Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano a Students, 1865-1911

Enoch Rhetoric / Education Refiguring Rhetorical Education examines the work of five female teachers who challenged ge...

Author: Jessica Enoch PhD

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Enoch

Rhetoric / Education

Refiguring Rhetorical Education examines the work of five female teachers who challenged gendered and cultural expectations to create teaching practices that met the civic and cultural needs of their students. Author Jessica Enoch analyzes Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book, a post– Civil War educational textbook for newly freed slaves; Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900 that questioned the work of offreservation boarding schools for Native American students; and Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s contributions to the Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1910 and 1911. Each of these teachers transformed their seemingly apolitical occupation into a site of resistance, revising debilitating educational methods to advance culturebased and politicized teachings that empowered their students to rise above their subjugated positions. Refiguring Rhetorical Education considers how race, culture, power, and language are both implicit and explicit in discussions of rhetorical education for marginalized students. Jessica Enoch, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, has published essays in College English, CCC, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Cover illustration: “The New School-Mistress,” Harper’s Weekly, 1873. Library of Congress

southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress

Printed in the United States of America

Southern Illinois University Press

ISBN 0-8093-2835-6 ISBN 978-0-8093-2835-2

Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911

“This important work expands the history of rhetoric by showing how women teachers from marginalized populations called upon and developed rhetoric for their own purposes.” —Anne Ruggles Gere, University of Michigan

Refiguring Rhetorical Education

[

WOMEN TEACHING AFRICAN AMERICAN,

]

NATIVE AMERICAN, AND CHICANO/A STUDENTS, 1865 –1911

Jessica Enoch

Refiguring Rhetorical Education

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H[Ò]kh_d]H^[jeh_YWb;ZkYWj_ed

[

WOMEN TEACHING AFRICAN AMERICAN,

]

NATIVE AMERICAN, AND CHICANO/A STUDENTS, 1865–1911

Jessica Enoch

Southern Illinois University Press / Carbondale


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Copyright © 2008 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 08

4 3 2 1

Publication was partially supported by a grant from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Enoch, Jessica. Refiguring rhetorical education : women teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a students, 1865–1911 / Jessica Enoch. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2835-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2835-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching—United States. 2. Students with social disabilities—Education—United States. 3. Women teachers—United States. 4. Rhetoric—Political aspects—United States. 5. Rhetoric—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. PE1405.U6E556 2008 808'.042071—dc22

2007034587

Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞


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In loving memory of Nancy McLinden Carr

For my parents, Robert and Barbara Enoch


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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1. The Profession of a Woman

Female Teachers, Marginalized Students, and Rhetorical Education 1 2. Revising Rhetorical Education

Lydia Maria Child and The Freedmen’s Book

30

3. Resisting Scripts

Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School 73 4. Claiming Cultural Citizenship

Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and La Crónica

121

5. New Visions, New Traditions

The Female Teacher and Rhetorical Education in the Twenty-First Century Notes

183

Works Cited Index


165

201

217

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Illustrations “Instruction for the Freedmen,” Freedman, January 1864 36 Carte de visite photograph of Lydia Maria Child 51 Students at work at the printing press, Carlisle Indian School 81 “Pupil teachers,” Carlisle Indian School 88 Zitkala-Ša, photographed by Gertrude Kasabier 93 La Crónica of Laredo, Texas 140 Leonor Villegas de Magnón and friend 155

ix


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Acknowledgments

I

n every way, this book project has been about teachers and their teaching. Because of this, my deepest gratitude goes first to Cheryl Glenn, who taught me how to be a teacher and scholar. Her remarkable work ethic made me see how projects like these are accomplished, and her unwavering confidence and consistent support made me believe in myself and this book. I am also indebted to Keith Gilyard, Jack Selzer, Marie Secor, Stuart Selber, Pat Shannon, and Elaine Richardson. Their initial guidance provided me with a clear vision as to how this project could and should take shape. I could not have completed Refiguring Rhetorical Education without generous financial support from Penn State University, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Pittsburgh. The grants I received from these institutions funded research trips to the American Antiquarian Society, Worchester, Massachusetts; the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; the Webb County Heritage Foundation, Laredo, Texas; and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin. Through this funding, I was also able to garner assistance in translating more than sixty Spanish-language articles from La Crónica for chapter 4. A UNH faculty development grant enabled me to participate in the Rhetoric Society of America’s biennial institute titled “The History of Rhetoric as a Teaching Tradition,” and the University of Pittsburgh’s third-term research stipend provided me with the uninterrupted time to complete the final revisions to this project. Because of this financial support, I was able to work with a number of very talented people whose expertise enabled me to recover and understand the pedagogical significance of the teachers in this study. Much appreciation goes to all of the archivists at the sites listed above. In particular, the help and knowledge that Barb Landis, archivist at the Cumberland County xi


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Acknowledgments

Historical Society, provided was invaluable, while the archivists at Webb County certainly went out of their way to help me locate information concerning Jovita Idar and Leonor Villegas de Magnón. Without Lisa Lawson, Malena Florin, and Raquel Moran Tellez, I would still be translating the articles from La Crónica. Thank you for your time and patience. Finally, research assistant Lindsey Bailet helped me to dot my i’s and cross my t’s in the final push of the writing and revising process. As I wrote and revised this manuscript, I received valued and thoughtprovoking suggestions along the way. Jaime Mejía’s insightful responses to chapter 4 helped me create what I hope is a more complex and compelling argument. Reviewers Anne Ruggles Gere and Susan Kates offered compelling revision ideas that enabled me to reconceptualize and fine-tune this project, and senior editor Karl Kageff at Southern Illinois University Press artfully guided this project to a smooth completion. The participants at the RSA institute spurred my thinking about how the field of rhetoric and composition defines and historicizes rhetorical education, and graduate students at UNH and Pitt who participated in my History of Rhetoric and Rhetorical Education seminars invigorated my thinking and offered the questions and concerns I needed to address. Jodie Nicotra, Jordynn Jack, Vorris Nunley, Keith Gibson, Jenn Fishman, and Rosalyn Collings Eves have helped me work my way through various aspects of this project, and I thank them for making the ride a good one. Special appreciation also goes to my colleagues at both the University of New Hampshire and the University of Pittsburgh. I count myself very lucky to be able to work among such smart and supportive people. My lifelong friends, Jenny Z., Julie, Kay, Nancy, Sympson, Lisa, Marla, Steph, Caroline, Kathleen, Aimee, Kim, Monica, Sarah, Jen B., Peter, T. J., Carleen, Jonah, and Lucy, have been there through it all, and their love and laughter has encouraged me on a day-to-day basis. I am especially grateful for the support of the Limerick, Enoch, and Wible families. My grandmothers’ strength inspired me, and my brother Rob’s steadfast confidence kept me typing until that very last word. My parents, Robert and Barbara Enoch, are my best and favorite teachers. I learned everything I really know from them, and I thank them wholeheartedly for all that they’ve taught me. My deepest and loving gratitude goes to Scott and Jack, who make every day feel like the best day. Parts of chapter 3 were previously published in my article “Resisting the Script of Indian Education: Zitkala Ša and the Carlisle Indian School,” College English 65.2 (2002): 117–41. Copyright 2002 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission.


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Refiguring Rhetorical Education


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The Profession of a Woman Female Teachers, Marginalized Students, and Rhetorical Education It is to mothers, and to teachers, that the world is to look for the character which is to be enstamped on each succeeding generation, for it is to them that the great business of education is almost exclusively committed. . . . What is the profession of a Woman? Is it not to form the immortal minds, and to watch, to nurse, and to rear the bodily system, so fearfully and wonderfully made, and upon the order and regulation of which, the health and well-being of the mind so greatly depends? —Catherine Beecher, “Suggestions respecting Improvements in Education,” 1829

I

n 1829, Catherine Beecher joined educators across the country to establish woman’s “true profession” as teacher. Educators such as Beecher recognized that, because of a national shift in educational priorities from classical learning and religious indoctrination to moral education, social etiquette, and basic literacy, women should be seen as the perfect candidates for the profession. Since women had a “natural” capacity to nurture and guide, and since they already were expected to be exemplars of piety, morality, good conduct, and correct manners, who would be a better choice to teach the children of the nation? Joseph Emerson and Horace Mann were just two among many educators who could only answer “no one” to this question. Emerson, the principal at a female academy in Saugus, Massachusetts, saw the new opportunity before his students and called them to expand their gendered duties from the home to the school. In his 1822 “Discourse, Delivered at the Dedication of the Seminary Hall,” Emerson prompted them to realize that, “next to the domestic circle, the schoolroom is unquestionably the most important sphere of female activity” (8). Women should be teachers, Emerson asserted, because they “naturally possess a greater share of those excellencies, which 1

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The Profession of a Woman

constitute a good teacher. More gentle, affectionate and winning in their manner; more ardent, zealous, and preserving in their efforts; . . . their operations upon the mind are more forcible and efficacious” (10). Almost twenty years later, Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education and avid proponent of the common school movement, continued to argue for woman’s rightful and natural place in the classroom. Mann made this argument for female teachers in his 1841 report to the Massachusetts board: That females are incomparably better teachers for young children than males, cannot admit of a doubt. Their manners are more mild and gentle, and hence more in consonance with the tenderness of childhood. They are endowed by nature with stronger parental impulses, and this makes the society of children delightful, and turns duty into pleasure. . . . therefore, females are infinitely more fit than males to be guides and exemplars of young children. (45–46)

These and other educators would continually equate the mother with the teacher and would argue throughout the early nineteenth century that the woman, as teacher, should use her “natural” feminine qualities to instruct the nation’s children. As the century progressed, this argument became unnecessary, for it was almost taken for granted that women were best suited for the work of the teacher. At the 1863 meeting of the National Teachers’ Association, for example, John D. Philbrick observed this “normal” teaching situation: The presiding genius who received us so courteously, welcoming us in tones of peculiar sweetness, is a lady whose natural endowments and opportunities of education have combined to form the true teacher. . . . Here we see these scores of children, without the loss of a day, are at once set forward on the true path of moral and intellectual life; conscience is awakened, and its dictates practically obeyed; manners are formed; right habits are acquired; curiosity is aroused and gratified by imparting rational instruction. (53–54)

This expectation that one would find a female teacher at the head of the classroom was more than justified in the coming years. In 1912, educator C. W. Bardeen reported that the teaching profession had become “an Adamless Eden,” finding that close to 90 percent of the teachers in New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire were women (18). But even though the sheer opportunities for the female teacher changed dramatically from 1829 to 1912, her job description did not shift much from that described by Beecher in the early part of the nineteenth century.1

