinterpret and appropriate the tools of journalism for their own purposes, this study is not primarily quantitative in nature. Instead, after providing the background necessary to understand the Red Man and Helper and its role at Carlisle, this essay will advance and complicate current scholarship on student self-determination and resistance by adapting and applying relevant aspects of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's taxonomy of indigenous projects. ⁸ Specifically, Smith's definitions of reframing and connecting will be applied to the newspaper's name changes, a brief quantitative survey, an anonymous student essay, and an essay by Annie Parnell in order to reveal student agency as it evolves through storytelling. Contributions by students C.C., Nellie Robertson, Carl Leider, and Charles Dagenett will then be interpreted as acts of creating and, again, storytelling, as all of these young writers celebrate indigenous...