Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education by Diane Glancy (review)

Diane Glancy’s remarkably imaginative and gripping text, Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education, leaves an indelible imprint on the reader. Interlacing history, oral traditions, and personal experience, Glancy provides a compelling narrative of the experiences of the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo forcibly moved by the US military in 1875 from Fort Sill, OK to the Fort Marion prison in Florida. Fort Marion Prisoners weaves the author’s discussion of her own experiences as a Native American growing up and working in the mainstream educational system throughout the text connecting those experiences with the traumatic educational experiences of these earlier native prisoners. Glancy poignantly notes, “To write about my education was to begin speaking of others—those earlier voices coming and going, convening from the past. To speak with one’s voice was to let others speak first…How to operate as an individual in a tradition that centers on community was the gap in one’s thinking that had to be covered” (89).

Glancy utilizes a range of sources—from archival documents from the prison, to Native “texts” such as ledger drawings and prisoner carvings on cellblock walls, to material objects like the life casts of the prisoners. Although previous scholars have devoted attention to many of these sources, Glancy effectively expands the archive by making this documentary evidence of the Native prisoners’ experiences legible in new ways. Bringing together the “fragments of history” (45) contained in the multiple narratives of the prisoners and the other “variant texts” (44), Glancy makes a critical intervention through her focus on historical memory which she characterizes as the “interior landscape of tribal voices and events that come over the lanes of traffic…as I re-drive their space” (60). By incorporating her own intellectual and emotional “journey” taken in the process of traveling across the same physical spaces as the prisoners, Glancy’s personal narrative becomes a powerful “vehicle” for an imaginative engagement with the spaces and texts of the Native prisoners. This imaginative re-creation of a well-known but little understood history gives powerful new voice to the interior landscapes of Native agency and subjectivity that have been largely erased in historical narratives and hidden within archival sources.

Far from merely a work of historical fiction, Glancy’s narrative travels through historical memory and imagination by combining nonfictional accounts of historical events and evidence as the “anchors” (98) from which she creatively imagines narratives of the Native prisoners’ interior thoughts and dialogues through the lenses of her own educational experiences. This allows her to delve more richly than scholars have to date into the cultural dislocations experienced by the prisoners resulting from their forced travels, imprisonment, and an educational system forced upon them and bent upon a coercive assimilation. As she writes the interior expressions of native prisoners, “To live in this world, I had to be educated, but to become educated, I had to be separated from a part of myself—that was the catch. Self was the distance I had to travel from. That was the first lesson for the Fort Marion prisoners. That was the lesson with which I struggled” (88). At the same time, Glancy offers fuller understandings of Native texts such as the prisoners’ ledger drawings as demonstrative of Native agency—as “statements of cultural realignment” and empowerment.

Historical memory and variant narratives in Fort Marion Prisoners contributes to innovative theoretical and methodological currents in the social sciences and Native American Studies that have recently turned to the role of intersubjectivity and emotional affect in historical research and writing. By incorporating her own experiences and emotional responses to the prisoners’ artifacts and spaces, Glancy’s text illuminates the legacy of Native dislocations and re-alignments in education that link Native experiences past to present. This, in turn, points to the necessity of recognizing the mingling of voices and memory that inevitably play in the creation of historical narratives.

Glancy is not only an...