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As Beecher set out in 1829, the female teacher, like the mother, was to nurture and form the character of her students. Along with teaching the three R’s of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic, the teacher was to act as her students’ moral guide and instill in them such values as frugality, patriotism, hard work, punctuality, and usefulness. Although these tasks were well within societal perceptions of women’s capabilities, educational officials placed much importance in this work: the female teacher was to prepare her students for civic life. Educational discourse that pervaded the nineteenth-century scene consistently positioned both the school and the female teacher as the primary forces that would mold students into citizens. George Howland clarifies the purpose of the school (and therefore the work of the teacher) in his 1880 Education article, writing that the school should be a “sure and efficient helper in making intelligent, industrious, and upright citizens” (144). Professor of education Homer Perrin reinforces Howland’s claim in a 1900 issue of the same journal, explaining that “The Republic educates primarily for self-preservation. The business of the public schools first of all is to make good citizens” (406). The female teacher, then, was to ready her students for citizenship by instilling in them the “right” values and beliefs that would enable them to strengthen and stabilize civic life. Her duty was to secure the nation by reproducing in students those preexisting norms, language practices, and behaviors already firmly entrenched in dominant American society. Thus, the “civic” role of the female teacher was quite conflicted. Her job was at once important—she was to prepare students for citizenship—and at once restraining—she was only to offer a specific kind of pedagogy, one that set out a form of civic participation geared toward sustaining the social order and preserving the nation. This pervasive understanding of the female teacher and her work might not seem problematic if this teacher was herself white and taught white, male, middle- and upper-class students who already benefited from, and would continue to benefit from, the existing societal structure. But how would such a prescribed professional ideal and pedagogical program resonate with teachers teaching marginalized students—students whose language and cultural practices did not map onto the ends of this educational project? How might the teacher shift her practice when teaching students who, as dominant culture ensured, should certainly receive an education but who should not participate fully in civic discussions? And how might the teacher enter into and engage the profession if she was not white and if her cultural role differed from the accepted description of who the teacher should be and what she should teach? Refiguring Rhetorical Education takes up these questions by examining the pedagogical practices and arguments that Lydia Maria Child, Zitkala-Ša,

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Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón composed for their black, Indian, and Mexican students at the turn of the twentieth century. 2 This study considers how these five women resisted the professional and cultural construction of the female teacher by challenging what Beecher called the “great business of education” because this “business” in no way spoke to their students’ needs. As I will show, the dominant educational discourses of each teacher’s day worked, in specific ways, to offer her students a very limited form of civic engagement—one that not only curtailed their political agency but also negated their cultures, languages, and traditions. To resist such practices, these teachers politicized their seemingly apolitical gendered role and argued for culture-based educations that enabled their students to enter into and change dominant society without having to surrender their cultural heritage and language practices. Although their pedagogical aims were similar, these teachers each composed a different kind of educational argument, and chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the particular arguments they made in 1865, 1900, and 1911, respectively. Chapter 2, “Revising Rhetorical Education: Lydia Maria Child and The Freedmen’s Book,” examines Child’s post–Civil War literacy textbook intended for newly freed slaves. This text engaged readers in writings by white and black authors that both reinstantiated and questioned the language education that worked to subordinate the black population after the war. Chapter 3, “Resisting Educational Scripts: Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School,” focuses attention on how Zitkala-Ša (Sioux) used her autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly to question the civic and cultural aims of the Carlisle Indian School in particular and offreservation boarding schools for Indian students more generally. Chapter 4, “Claiming Cultural Citizenship: Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and La Crónica,” analyzes the language and cultural instruction that Idar, Peña, and Villegas offered the Mexican people of Laredo, Texas, through the educational articles these women published in the Spanishlanguage newspaper La Crónica. Thus, each of the teachers studied here chose to deploy dramatically different pedagogical strategies. As they made their individual arguments, however, they all fought against the systematic disenfranchisement of their students perpetuated through schooling. This glimpse of the variety and consistency in these teachers’ work reveals the two major lines of investigation of this project. First, this study questions historical assumptions about the female teacher that define her as a politically passive, presumably white, woman who subscribed to and perpetuated the ideological positions of dominant society. Here, I examine how Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas refigured the dominant “figure” of the female teacher by articulating resistant pedagogical prac-

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tices that in no way followed prescribed educational mandates. Second, this study examines the challenges these women made to dominant forms of education that positioned their students as second-class members of the civic community. This particular aspect of this investigation works to reveal how these teachers intervened in a pedagogical conversation about the specific kinds of language practices, rhetorical strategies, as well as social and bodily behaviors their students needed to participate in public discussions. The second emphasis of this study, then, focuses on how these teachers refigured rhetorical education. Here, I specifically consider how their pedagogical arguments offer new understandings of rhetorical education—understandings that reshape conventional ideas about both historiographic and pedagogical practice.

Rhetorical Education: Definitions, Histories, and Future Practice When these teachers redefined dominant educational priorities and set out new language practices and behaviors that they believed would enable their students to enter civic life, Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas contributed to a long-standing conversation concerning rhetorical education. In ancient times, educators such as Protagoras, Isocrates, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian contemplated the kind of education that would best prepare students for vita activa—the active life. Protagoras and Isocrates agreed that rhetorical education should provide students with the opportunity to “pursue and practice those studies which enable them to govern wisely both their own households and the commonwealth” (Isocrates 53). Aristotle’s Rhetoric forwarded a similar project but moved toward pragmatic ends by setting out a program for active participation that offered students rhetorical tools, such as common topics and artistic and inartistic appeals. Cicero’s Crassus, Scaevola, and Antonius argued over the kind of education the orator should receive, debating the question, “How should he be educated?” And Quintilian, in many ways, answered the question Cicero’s characters posed by setting out in his Institutes of Oratory a dense educational treatise that would lead the student from childhood to adulthood, preparing him to become Cato’s vir bonus, the good man skilled in speaking. This classical connection between civic engagement, language practice, and rhetorical strategy, as well as social and bodily behavior, was both perpetuated and revised well beyond ancient times. Figures such as Desiderius Erasmus, Peter Ramus, Giambattista Vico, George Campbell, Hugh Blair, Richard Whately, Fred Newton Scott, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Toulmin, and Wayne Booth all considered the aims and ends of rhetorical education. Although these rhetoricians may have shaped rhetorical education in different ways, they each participated in the conversation initiated by the

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ancients that interrogated what it means to prepare students for active life. Given this historical perspective, Art Walzer is correct in his assessment that “it is not an exaggeration to characterize the history of rhetoric as a twenty-four-hundred-year reflection on citizen education” (113). This relationship between rhetorical education and civic engagement is indeed a pronounced one inside the history of rhetoric, but it is also one that is both complex and problematic. Although many scholars have accentuated the empowering ways that rhetorical education teaches members of a community to participate and enact change, others have highlighted how this kind of instruction also works to sustain asymmetrical power structures and further alienate already marginalized members of the community. For example, scholars such as S. Michael Halloran and David Fleming underscore the liberating possibilities of rhetorical instruction. Halloran promotes the idea that such an education should define students as “political beings, as members of a body politic in which they have a responsibility to form judgments and influence the judgments of others on public issues” (108). Echoing Halloran, Fleming conceives of rhetorical education as a practice that enables the student to become “the good rhetor,” who has “‘mastered’ the knowledge of speaking and writing well, and who is conceived first and foremost as a free and equal member of a self-governing community” (184). Sharon Crowley, Nan Johnson, and Jan Swearingen question this liberating picture of rhetorical education by accentuating its often exclusionary character. As Crowley points out, since rhetorical education teaches students how to participate in the existing political structure, “the task of rhetorical education in any era . . . will be to discipline and maintain a dominant subjectivity” (33). Swearingen and Johnson agree, as Swearingen specifically highlights the fact that during the ancient period of rhetorical education’s inception “women were increasingly excluded from schooling, rhetoric, and public assemblies” (10). In her study of gender and rhetorical space in nineteenth-century America, Johnson corroborates both Crowley’s and Swearingen’s assertions, writing that rhetorical pedagogies often “maintain rather than destabilize status-quo relationships of gender, class, and race” (1). Thus, as rhetorical education empowers already enfranchised members of a community, it can also function as yet another mode of exclusion for those at the margins. Refiguring Rhetorical Education works inside and extends the problematic of rhetorical education that these scholars set out. The teachers in this study share similar goals with both ancient and contemporary rhetoricians because they too contemplated what it meant for their students to be “good” and to “speak and write well,” and they also saw the vital importance of composing

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pedagogical practices for students that would prepare them to participate in public discussions. At the same time, Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas also recognized how dominant educational practices worked to incapacitate their already marginalized students as civic participants. In this way, these teachers certainly encountered the debilitating forms of rhetorical education that Crowley, Johnson, and Swearingen describe. The most important aspect of this study, however, is the way these teachers negotiated this problematic. They each invented new forms of rhetorical education that aimed to reshape dominant power structures by considering how issues of race, language, and culture inflect every aspect of this pedagogical program. With such considerations in mind, these teachers composed and argued for new iterations of rhetorical education as they consistently evaluated the kinds of language practices, rhetorical strategies, and social and bodily behaviors that would enable their students to “form judgments and influence the judgments of others.” One of the aims of this study, then, is to see how these teachers speak back to the historical and contemporary discussions about rhetorical education and to investigate what it means to place these teachers’ arguments inside such conversations. My contention is that their work brings out new concerns about rhetorical education, allowing for scholars and teachers today to revise their understandings of this pedagogical practice. Given this perspective, the project here is not to designate the concept of rhetorical education as either “good” or “bad” but instead to examine how various kinds of rhetorical educations come in contact with one another—all in the name of changing or sustaining power relations. Johnson argues that scholars should “view rhetorical theories and pedagogies as a cultural field or site where the disposition of power is constantly being renegotiated” (10). Working from this claim, this study investigates how Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas created new forms of rhetorical education as a means to shift the distribution of power in their cultural and civic communities. Thus, the driving consideration for this project is to explore what particular iterations of rhetorical education do and how these pedagogical practices address power relations by positioning students to contribute to civic life. The investigative stance I engage calls for a definition of rhetorical education that encompasses the range of limited and expansive possibilities for participation that this pedagogy might provide students. The definition I propose is one that both builds from my analysis of these teachers’ work and guides my discussion of their practice. This definition equates rhetorical education with any educational program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them the rhetorical strategies, language practices, and bodily and social behaviors that make possible their

