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Early Indigenous Literatures Main Menu The Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian Stories By: Kai Chase Illicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relations soumya rachel shailendra Legibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's Writing An exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma Cohen Lyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettes by Kira Tucker Marriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literature by Angad Singh Not-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneity by Yasmin Yoon Reading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century Paratexts Title Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's Exhibit Resistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary Contributors Featuring James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren Johnson Spiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist Narratives Featuring texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya Milner Sovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United States Julia Gilman What Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region? Featuring Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Pokagon, Black Hawk, and Simon Kofe by Sarah Nisenson (Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833) BHR 1-Intro

School Days (72-73)

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From tears to fury and fire. Kai Chase
Contents of this annotation:
1. School Days (72-73)
The child is unsettled upon returning home. Kai Chase
Contents of this annotation:
1. School Days (72-73)
The assimilationist processes in the school leak into the larger community. Kai Chase
Contents of this annotation:
1. School Days (72-73)
The child as frustrated refusal of assimilation. Kai Chase
Contents of this annotation:
1. School Days (72-73)

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"The School Days of an Indian Girl": Reproducing Resistant Assimilations
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*all images come from the public domain from the following: Zitkala-Ša, American Indian Stories. [Internet Archive] Brigham Young University, Washington: Hayworth Publishing House, 1921.*

To consider the role of the child in Bonnin's American Indian Stories, I turn first to her most obvious pieces on childhood--that of the "Indian girl" whose tales open the book. I focus here particularly on her "School Days" section whereby the audience sees the constant battles the child must face as she moves between her reservation home and the missionary school system (which we soon find is not neatly separated). By paying attention to the missionary school as a particular ideological site, we can see how the battles of the individual narrator extend beyond and out into her Nation's fight for sovereignty and survivance in midst of painful, infuriating attempts at assimilation. As the young narrator grows, she sharply demonstrates what Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in As We Have Always Done marks as refusal--an "appropriate response to oppression" that is "always generative...always the living alternative" (33). Through the process of refusal, the narrator finds physical expression of bent up anger and pain while not providing either the other characters not the (presumably white) audience the comfort of easy answers. In this section of the exhibit, I follow the narrator's repeated struggles in school as varied ways in which the figure of the child is the site upon which resistant assimilations--refusals which complicate flat understandings of acquiescence and subversion--are (re)produced.