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

PRIMARILY CONSTRUCTED OUT OF PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS, Glancy’s Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is best described as a creative, spiritual amalgam of the experiences of the Fort Marion prisoners of the 1870s and the author’s personal journey of researching, writing, and reflecting on those experiences. Jumping back and forth from the nineteenth-century Florida prison to her own composition process and reflections, Glancy crafts a text that comes across as disjointed yet powerful. Adding to this reader’s confusion and the text’s spiritual tone, Glancy blends her literary text, which at times consists of dialogue, first-person and third-person narrative, with the text of primary resources such as letters and records. Truly, Glancy’s text is “An interaction. An interpretation. An interlocutor” (60).

When Glancy does not present the reader with her travels, her reflections, and her own educational experiences, she brings to life the Arapaho, Caddo, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa prisoners of Fort Marion. Defeated by the U.S. Calvary in the 1870s, these men, women, and children were transported from Fort Sill, located in modern-day Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. There, under the direction of Captain Richard Henry Pratt (later of Carlisle Boarding School fame), these captives were taught English, the Bible, and other staples of nineteenth-century Anglo “civilization.” Fort Marion served as an experimental precursor to the implementation of Native American boarding schools, which shaped, even terrorized, the lives of many Native Americans during the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.

Throughout her text, Glancy emphasizes the importance of two key aspects of the Fort Marion experience: ledger books and the ocean. Placed in the captives’ hands by Captain Pratt with instructions to draw, ledger books served as an outlet of expression for the Native prisoners and as artistic goods that prisoners sold to curious tourists. Glancy beautifully describes the power the ledger books and colored pencils had when she pens, “He made marks with the drawing sticks. He floated through the air. The drawing sticks were his wings. They were magic sticks. A horse came from the stick” (36). While the ledger books were certainly important to their contemporaries for expressive, therapeutic, and commercial reasons, today they are the primary window into the minds and hearts of the Marion captives. Along with reprinting several of these ledger drawings, Glancy brings the reader to the point of their creation, artistically describing what captives, such as Bear’s Heart, thought about while drawing. Along with the ledger books, Glancy also emphasizes the ocean, which is situated alongside Fort Marion. Being from the Great Plains, many of the prisoners were unfamiliar with such a large body of water and the mysterious creatures it contained. As she proceeds through her text, Glancy demonstrates how the prisoners conceptualized the sea and how it fit into their changing worldviews.

While Glancy’s text certainly is moving, followers of her work published in Florida Review and Yellow River Review will find little new material here. Due to Glancy’s creative mixture of history, personal experiences, expression, narrative, and evocative spirit, this text is perhaps best for those interested in Native studies and literature, as opposed to history. Still, the brief nature of the text (totaling 136 pages) does make it a quick read for all those interested in Fort Marion, Native education, and a heart-wrenching story.