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participation in communal and civic affairs. Such a definition complicates the idea that rhetorical education leads to full engagement or that it maintains the status quo. Instead, it extends Cheryl Glenn’s point that “rhetorical education enables people to engage in and change . . . society—but not always” (“Rhetorical” viii). Thus, this definition allows for a variety of practices to fall under the category of rhetorical education, and, more particularly, it designates both the pedagogical arguments that these teachers composed and the dominant educational programs that they challenged as viable examples of rhetorical education. The dominant discourses of rhetorical education I study here did not advocate political agency or full civic participation for the marginalized students that Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas taught. They did prescribe a rhetorical education, however, because they taught students to participate in their communities in a limited way. For instance, when the Carlisle Indian School argued that its students should learn English and be “civilized,” it promoted a rhetorical education that determined the specific ways Indian students could live out Isocrates’s educational mandate: “to govern wisely both their own households and the commonwealth” (53). Likewise, the dominant educational discourses that the rest of the teachers in this study contested advanced rhetorical educations built on language and cultural practices that enabled those in power to stay in power. Thus, Crowley’s claim makes sense when examining the popular and dominant educational discourses circulating at the turn of the twentieth century; these discourses certainly functioned to “discipline and maintain a dominant subjectivity” (33). When the words of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas enter into this conversation, however, it becomes clear that rhetorical education (and the dominant subjectivity it disciplines and maintains) is never constant and is always open to contestation. Through their educational challenges, these teachers composed alternative forms of rhetorical education—forms that were steeped in their students’ languages, cultural practices, and histories and that addressed the asymmetrical power relations their students faced. The pedagogical practices promoted by these five teachers directly conflicted with dominant forms of rhetorical education because these women did not teach their students to find their place in society but instead asked them to consider how their culture-based histories, languages, and rhetorical practices might change the world in which they lived. By setting these moments of rhetorical-education-in-conflict at its center, this study draws attention to what Walter Beale sees as one of rhetorical education’s “most engaging moments”: when educators “attempt to change or rehabilitate both character and culture” (626). Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas make these

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attempts at change by creating arguments that question the kind of culture and character that dominant education prescribed for black, Indian, and Mexican students.

Writing the History of Rhetorical Education Refiguring Rhetorical Education explores three contests over rhetorical education at the turn of the twentieth century, and, in so doing, it both contributes to the history of this pedagogical practice and questions the historiographic methods used to compose such narratives. Conventional understandings of rhetorical education often trace how canonically recognized rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Cicero, Blair, and Burke taught rhetoric; how such figures discussed or debated the function of rhetorical education; or how students in later generations learned the rhetorical theories these esteemed rhetoricians created. Jeffrey Walker makes this point clear when he argues for the teaching of rhetoric as the distinguishing feature of the rhetorical tradition. As he makes this argument, Walker highlights the historiographic practice through which scholars compose such a tradition: What makes rhetoric rhetoric is its teaching tradition, an “educational theater” that has descended from Isocrates (and his predecessors), and that passes through such grand figures as Cicero, Quintilian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the sophists of the Second Sophistic, Hermogenes, Michael Psellos, and a myriad of other bigger and smaller lights. (23)

This tracing of how such “big” and “small” figures make their way onto the educational stage to perform a rhetorical pedagogy for students has, of course, certain historiographic effects. Because this method looks for well-known rhetoricians and their students, it often tracks how enfranchised men accessed exclusive schools to teach and learn a set of rhetorical skills that would in turn enable them to make full use of their enfranchisement. This historiographic prerogative not only prompts an examination of such students and teachers but also situates itself in traditional sites of education, as scholars have often examined ancient progymnasmata in Greek schools, lectures in rhetoric at Scottish academies, and the rise and fall of rhetorical instruction in American universities. These examinations are certainly important because they underscore how the tradition of rhetoric became a tradition through the repetition and revision of sets of rhetorical theories and pedagogies. Moreover, these examinations also highlight how the practice of rhetorical education often worked as yet another empowering mechanism for those in power. Recently, scholars such as David Gold, Nan Johnson, Susan Kates, Shirley Wilson Logan, Stephen Schneider, Susan Romano, Jacqueline Bacon, and

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Glen McClish have troubled this historiographic narrative by investigating how students and teachers without such entitlement made use of their own forms of rhetorical education. Gold and Kates both direct attention away from prominent American universities—and as Gold’s dissertation title puts it, “never mind what Harvard thinks”—by exploring how teachers and students at the turn of the twentieth century taught and learned about rhetoric at such places as the Brookwood Labor College (Katonah, New York) and East Texas Normal College (Commerce, Texas). While Kates and Gold situate their historiographic practice in less well known colleges, Romano, Logan, Schneider, and Bacon and McClish center their studies outside postsecondary U.S. institutions entirely. In Logan’s “‘To Get an Education and Teach My People’: Rhetoric for Social Change,” Schneider’s “Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and Critical Rhetorical Education,” and Bacon and McClish’s “Reinventing the Master’s Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education,” these scholars uncover the various and inventive ways that African American individuals have worked outside traditional academic settings to claim and create a rhetorical education for themselves. Romano moves farthest afield from traditional locations of rhetorical education in North America when she examines Tlaltelolco, a sixteenth-century educational institution in Spanish-colonial Mexico, which offered rhetorical instruction in the form of “cultural translation projects . . . [that] attempt[ed] to ‘de-indianize’ the indio” (257). As each of these scholars refocus the historiographic lens in different ways, they offer a new vision of rhetorical education that interrogates the not-so-simple relationship between learning rhetoric and entering public life. Refiguring Rhetorical Education furthers the project of these scholars by positioning Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas inside this tradition while also considering how these teachers disrupt conventional practice. The first way in which they break from tradition is through their work in nontraditional spaces outside the American university. These women composed their work for freedmen’s schools in the post–Civil War South, about off-reservation Indian schools, and through pages of a Spanish-language newspaper published out of a city on the border of Texas and Mexico. In addition to their nontraditional educational locations, these women did not teach enfranchised or even soon-to-be enfranchised students. They taught black, Indian, and Mexican students whose possibilities for civic engagement were already significantly limited. To complicate the situation even further, these teachers did not occupy a gendered or cultural status that would enable them to be recognized as esteemed rhetoricians or even full citizens themselves. As I will discuss more explicitly below, Child,

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Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas were marginalized members of their communities due to their professional status as female teachers, their overall gendered status, and, in the case of Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas, their racial and cultural status. But these are not the only ways in which the teachers in this study speak from the margins of rhetorical education’s history. In addition to their pedagogical locations, their student populations, and their own gendered and cultured bodies, Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas also do not seem to “fit” into the history of rhetorical education due to the ways in which they framed their pedagogical practice. These teachers did not engage ancient or even turn-of-the-century rhetorical pedagogies or theories. In fact, they did not explicitly acknowledge that they were either offering a rhetorical education or arguing about the means and ends of this pedagogical endeavor. Thus, it might seem that these women do not have a place inside the history of rhetorical education since their work refuses, at almost every level, to fulfill the recognized criteria for inclusion. The argument of this book is that these women do belong inside the history of rhetorical education because they interrogate the basic questions that the ancients asked: How do teachers educate their students for civic engagement? What language practices, rhetorical strategies, and social and bodily behaviors allow for such involvement? Each teacher in this study answers these age-old questions by connecting to and pushing the boundaries of traditional understandings of rhetorical education. More specifically, by considering how language, culture, and race interanimate this pedagogical practice, as well as the communal and civic realm it prepares students for, these teachers do not simply become part of the history of rhetorical education but raise important questions about how new lights and new pedagogies have challenged and changed conventional teaching practices aimed at civic engagement.

The Future of Rhetorical Education As this study considers the historical and historiographic significance of these women and their work, it also prompts scholars and teachers to reflect not only on the definition of rhetorical education in the past but also on the creation of rhetorical pedagogies in the present and future. Refiguring Rhetorical Education as a whole and the final chapter in particular asks teachers and scholars to use the work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as a heuristic to rethink the aims and objectives of rhetorical education in a present-day context. Such an objective works in conjunction with that of a number of scholars attempting to revitalize rhetorical education in the twenty-first century.

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12 The Profession of a Woman

Although the idea that rhetorical instruction belongs in the first-year writing classroom was brought back into vogue in the early 1960s, scholars in the field of rhetoric and composition have recently seconded this initial argument to make more urgent and compelling calls for integrating this pedagogical practice into writing curricula.3 For instance, in her 2006 College English response essay to the question “What should College English be?” Logan asserts that we should “teach students of college English more intentionally how to analyze and deploy language and images that better prepare for meaningful civic engagement” (“Why” 110). Affirming Logan’s assertion, a number of scholarly and pedagogical agendas have forwarded a similar argument. Collections such as The Realms of Rhetoric: The Prospects of a Rhetorical Education (Bahri and Petraglia) in 2003 and Rhetorical Education in America (Glenn, Lyday, and Sharer) in 2004; textbooks such as Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (Crowley and Hawhee) in 2003 and Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy (Lazere) in 2005; as well as disciplinary initiatives such as the 2005 Rhetoric Society of America’s first biennial institute, “The History of Rhetoric as a Teaching Tradition,” all signal a renewed investment in “recuperat[ing] rhetoric’s pedagogic status and mission” (Bahri and Petraglia, “Traveling” 2). This scholarly and pedagogical focus is indeed exciting for the field of rhetoric and composition at large. However, it is vital to understand that as we recuperate rhetorical education and prepare students for public discourse, we must critically reflect on the kind of rhetorical education that we invoke in our classrooms. Refiguring Rhetorical Education encourages this reflection as it links turn-of-the-twentieth-century pedagogies with those at the turn of the twenty-first century. Of course, just as we cannot repeat the practices of Aristotle or Cicero, this study does not suggest that we replicate the teachings of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, or Villegas. Instead, this historical analysis offers ideas to consider and questions to ask ourselves as we respond to the exigencies and contexts of our own pedagogical situations.

The Female Teacher and Feminist Rhetorical History To speak fully about the importance of these teachers’ pedagogical arguments and especially to understand the gendered and cultural constraints they faced, I both ground my work in and contribute to feminist histories of rhetoric. Much of the work by feminist historians in rhetoric such as Cheryl Glenn, Catherine Hobbs, Nan Johnson, Andrea Lunsford, Shirley Wilson Logan, Carol Mattingly, Kate Ronald, Joy Ritchie, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Hui Wu seeks to understand the ways that women throughout history have made their voices heard or their silences felt. Through their recovery

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work, these scholars have learned that in order to bring women’s rhetorical achievements into scholarly discussions, the very definitions of rhetoric, rhetorical situation, constraint, rhetor, kairos, audience, as well as many other rhetorical concepts, have to be revised. The entrance of such rhetors as Aspasia, Margaret Fuller, and Ida B. Wells into the history of rhetoric, then, does not simply expand the rhetorical tradition but “revitalize[s] rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself” (Glenn, Rhetoric 10). Thus, the presence of these women and many others functions, in Lunsford’s words, to interrupt the seamless narrative usually told about the rhetorical tradition and to open up possibilities for multiple rhetorics, rhetorics that would not name and valorize one traditional, competitive, agonistic, and linear mode of rhetorical discourse but would rather incorporate other, often dangerous moves: breaking the silence; naming in personal terms; employing dialogics; recognizing and using the power of conversation; moving centripetally towards connections; and valuing—indeed insisting upon—collaboration. (6)

Among the “dangerous moves” that feminist historians have worked to recover are the strategies women have used to reconstitute the definition of the rhetor. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell has noted, “the most significant contributions of [feminist rhetorical] criticism have come from work that explores the ways that women negotiated the assumption of the role of rhetor” (“Consciousness” 51). Lindal Buchanan, Carol Mattingly, and Roxanne Mountford are just three scholars who have made such contributions by examining how women have entered male-dominated rhetorical spaces and composed themselves as rhetors. These scholars in particular ask: How does she deliver a speech if, for instance, she is pregnant? How does she dress to address an audience? And how does she preach to her congregation? Judy Nolte and Suzanne L. Bunkers, Anne Ruggles Gere, June Hadden Hobbs, and Wendy B. Sharer have examined woman’s role as rhetor in a different way by looking past the platform, pulpit, and podium to see how women spoke and wrote to audiences outside traditionally male forums. These scholars have looked to women’s essays, diaries, and letters, their social and literary clubs, and their religious writings as alternative sites of rhetorical performance—sites where women redefined the role of and expectation for the rhetor. Investigations into these alternative sites have shown how female rhetors have made meaning not by transgressing or resisting their gendered sphere to become rhetors but by speaking within and from this sphere. This kind of rhetorical study in particular calls historians to reflect on the work that

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a rhetor can do and the spaces where she can do it. Such reflections prompt scholars to heed Glenn’s advice to question the seeming silence or diligent obedience of “good” women throughout history: Whenever we find ourselves entertaining the idea that women have historically internalized the social pressures to be chaste, obedient, and silent, we need to laugh out loud and nudge one another in the ribs. We need to remind ourselves that some of them might have been chaste, some might even have been obedient (many of them were very brave), but none of them were silent. These women still have much to tell us––all we have to do is listen to their voices and their silences. (Rhetoric 179)

My study builds on and contributes to Glenn’s recommendation as I call into question the “historical fact” that the female teacher was always a very good woman who dutifully taught her students just what they were supposed to know. In the opening pages of this chapter, I outlined the pervasive description of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century teacher as one who simply acted out her gendered role by guiding students to sustain the nation through an education in basic literacy, correct conduct, and social etiquette. It should come as no surprise that this conception of the female teacher as docile guardian of the status quo is the one most frequently recited from public memory—if recited at all. The female teacher has been consistently defined and memorialized as a single, white, politically innocuous woman—“the spinster, the schoolma’am, the old maid and the mother-teacher” (Munro 3). Historians of education Allison Prentice and Marjorie R. Theobald record that the female teacher has been inscribed as “young, naïve, and malleable” (4); she is remembered as the “ideal, natural” teacher who was “easily dominated by [her] employers” (6). As Edwina Walsh notes in Schoolmarms: Women in America’s Schools, the very definition of schoolmarm promotes a limited understanding of the female teacher’s work. Walsh writes that while “early American male teachers were called schoolmasters, a term Webster’s defines as ‘one who disciplines or directs[,]’ [f]emale teachers were called schoolmarms, defined in Webster’s as ‘a person who exhibits strict adherence to arbitrary rules’” (29). Even in texts aimed at understanding the feminization of the teaching profession, historians such as Redding Suggs put limits on the kind of work the female teacher might have done. In Motherteacher, Suggs remembers female teachers in this way: “As a class physically weaker than men, politically disenfranchised, conditioned by normal school training, and occupationally limited, they were in any case too weak to trouble the democracy with authoritative criticism, much less establish a logical system of education

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with strict educational requirements” (109). Given these banal definitions of female teachers, it is not surprising that there have been few examinations of their rhetorical significance—why see women who simply taught morals and manners along with the 1, 2, 3’s and the ABCs as worthy of examination? Because teaching was deemed simple, nurturing, and politically conservative, it makes sense that female teachers and their pedagogical arguments have fallen into anonymity—a position that Carolyn Heilburn explains has long been considered the “proper condition of women” (12). In this project, I revise the traditional conceptions and our collective memories of female teachers by recovering the pedagogical arguments of five female teachers from their relative anonymity.4 Refiguring Rhetorical Education turns scholarly attention to the rhetorical and pedagogical achievements of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas—women who negotiated the role of the rhetor by first meeting gendered expectations through their decisions to become teachers. Their gendered and rhetorical negotiations become clear when they transformed the definition of the teacher by renaming themselves as authorities who could argue for change in their students’ work in school and position in society. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, I show how these women took advantage of their role as teacher and enacted their rhetorics of pedagogical resistance. As rhetors, they discursively undid the traditional conception of the female teacher and invented pedagogical arguments that prepared students with the tools to question and critique the world in which they lived. Through this examination of how five female teachers spoke out against dominant discourses of education, this study contributes to the ever-expanding notion of who a rhetor is and why and how she chooses to speak, write, or even teach.

Women’s Rhetoric at the Turn of the Twentieth Century This study also joins with the growing number of feminist scholars working to invigorate the rhetorical history of nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury women in the United States. Most initial work in women’s rhetoric during this period focuses on white women’s arguments for suffrage or black women’s calls for abolition or racial uplift. For example, in her groundbreaking collection Man Cannot Speak for Her, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell presents, for the most part, rhetorical works by nineteenth-century white women that “form the core of the persuasive message of early feminism.” Campbell sees in the speeches of women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Carrie Chapman Catt the “basis for describing the challenges women faced and for evaluating the resourcefulness with which women deployed the available means of persuasion to encompass and transcend the obstacles they confronted” (Introduction x). While Campbell’s text does include

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the work of some African American women, such as Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth, Shirley Wilson Logan’s influential texts With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women and “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women keep their focus on the rhetorical achievements of African American women. Here, Logan helps to bring the “muffled voices” of African American women “to full volume” by offering readers the work of such rhetors as Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, and Ida B. Wells who addressed issues of abolition, racial uplift, the duties of African American women, and lynching (“Introduction” xi). The scholarship of both Campbell and Logan signals the initial emphases concerning histories of women’s rhetorics in the nineteenth century. As feminist historians have continued to investigate women’s rhetorical achievements during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they have expanded their vision beyond arguments for the vote or abolition and have begun to investigate women’s lesser-known rhetorical activities. For example, Jacqueline Jones Royster examines African American women’s nonfiction writing in Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. Susan Wells’s Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine analyzes women’s literate and rhetorical practice as medical students and physicians. As mentioned above, Nan Johnson investigates the ways nineteenth-century pedagogical materials taught women to remain in their domestic sphere in Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866–1910. And in Appropriate[ing] Dress: Women’s Rhetorical Style in Nineteenth-Century America, Carol Mattingly argues for women’s clothing style as a productive site for rhetorical inquiry. My examinations here contribute to this growing body of scholarly work as they continue to extend and complicate conceptions of turn-of-the-twentieth-century women’s rhetorics. By exploring the pedagogical arguments of five female teachers, this study calls attention to the most popular and arguably the most overlooked profession for women during this period and refuses to define the work of the female teacher as merely domestic or apolitical. This project instead identifies these women as political and educational activists who leveraged rhetorically significant arguments as a means to fight for their students’ cultural and civic futures.

Feminist Histories and Women of Color As much as this discussion extends feminist rhetorical discussions toward the multiple ways women have chosen to speak or write, it also revises a tradition that includes the rhetorical achievements of white and (some-

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times) black women. Not surprisingly, feminist recovery work (like the work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century women discussed above) began by investigating the achievements of women who lived alongside those white, enfranchised men who composed the rhetorical canon. Equally as expected, these women were often white and, despite the sexism of their times, empowered by their color and class. As feminist histories developed, the work of scholars such as Logan and Royster shifted the focus of feminist recovery by including the rhetorical endeavors of African American women like Harper, Wells, Cooper, and many others. Logan’s and Royster’s work on African American women makes it clear that gender cannot be the only determining factor when studying and contextualizing rhetorical histories of women—even the rhetorical achievements of white women. Feminist historians must take into account the ways that gender, race, class, and culture interanimate one another and then inform the rhetorical practices that women deploy. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 take up this challenge as a means to understand how race and culture affected the gendered work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas. Each pedagogical investigation is grounded in the kinds of racial, cultural, and gendered expectations these teachers were expected to fulfill and the specific arguments they made to resist or carry out such expectations. Thus, this project follows Susan Jarratt’s conception of “feminisms” as a theoretical construct that “challenge[s] all boundary-marking logics and literacies, [and] call[s] into question not only gendered exclusions in the production and dissemination of knowledge but also the buttressing of racial, class, and other privileges thereby” (Introduction 2). To expand the feminist project in light of Jarratt’s definition, I look beyond what Amy Kaminsky has called the “symbiotic fictions of ‘white’ as norm and ‘Black’ as race” (11) to incorporate women outside the black/white dichotomy into feminist histories of rhetoric. Of course scholarly contributions like those made by Logan and Royster should continue to reframe rhetorical study, but their work can also be used as a foundation from which to build new histories concerned with the ways that Native American women, Chicanas, and women from various racial, cultural, and classed backgrounds could change rhetorical history and theory. This study first examines how Child, a white, Northern woman, reworked the figure of the female freedmen’s teacher as a means to present a new kind of education to her black students. Chapters 3 and 4, however, build on the foundation Logan and Royster made secure by analyzing the work of Zitkala-Ša and Idar, Peña, and Villegas. My investigation of Zitkala-Ša begins to answer Scott Lyons’s question, “What do American Indians want from writing?” (449) by specifically asking what a nineteenth-century Indian

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female teacher wanted from the iterations of rhetorical education practiced in Indian schools. This investigation shifts the current stance on Native American research in rhetoric and composition, which, as Malea Powell points out, does a “pretty good job of not doing a very good job of critically engaging with Native texts” (“Rhetorics” 397). In addition, the recovery of Idar’s, Peña’s, and Villegas’s work contributes to an almost nonexistent discussion concerning Chicana rhetorical achievements. Only a few rhetoricians have investigated the contributions that past and present-day Chicana rhetorics could make to rhetorical history and theory.5 The relative absence of research on Chicana rhetorics arises from the need for scholars to rethink the cultural and linguistic boundaries inherent in both feminist rhetoric and mainstream rhetoric and composition. As Clara Lomas points out, in addition to the political affiliations and gender discrimination that allow histories of Mexican women to be ignored, scholars’ “linguistic biases have relegated [histories of Chicanas] to oblivion” (xvii).6 Chapter 4 of this study offers one way for feminist and mainstream historians to begin responding to Lomas’s assessment by recovering the work of three educators who wrote and published their work in Spanish.

Critical and Multicultural Pedagogical Theory The project of this text is not only to look at the negotiations that Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas made to their own racial and gendered positions in order to teach. This study also interrogates how issues of race, culture, language, power, and access meet whenever discussions of rhetorical education arise. These female teachers taught black, Indian, and Mexican students, and the pedagogical arguments that they composed reveal the critical disconnections between the culture and language of their students and the pedagogical imperatives of the dominant educational discourses of their day. To read and understand the ways these teachers confronted such issues, I draw on two, often overlapping, conversations inside our field today: conversations concerning critical pedagogy and those concerning race and ethnicity. When I write of the ways Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas confronted issues of power as they composed their rhetorical educations, it is impossible not to hear the resonance their work has with contemporary understandings of critical pedagogy and, more specifically, the resonance it has with the educational goals set out by Paulo Freire. Like these five women, Freire also refused the idea that education is only an instrument that “integrates [the oppressed] into a structure of oppression” (55). Instead, he saw that education can be a “practice of freedom” whereby educators can provide students with the conditions to “transform that structure so that [they] can

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become ‘beings for themselves’” (55). This theoretical perspective helps me understand the rhetorical educations Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed as both signs of resistance and moves toward positive social change. But this perspective is only a beginning; from here, I build a more nuanced understanding of each of these teachers’ pedagogical practices by joining critical theories of education with specific conversations concerning race and ethnicity in the field of rhetoric and composition.

African American Rhetorics and Pedagogies In “History and the Spaces Left,” Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams are most interested in the ways scholars have (mis)remembered African American contributions to the field of rhetoric and composition. They write that, for the most part, the field’s “officialized” historical narratives ignore the presence of African Americans in composition (579). When scholars do speak of African American involvement, Royster and Williams contend, they often conflate African American students with basic writers by pointing to the commencement of open admissions as the moment when African American people emerged on the scene of composition studies. Many scholars have joined Royster and Williams to disturb such assumptions by composing “more instructive ways of looking at African American experiences that support a different view of presence” (579). For instance, Keith Gilyard, Stephen Parks, Catherine Prendergast, Geneva Smitherman, Scott Wible, Richard Marback, and Patrick Bruch have interrogated the ways African American language practices are understood and judged both inside and outside the academy. Elaine Richardson examines how the “socializing values” present in the lives of African American women affect the ways they construct their literate selves (695). Juanita Rodgers Comfort positions the racial and gendered self-portrayals of writers like June Jordan at the center of her writing class as a way to “challenge [her] students, both black and white, to reconsider what they themselves [are] about” (544). And Shirley Wilson Logan, Kelvin Monroe, and Vershawn Ashanti Young investigate the constructions of black student and black teacher identities. In this study, I reinforce the work of these scholars by specifically engaging the questions raised by Lisa Delpit, Lisa Gonsalves, Arnetha Ball, Ted Lardner, and Geneva Smitherman. Each of these scholars asks, How must all teachers, but especially white teachers, revise the ways they see and understand African American language and cultural practices? These scholars join with Royster and Williams to offer “more instructive ways of looking at African American experiences” by examining the (many times) fraught relationship between white teachers and black students (579). These scholars argue that to teach African American students effectively, the teachers must

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change along with the students by first reflecting on their own racial and cultural positions. Only after this reflective process can these teachers begin to consider how African American students might acquire the codes of the “culture of power” while simultaneously learning to destabilize these codes (and the culture they are part of) with their own literacies and knowledges (Delpit 296). The pedagogical dilemmas that Delpit, Gonsalves, Ball, Lardner, and Smitherman face are important to this study because they are so similar to those that Child confronted in 1865 as she also attempted to “teach other people’s children” in The Freedmen’s Book.7 In chapter 2, I interrogate Child’s negotiation of her own racial and gendered position as a white, Northern woman to see how she presented her readers with an expansive rhetorical repertoire that prepared them to question the ways dominant educational narratives taught them to live their lives. To understand better how Child creates this pedagogy, I draw from the scholarship of Comfort, Gilyard, Joyce Elaine King, and Gwendolyn Pough, among others. I build from these scholars’ work to examine how Child challenged both the figure of the white freedmen’s teacher and the dominant forms of rhetorical education by offering her readers a multivocal text that set out a variety of rhetorical strategies and viewpoints articulated by conservative and radical, as well as white and black, voices. In this chapter, I see the rhetorical education that Child invokes in The Freedmen’s Book as one that prompts her readers to critical investigation and involvement by calling them to consider those arguments about civic participation they want to adopt and those they want to reject. Thus, the scholarly conversations that interrogate the ways all teachers, but especially white teachers, can compose positive and invigorating pedagogical practices for African American students enable me not only to read Child’s work but also to show how her work speaks back to these discussions.

Native American Rhetorics and Pedagogies The interpretive framework I use to study Child in chapter 2 shifts in chapter 3. In this chapter, I analyze a different rhetorical situation by investigating the ways Zitkala-Ša, an Indian teacher, spoke to white mainstream readers in the Atlantic Monthly about Indian education. The shift occurs, then, not just in terms of racial and cultural differences but also in terms of pedagogical and political purpose: Child taught her black readers about civic responsibility and involvement through her educational tract; Zitkala-Ša used her autobiographical essays to expose her white readers to a side of Indian education they most likely did not know. The questions I asked of Child were, How does she position herself inside The Freedmen’s Book, and how does she teach her students? In chapter 3, my questions shift to

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The Profession of a Woman 21

the following: What argument does Zitkala-Ša make about the rhetorical education offered in Indian schools? How does she compose herself as an Indian student and teacher in her autobiographical writings? And how does she speak to the predominantly white Atlantic Monthly readership? To answer these questions, I turn to a much more limited set of scholarly resources than those consulted in chapter 2. A literature review of College English and College Composition and Communication shows a brief surge of attention to Native students, literature, and language use in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of the civil rights movement and consequent shifts in university priorities,8 but then scholarly attention to Native concerns wanes (to say the least) to just a smattering of scholarly articles. Only recently have scholars begun to question more seriously and more regularly how the field of rhetoric and composition might respond to and be energized by the work of Native scholars, rhetors, and students.9 Much of this attention has attempted to disrupt persisting stereotypes and appropriations of Native people and their texts. Cheryl Glenn, for example, confronts the ways dominant white culture has “alternatively capitalized upon and then disparaged [Indians]” by interrogating the “common perception” of them as “fiercely silent if not personally cold, . . . solemnly dignified, if not linguistically impoverished” (Unspoken 109, 113). My reading of Zitkala-Ša’s work reinforces Glenn’s argument and refuses such stereotypical definitions. Zitkala-Ša was far from silent; her contributions to the Atlantic Monthly reveal a moment often ignored in rhetorical and pedagogical history—when an Indian teacher captured the ear of the white American public and spoke out about Indian education. To analyze Zitkala-Ša’s rhetorical prowess, I build on and draw from the work of Malea Powell and Scott Lyons. Powell’s investigation of the “alliance and adaptive tactics” of Susan La Flesche Picotte, Sarah Winnemucca, and Charles Eastman helps me to see Zitkala-Ša as one of many Native people who “negotiated themselves as civilized Indians at the end of the nineteenth century” (“Down” 49). Powell’s ideas concerning survivance—a term she borrows from Gerald Vizenor—as well as her analytical vantage point, which examines how Indian writers and speakers used “imperial discourses,” will prove important to this study as I work to understand Zitkala-Ša’s writing and her complicated positioning as an Indian teacher of Indian students (“Rhetorics” 400, 405). When I focus attention on Zitkala-Ša’s essays and her critique of the Carlisle Indian School, I rely most heavily on the work of Lyons. In particular, the theory that frames this chapter is Lyons’s definition of rhetorical sovereignty: “the inherent right and ability of [Indian] peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires, . . . to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles, and lan-

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guages of public discourse” (450). I use this term to define and understand the aims of Zitkala-Ša’s rhetorical and pedagogical endeavor, seeing that through her essays she demands that Indian students and teachers have a say in the “goals, modes, styles, and languages” of educational discourse and Indian education.

Chicano/a Rhetorics and Pedagogies As I move to chapter 4, the rhetorical situation and theoretical framework once again shift. The previous chapters both investigate cross-cultural discussions about rhetorical education: in chapter 2, I examine the ways Child educated her black students; and in chapter 3, I analyze how ZitkalaŠa wrote to a predominantly white readership. In chapter 4, the educational discussion I study is not cross-cultural but is instead intracultural. Here, I examine the rhetorical education that Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed for their own Laredo, Texas, community through the pages of La Crónica. When Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed their articles, they offered their readers a rhetorical education that negotiated the political and cultural demands they confronted on the border of Texas and Mexico. These teachers’ pedagogical arguments opened up a space for their readers to identify with one another and consider how they might enter dominant American society while still retaining a Mexican cultural identity. So that I can effectively discuss the kind of rhetorical education these teachers promoted, I employ the theoretical concept of cultural citizenship. Borrowing largely from William Flores and Rina Benmayor’s edited collection, Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, I examine the various ways these teachers created educational opportunities that enabled their readers to maintain a connection to Mexican culture and language while also claiming their civic and cultural rights inside the U.S. border. In her contribution to this collection, Blanca Silvestrini defines cultural citizenship as a means for people to “organize their values, their beliefs about their rights, and their practices based on cultural belonging rather than on their formal status as citizens of a nation” (44). I work from her definition to read the arguments for rhetorical education that Idar, Peña, and Villegas proposed.10 This definition of cultural citizenship helps me to examine the rhetorical education Idar, Peña, and Villegas created for their readers, one that addressed their own and their readers’ complex positioning on the border of Texas and Mexico. As I make this analysis, I contribute to two scholarly conversations. First, I build on and historicize discussions in education concerning bicultural and bilingual education initiated by Antonia Darder, Donaldo Macedo, Susan J. Rippberger, and Kathleen A. Staudt. Second, I attempt to counter the ways our discipline has, in the words of Jaime

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Mejía, “fail[ed] to address how rhetoric and composition pedagogies could directly and positively impact the largest segment of the largest collective ethnic minority group in the United States” (51). My analysis attends to this disciplinary failure by recovering the rhetorical educations that three Mexican teachers composed for their Mexican readership. In offering this history, this chapter also extends and deepens the innovative work of such scholars as Valerie Balester, Ralph Cintron, Juan C. Guerra, Michelle Hall Kells, Mejía, Renee M. Moreno, Paul Velazquez, and Victor Villanueva Jr. These scholars interrogate how our field’s priorities, expectations, and assumptions must change, given the rich linguistic and cultural backgrounds of the students entering our classrooms. Kells, Balester, and Villanueva in particular argue that “as teachers of historically disenfranchised Latino/a student populations, we need not only to understand but to enact the understanding of the discourses our students weave together, unravel, and connect to a ganglion of myths, questions, and issues about civic identity and social access” (“Introduction” 3). Chapter 4 places these scholars’ argument at its center by analyzing how three turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mexican teachers composed pedagogies that dealt specifically with issues of civic identity and social access. Although all of these theoretical perspectives aid me in reading the work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas, it is important to note that in no way do I pretend that these women anachronistically used these twentyfirst-century theories to compose their turn-of-the-twentieth-century pedagogical arguments. To avoid any kind of anachronistic reading, I begin each chapter by examining each teacher’s pedagogical significance in its historical context. I center my attention on the negotiations these teachers made within their gendered and cultural constraints to compose arguments aimed at resisting the dominant educational discourses that dictated their professional lives, as well as their students’ civic and communal futures. My analysis for each chapter begins, then, with primary and archival research. For chapter 2, I examine The Freedmen’s Book alongside other post–Civil War educational tracts and discussions concerning the social and civic future for newly freed men and women. In chapter 3, I situate the interchange between Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School within conversations about Indian education at the close of the nineteenth century. In chapter 4, I ground my understanding of the particular contexts in which Idar, Peña, and Villegas wrote by relying on translations of more than sixty articles from La Crónica and by consulting contemporary resources concerning Mexican education along the border. Thus, the critical theories that I discuss above do play a major part in this study, but their role is not to determine

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whether or not these teachers’ practices fulfill the requirements of our theoretical standards. Instead, the theories I use function as interpretive tools to illuminate the work these teachers did and to connect their work to our concerns today.

Defining Terms: Dominant Discourse and Resistance This study defines the work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as resistant because their pedagogical arguments challenged dominant educational discourse on two major fronts: the ways these discourses constructed the female teacher and the ways they composed a rhetorical education for black, Indian, and Mexican students during the period from 1865 to 1911. Because this project rests on these teachers’ resistances to dominant discourses of education, I cannot begin to talk constructively about them or their pedagogical arguments before first defining what I mean by these terms. Although numerous scholars have defined discourse in various ways, the term usually pertains to the language and rhetorical strategies, practices, and approaches that enable persons and groups to engage in the world from a particular perspective. As James Gee contends, discourses are “inherently ‘ideological.’ They crucially involve a set of values and viewpoints in terms of which one must speak and act” (22). All language practices, then, cannot be contained inside a certain discourse. Instead, discourses act as Burkean terministic screens; they are a “reflection of reality”—they “select” and “deflect” certain terms, ideas, values, and beliefs (Burke, Language 45). Thus, in Gee’s words, a discourse “concerns itself with certain objects and puts forward certain concepts, viewpoints, and values at the expense of others” (4). When considering dominant discourses, it is important to understand that “discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society” (Gee 4–5). Even though all discourses relate to the distribution of social power, dominant discourses promote the values that reinforce the lifestyles and belief systems of those in power. Moreover, dominant discourses reproduce the idea that the histories, traditions, practices, and behaviors of those in power are not only good and right but also that they should continue to be prevalent. The project of dominant discourses, however, is rarely visible or overt; instead, such discourses implicitly enact and reflect how the world seemingly does and should work. This kind of “officialization,” as Pierre Bourdieu explains, is a “process whereby the group (or those who dominate it) teaches itself and masks from itself its own truth, binds itself by a public profession which sanctions and imposes what it utters, tacitly defining the limits of the thinkable and the unthinkable and so contributing to the maintenance of the

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social order from which it derives its power” (qtd. in Atwill 208). Through this process of continually setting out what is right and wrong, good and bad, possible and impossible, dominant discourses compose what Michel Foucault has called “the omnipresence of power,” in that the ideas, values, and interests of those in power are viewed as pervasive, even natural (History 93). In terms of my work here, I specifically examine how dominant discourses constructed the female teacher and how they composed a rhetorical education for black, Indian, and Mexican students. The dominant discourses I analyze were produced by teachers, school officials, and political leaders and were perpetuated through everyday newspapers and magazines, educational journals, and teaching materials. These producers of dominant educational discourses aligned themselves with the ideological principles that sustained American society both by enabling white, male, enfranchised citizens to remain in their elite social positions and by asking the female teacher to obediently carry out this work. For example, in chapter 2, I study the most popular and widely distributed educational tracts for freed men and women published by the American Tract Society (ATS). Through publications like the Freedman, the ATS situated the white, Northern, female teacher as the guiding force that would teach black students to accept yet another form of subordinated status after the Civil War. In chapter 3, I investigate two publications of the Carlisle Indian School, the Indian Helper and the Red Man. As the most popular and influential Indian educational institution in the country, Carlisle used these publications to inform the American public of the “good work” done at the school. Finally, in chapter 4, I examine the ways that publications like the Texas School Journal called teachers working on the Texas-Mexico border to Americanize Mexican students by promoting Anglo cultural ideals and language practices. In varying ways, all of these dominant educational discourses looked to teachers such as Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas to repeat and inculcate the “appropriate” rhetorical education for their marginalized students. But, of course, this study does not only focus attention on these dominant discourses. My intention is to investigate how Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas transformed their roles inside these dominant educational discourses into sites for educational change. These women challenged ideas of who the female teacher should be, and they reconceived the form and function of rhetorical education by countering the asymmetrical power relations reproduced through the dominant educational discourses of their day. Therefore, I place Child’s Freedmen’s Book, Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, and Idar’s, Peña’s, and Villegas’s La Crónica entries at the center of this study. These texts provide evidence of these teachers’ pedagogical

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negotiations, their creativity, and their arguments for change—all of which I call resistance. This definition of resistance guides my work, but by defining resistance in this way, I reconceive the conventional definition of the term itself. Traditionally, resistance roots itself in the outright “rejection of dominant ideologies” and is “gendered public (male)” (Munro 113, 36). It is viewed as “the stance of the antagonist . . . the voice of the critic, rational, angry, ironic, in sufficient command of the material so as to critique it” (Fetterly ix).11 As such, resistance is often equated with goals to destroy or entirely deconstruct. The resistant work that the women in this study perform differs from such traditional conceptions because their resistance begins with the acceptance of their gendered roles. These women accepted the most basic component of the dominant discourse concerning teaching, namely, that women should be teachers. Their resistance thus grew from the traditional, domesticated, and feminized position of the teacher. It was from this position that these women challenged dominant educational norms. As each chapter will show, however, even in these teachers’ overt resistances to dominant discourses of education, they did not intend to destroy the educational systems of their day. Each resistant pedagogy negotiated, revised, and reconstituted what education could be; each opened up, rather than closed down, lines of conversation. Witnessed in these teachers’ educational arguments are moments of debate and reformulation. Their resistance places dominant forms of rhetorical education “under construction” as a means to rebuild a pedagogical practice that infuses participation in civic life with questions of language, race, and culture.

On Beginnings Before I begin my analysis of these five teachers’ pedagogical practices, it is important first to step back and say a word about where I stand inside this discussion. I aim here to (briefly) examine my approach to and connections with these teachers; as I do, I hope to answer a call Royster makes in Traces of a Stream. Here, Royster asks scholars to “articulate their ideological standpoints systematically, not simply as a personal or political flag to wave at a convenient moment” but rather “in recognition of how our viewpoints are implicated in scholarly presentation and representation; and also in support of ‘humility,’ as we locate ourselves within the text as scholars, and thereby as people who have interpretive power” (281). My examinations in this study are built on traditional archival research, sound rhetorical and pedagogical theoretical principles, and careful analysis. But, as Royster makes clear, I cannot pretend these interpretive frames are the only ways I came to my conclusions. I searched for Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas for

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a reason—a good one, I believe. And though I learned much more than I ever anticipated, I know that by clarifying my ideological approach and connection to this project, I will not only give greater insight into my historiographic decisions but also strengthen my overall argument concerning the important part this project could play in scholarly discussions. As a graduate student studying rhetoric and composition and a committed teacher of first-year writing, I began this project equally invigorated by my work in the classroom and disheartened by the historical and presentday definition of composition instruction and its teachers. As Sue Ellen Holbrook, Susan Miller, and Eileen Schell have assessed, the work of the composition instructor is often deemed the “drudge” work of the academy; the proverbial “housework of the English department in which women ‘tidy up’ student essays with painstaking, careful commentary and hours devoted to students in one-on-one conferencing” (Schell 554). I deeply resisted these constructions of the composition instructor as mother, as nurturer, and as service provider for students who complete her course and then move on to “real” classes, “real” education, and “real” life. I knew that if I were to go on in this field I would have to find and build from a different kind of definition of the teacher and her teaching. At the same time that I was dealing with my own professional future, I also began to question the ways my teaching addressed issues of power, access, race, class, gender, and culture. I reflected on the cultural codes I perpetuated and ignored as a white, female, middle-class teacher, and I invested myself in the theories of critical pedagogy as a means to interrogate the ways my teaching could function to empower and disempower my students. As I delved deeper into theoretical discussions concerning critical pedagogy and searched for ways to incorporate these ideas into my classroom practice, I found myself making a critique similar to that made by Jennifer Gore, Shari Stenberg, and Amy Lee. These scholars argue that even though critical theorists call for educators to reject debilitating educational practices and create pedagogies that prompt students to change their worlds, they many times do so without connecting such abstract ideals to actual pedagogical practice. As Gore notes, “Although [critical theorists] have been strong on social vision, they have been weak in terms of social or instructional practices” (274). Stenberg and Lee extend Gore’s argument to support their own claim that liberatory pedagogy has “too often become a new knowledge body to be theorized about, but not engaged at the level of the classroom. It has become another ‘content’ to be mastered” (329). My scholarly investigations corroborated these disconnections, and I began to search for real teachers who proposed and enacted real pedagogies that aimed to enable their students to bring about change in their worlds.

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These two concerns soon coalesced to formulate a broad research agenda for my dissertation project that would examine the ways female teachers taught marginalized students. Such an agenda allowed me to investigate how teachers dealt with their own gendered roles and to analyze how they might have constructed pedagogical practices that addressed issues of gender, race, culture, and power. To begin, I looked to times of conflict. I turned to the conclusion of the Civil War, the rise of Indian education, and the onset of the Mexican Revolution to see how female educators taught black, Indian, and Mexican students during periods when the nation was openly formulating and enforcing its educational goals. I approached these educational moments by asking questions such as these: Who was the female teacher? What was her role? How did she teach? Did these teachings reinforce or resist the national agenda? As the following chapters will show, when I examined the work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas, I found much more than I was looking for. These teachers certainly resisted their gendered role, but what became equally as compelling to me was how they enacted such resistance. These women redefined themselves as teachers by composing revolutionary pedagogical arguments that focused on the kinds of language practices, rhetorical strategies, and social and bodily behaviors their students needed to participate in and change their civic and cultural communities. I soon realized these women were interrogating and extending the aim of an ancient form of instruction: rhetorical education. Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas created and argued for specific pedagogical practices that placed civic and communal participation as central concerns and refused any educational prerogative that asked students to surrender their cultural heritage or to take up status as second-class citizens. As I continued to write and research about these teachers in the years after my dissertation was completed, I also continued to connect their work with my own concerns and began to see them as women to find a heritage in and build a history from. In this study, I position these women as exemplars for me and for others in the field who resist the ways composition instruction has been feminized and who strive to construct rhetorical pedagogies that refuse to repress, counter, or ignore their students’ language and cultural backgrounds. But even though I might identify with these women as a teacher, it is also important to recognize the many qualities I do not share with them. In most ways, I am an outsider to these women’s communities. I am a white, middle-class, now tenure-track professor who works at a research university and teaches students from various racial, cultural, and classed backgrounds. Time, age, race, professional status, culture, and language are all factors that

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separate me from these women and that separate these women from one another. My work throughout this text, then, is not to erase difference or pretend that teachers today have similar concerns or constraints as those working at the turn of the twentieth century. Rather, my purpose here is to accentuate the negotiations the teachers in this study made in terms of their particular situations as a means to create unique forms of rhetorical education for their students. It is through the examination of the specific contexts and exigencies of these teachers’ lives that I see their work bringing into contemporary discussions new knowledge about rhetorical education, and it is in recognizing these differences that I continue to connect myself to these women because I see them doing the work I want to do—the work I think we should do in this discipline.

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2

Revising Rhetorical Education Lydia Maria Child and The Freedmen’s Book —Scourge them as they have scourged us. —I’ve heard many preachers white and black; an’ they all tell me Jesus said, “Do good to them who do evil to you.” —Why should I go in coarse rags, to clothe my master in broadcloth and fine linen, when he knows and I know, that we are sons of the same father? —May be de British lan’ and may be de British no lan’. But I tell ye, boys, de white man can’t keep his foot on de black man ’ef de black man git de knowledge. —Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen’s Book, 1865

I

n Lydia Maria Child’s short story “The Meeting in the Swamp,” four slaves speak to a group of their peers concerning what to do about their masters if they decide to escape to nearby British ships. As displayed above, each character offers a different procedural argument to his audience, advocating outright violence, religious forgiveness, overt resistance, or educational freedom. After these men assert their points—a debate that runs for four pages of the six-page short story—there follows one short paragraph that reveals the group’s decision: “There was a good deal of speaking afterward, and some of it was violent. A large majority were in favor of being merciful to the masters; but all, without exception, agreed to join the British if they landed” (Freedmen’s Book 109). This short story is one of many contributions included in Child’s 1865 educational tract for newly freed slaves entitled The Freedmen’s Book. The lengthy discussion that makes up most of “The Meeting” is emblematic of both Child’s text and her teaching strategy. Although the conclusion of the story tells readers that most “were in favor of mercy,” Child dedicates the majority of “The Meeting” to the four major characters and their debate over how they should treat their masters. The entire text of The Freedmen’s Book

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offers a similar kind of conversation. On a structural level, Child composed the text using an amalgam of genres and writers. A collection of biography, autobiography, prayer, fiction, and nonfiction, it includes the work of Child, Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, James Montgomery, and Henry Wilson, among others. On a thematic and rhetorical level, Child offers her readers a debate much like that in “The Meeting.” The various writers and genres that make up The Freedmen’s Book involve readers in a complex and multivocal conversation concerning the social, political, and intellectual place of freed men and women in their post–Civil War world. Such a structure disallows Child’s text to promote a consistent message. Some voices in the text replicate the argument of one debater from “The Meeting” by proposing conservative religious forgiveness—a position seen in most popular literacy tracts of the day. Pages later, though, other voices interrupt this viewpoint and question white demands on the black community, challenging educational discourses in particular and social and political discourses more generally. It is through this process of exposing her readers to a range of conservative and radical positions that Child constructs a two-pronged rhetorical education that prepares her readers for an active and engaged public life. First, when she introduces her readers to such varying and often divergent viewpoints, she includes them in an impassioned discussion over the definitions of and ideas about black participation in American society. In bringing her readers into these debates, she creates a rhetorical education that prompts them to reflect on these discussions and to decide for themselves what the terms of their participation should be. Second, as Child exposes her readers to these ideas about participation, she presents them with an expansive variety of rhetorical strategies that enables them to engage in their communities in new ways. Instead of offering her readers a limited set of rhetorical options, as dominant pedagogical texts tended to do, Child makes available to her readers revolutionary rhetorical tactics that prompt them to contribute to and shape civic and communal conversations. Through the rhetorical education she advances in The Freedmen’s Book, Child not only makes a significant departure from the more popular pedagogical practices for newly freed men and women but also expresses her hesitations with her role as a freedmen’s teacher. Dominant educational institutions such as the American Missionary Association (AMA) and the American Tract Society (ATS) composed a very detailed picture of the freedmen’s teacher. This white, often young, Northern woman was consistently featured as a demure but brave teacher who would dutifully carry out a specific education in religious truth and civic duty. According to the expectations of the AMA and ATS, this teacher would in no way direct her

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students to disrupt their postwar worlds; instead, it was expected that she would teach her students language practices and social behaviors steeped in ideas of obedience and compliance. Through the pedagogical materials of the ATS in particular, the freedmen’s teacher spoke to students in the unified and singular voice of the Northern, white woman and taught those rhetorical skills that situated her students in subservient social and civic roles. Thus, when Child includes voices other than her own and sets out an expansive repertoire of political positions and rhetorical strategies, she questions the function of the freedmen’s teacher and redefines the work this teacher can do. This chapter examines how Child resists both the monolithic description of the freedmen’s teacher and the dominant pedagogical project intended for black students. Here, I investigate the ways Child re-creates her role as the white, Northern, female teacher to compose a rhetorical education that both invites her readers into a complex conversation concerning black participation in public life and presents them with a rich array of rhetorical options to use as they engage this discussion. To make this argument, I first define the dominant description of the freedmen’s teacher set out by prominent and popular freedmen’s societies and detail the specific kind of rhetorical education these institutions called on her to deploy. I then examine Child’s move into the role of freedmen’s teacher and contrast the rhetorical education she composed with that of these dominant educational institutions. Such a contrast reveals how revolutionary Child’s pedagogical project actually was, as it gives insight into the ways she diverges from conventional practice to offer her readers a rhetorical education aimed at change and disruption rather than acceptance and submission. As I explore the significance of Child’s pedagogical practice, I build on and borrow from the work of such activists, scholars, and educational leaders as Juanita Rodgers Comfort, Keith Gilyard, Joyce Elaine King, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Pough, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Carter G. Woodson. Like Child, these figures also advocate pedagogical practices for black students that, in the words of King, “oppose blind acceptance of mainstream concepts, cultural values, and social practices” (263). Child’s work resonates with and adds dimension to pedagogical agendas such as Pough’s—agendas that center on helping students to adopt a “critical/political awareness” by “spark[ing] an awareness in students, allow[ing] them to come to and develop their own forms of critical consciousness, and giv[ing] them a space to explore ways that they could contribute to change” (475). Throughout the chapter, then, I use this contemporary scholarship to read The Freedmen’s Book more fully and fruitfully in its original context and consider how Child’s work broadens understandings of rhetorical education.

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Educating the Freedmen When Child published The Freedmen’s Book in 1865, she was taking part in an already robust conversation concerning the education of black men and women. Before the Civil War began in 1861, activists had a long history of protesting the implicit and explicit policies that barred black people from receiving an education, as they argued against the Northern practice of denying the black population access to schools and the Southern prohibition of black education by law. Black activist David Walker, for instance, used his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World to explain and repudiate white educational policy for black people, writing that white society “keep[s] us sunk in ignorance, and will not let us learn to read the word of God nor write—If they find us with a book of any description in our hand they will beat us nearly to death—they are so afraid we will learn to read, and enlighten our dark and benighted minds” (65). Thirty years later, at the onset of the war, Walker’s argument against white prohibitions to black education seemed more than justified to many educational activists. During this time, both black and white leaders engaged in the important struggle for literacy. As Heather Andrea Williams describes, many newly freed men who upon emancipation joined the war effort simultaneously argued for schools for their regiments so that these same men could become educated community leaders once the war was over (52). At the close of the war in 1865, freed men and women took on the role of community leadership and immediately pointed to education as a primary and pressing need. For example, in a number of Southern states, black people joined together and held conventions where they emphasized the key role that literacy should play in their fight for equality and suffrage (79). As many members of the black community spoke out for their right to education, others entered the classroom. The Savannah Educational Association was one organization run by the black community that placed black teachers in freedmen’s schools, while thousands of other individual black teachers entered Southern classrooms as members of other educational institutions.1 At the same time that the black community made these important educational efforts, Northern white educators also entered this discussion in a specific way. They believed their major contribution to the abolitionist and post–Civil War project would be to deliver Northern teachers, textbooks, and schoolhouses to newly freed men and women. Educator Samuel Greene elucidates the role of the Northern teacher in his speech “The Educational Duties of the Hour” delivered at the 1865 National Teachers’ Association convention. Here, Greene calls his audience to action by announcing that the war “has thrown open the blessings of education to four millions of

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liberated slaves, to whom all formal instruction was peremptorily forbidden. They now extend to us the imploring hand, and crave the bread of intellectual and moral life” (241). Greene goes on to deduce that since “slavery is dead,” Northern teachers must go south and “introduce” the “angelic agency of education . . . [to] meet the demands of humanity, civilization, and freedom” (242). For Greene and other educators, it was the North’s divine responsibility to “save” freed men and women and prepare them for “civilization.” To enable these teachers to go to the South and “save,” a number of already established institutions increased their workloads to direct their educational relief efforts more formally and forcefully. The most powerful among these educational institutions was the AMA. Begun in 1846 as an abolitionist society, the AMA defined its mission and work in this way: “The Association felt providently called and fitted to devote itself to the elevation of the Freedmen. Its sympathies were with them, it understood their character, and enjoyed their confidence. It has responded to that call, with clothing, schools, and the instructions and consolations of religion” (American Missionary June 1867, 122). The AMA carried out this mission in full force after the close of the war. From 1865 to 1869, the AMA doubled its number of teachers and missionaries from 250 to 532, and as a result of this increase, the association soon came to direct and manage almost all of the educational initiatives in Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama (J. Richardson 37). The sheer number of its teachers reveals the pervasive presence of the AMA in the South, but the association increased its visibility throughout the United States by publishing its newsletter, the American Missionary. Each month, those who supported and funded the work of the AMA would learn about educational progress in freedmen’s schools by reading letters from teachers published in the newsletter. The following letter by Mary S. Battey offers a representative example: Our school begun—in spite of threatenings from the whites, and the consequent fears of the blacks—with twenty-seven pupils, four only of whom could read, even the simplest words. At the end of six weeks, we have enrolled eighty-five names, with but fifteen unable to read. In the seven years teaching at the North, I have not seen a parallel to their appetite for learning, and their active progress. Whether this zeal will abate with time, is yet another question. I have little fear that it may. (March 1867, 52)

Letters like this not only revealed the persistent presence of the AMA and its teachers but also reminded readers of the continual need for more monetary aid to fund schools, educational materials, and teachers.

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Aside from the dominant AMA, Northern societies such as the Methodist Freedmen’s Aid Society, the Freedmen’s Relief Association, the American Freedmen’s Union Commission, and the Boston Educational Commission, as well as a number of Presbyterian and Baptist churches, also contributed to this educational effort (J. Jones 16). In addition, the U.S. government worked in conjunction with these individual societies by instituting the Freedmen’s Bureau on 3 March 1865. This bureau was charged with “the supervision and management of all abandoned lands, and the control of all subjects related to the refugees and freedmen” (qtd. in Cimbala xv). One of the “subjects” related to the freedmen that the bureau oversaw was, of course, education.2 Even though educational initiatives from the AMA to the Freedmen’s Bureau grew out of specific social, regional, religious, and federal circumstances, they did share similar goals. As Jacqueline Jones points out in Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1871, for the most part, these educational societies worked together and “did not differ sharply in either ideology or practical application of those ideas” (18). The American Tract Society (ATS) was one organization that joined in the educational effort in a particularly important way. While other institutions built schools, sent supplies, and recruited and then supported teachers, the ATS concentrated its attention on publishing educational materials that were specifically suited for freedmen’s education. Texts such as The Freedmen’s Primer, The Freedmen’s Second Reader, The Freedmen’s Third Reader, The Freedmen’s Spelling-Book, John Freeman and His Family, and Plain Counsels for Freedmen, as well as the society’s monthly publication the Freedman, were all a part of the ATS library. These widely distributed and widely used educational materials offer detailed information concerning the pedagogical assumptions, prerogatives, and priorities of these Northern educational institutions. In reviewing the ATS’s educational materials, one assumption that becomes very clear is who the intended audience for these texts was. Of course, the ATS believed that black students would be learning from these texts, but these pedagogical materials also reveal the ATS’s expectation that a particular kind of teacher would be teaching from these texts, one whom Northern educational institutions had specifically targeted as most capable of carrying out their implicit and explicit educational mission. Through the ATS’s educational texts, as well as the AMA’s promotional materials, these societies set out their definition of the freedmen’s teacher.

Freedmen’s Teaching as Women’s Work In January of 1864, the ATS published its inaugural issue of the Freedman, and on its opening page the society delineated exactly who the freedmen’s

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teacher should be. The first lesson of this issue, entitled “Instruction for the Freedmen,” presents an illustration of a white, female teacher instructing black children under a tree in a large open field. Before commencing the first lesson, the text welcomes readers and invites them to observe what the ATS would promote as the conventional educational situation. It reads, “Our picture shows a beautiful scene, where under the rich, dark shade of the trees the children are taught by a lady who loves them, and has come from her home in the North to instruct them in useful knowledge” (1). This image of

“Instruction for the Freedmen,” from the Freedman, January 1864. Harvard College Library.

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the loving Northern, white, female teacher teaching black students is one the ATS and AMA actively advocated and projected throughout their materials.3 But before these institutions could place the Northern, white teacher in either their classrooms or their textbooks, they had to address a number of concerns. Even though white women were certainly taking charge of the school in greater numbers throughout the Northern part of the country, the idea that these women should find their place at the head of the freedmen’s classroom required a good deal of rhetorical maneuvering. So that Northern women could travel to the South and teach, institutions like the AMA and ATS made the case that these women were the best equipped to undertake the pedagogical task at hand. Those who supported women’s educational work in the South argued that they were the most logical choice because of their religious dedication and fervor; their qualities of goodness, patience, and kindness; as well as their natural aptitude for social graces and etiquette—all of which, it seemed, were qualities that newly freed men and women needed to learn. An AMA pamphlet titled Women’s Work for the Lowly articulates exactly how and why the Northern, white woman should become the primary teacher in the Southern freedmen’s school: The question which, just now, is exciting a good deal of inquiry and debate, and which is likely to excite more in the future, is “Woman’s sphere and work.” She feels, to a degree, the degradation of enforced idleness, and asks for work, as she has a right to, in all proper ways and places. This feeling led her into the hospitals during the war; where, on a limited scale, she won a good name as a nurse. But this was exceptional. Her work properly began after the war. The rough work of camp, and march, and field, was man’s. Hers was that of education and religion; bringing in the ameliorating and purifying influences of church and school and Christian home, to close the wounds of war, and smooth the level furrows of battle. (3)

Rhetorical attempts such as this persuasively argued for and then instantiated women’s “proper” place in the Southern classroom after the Civil War. As this pamphlet makes clear, it was woman’s natural duty to “ameliorate” and “purify” the South by using her feminine influence to bring “education and religion” to her students so they could become acceptable members of the American community. This argument for women’s rightful place in the freedmen’s school caught on with fervor, and white female teachers soon entered the Southern classroom in great numbers: during the first half of the Reconstruction period, 65 to 85 percent of freedmen’s teachers were white women

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(Morris, Reading 58). As Jacqueline Jones describes, these women often fit the profile of “the well-educated daughter of a farmer or professional [who] was highly conscious of her duty to God and country” (15). Many of these women were teachers already, had attended normal schools, or had been missionaries, and they were often abolitionist or at least antislavery (J. Richardson 164–68). The motivations these women had for becoming freedmen’s teachers varied, but mostly they wanted both to contribute to the antislavery cause and to bring their form of religion to this community while also “liberat[ing] themselves from the comfort and complacency of a middle-class existence” (J. Jones 8). These Northern, white women were not the only ones to take on the role of freedmen’s teacher at this time, however. As discussed in the conclusion to this chapter, a number of black women, such as Edmonia Highgate, Susie King, Jane Deveaux, Louisa Jacobs, and Mary Peake taught in the Southern freedmen’s schools. These women saw education as a vital part of the black struggle for advancement and equality, and their work in educating those of their own race planted the seeds for what would later become the National Association of Colored Women’s motto, “Lift as We Climb.” But even with the presence of these black women in the classroom, the AMA and ATS were vigilant in focusing the nation’s attention on the freedmen’s teacher as a Northern, white woman. Although these societies did not revere these women behind the scenes—female teachers received less pay than their male counterparts and were denied almost all administrative duties—the AMA and other institutions like it outwardly celebrated and perpetuated the idea that this teacher was teaching the freed men and women of the nation, and her sole task, as freedmen’s societies outlined, was to “concentrate on ‘moral reform’” (J. Jones 104). In spite of the diminished agency that freedmen’s organizations allowed their female staff, institutions such as the AMA and ATS used the figure of the Northern, white, female teacher as a way to signal the success and promise of the kind of educational work these organizations promoted. In publications such as the American Missionary, references to and descriptions of the female teacher not only compounded the argument that the freedmen’s teacher should indeed be a Northern, white woman but also reasserted the kind of educational work the female teacher was expected to carry out. For example, in the February 1867 issue of this publication, one writer describes to readers what it was like to see these women take on their teaching responsibilities: [A] small procession of Yankee girls, just from the cars, [has come] into Harper’s Ferry, to scatter through the Valleys of Virginia, as teachers of

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the freed-people. That was a sight you have come all the way to the old slave-lands to appreciate! There they were—the “teachers!” The teachers! for whom Virginians had the most chivalric contempt, and the few Northern hearts here the warmest greeting. . . . I see elegance, beauty, and youth; all come to brighten the lot of the lowly, to deliver from ignorance and vice that victim race which our brothers with their blood delivered from chains.

This writer then moves on to give a more specific account of exactly who made up this “troop of maidens” (39): Here was the red-lipped school-girl, just from school; here the young widow, holding in tearful love the memory of buried husband and child; here were women in the prime of matured power, with their rare beauty of sumptuous womanhood—women whose elegance and grace and fine mentality would have lent luster to the highest sphere.

“Such were the teachers of the freed slaves,” the writer concludes, “who sat and knelt together; whose soft eyes dimmed with tears as they sang the hymns of home, and prayed for the blessing of God upon their work” (40). The idea that the female teacher would “deliver” freed men and women from “ignorance and vice” was reinforced again and again by these educational institutions. The New England Freedmen’s Aid Society’s description of the freedmen’s teacher and her work reflects this persistent perception: [The teacher] must see in the freedmen the representatives of humanity, the “little ones” whom Jesus has told us we serve him in serving. She should feel also the importance of the work in relation to our country: that she is forming the people who are to influence very largely its future, for good or evil. She will need all these motives of religion and patriotism to sustain her in her duties. (qtd. in Morris, Reading 59)

This dominant description of the female teacher as a Northern, white woman both motivated by religion and patriotism and happy to carry out the mission of the AMA and other freedmen’s societies was not just advertised through such overt directives. The AMA also went to great lengths to patrol how these Northern women described and portrayed themselves and their work in their published writings. Although many freedmen’s teachers may have rejected the pedagogical program of the AMA and ATS and adopted more politicized teaching practices, the dominant freedmen’s institutions of the period went to great lengths to ignore such activities and continually reiterated the definition of the female teacher as one who only taught students to respond to their

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emancipation in a specific way. One example of the lengths to which these societies would go to promote the “correct” image of the female teacher was in the publication of freedmen teachers’ letters in the American Missionary like that by Mary Battey quoted above. These letters were carefully monitored by the AMA because officials wanted to ensure readers that their monetary contributions to this educational effort were working toward the desired ends. Because of such concerns, teachers were “under considerable pressure to produce well-written and dramatic letters” (J. Jones 99). AMA corresponding secretary George Whipple instructed teachers to include in their letters those “spectacular occurrences” that would “move [readers] to tears” (qtd. in J. Jones 99). If teachers did not meet such expectations, institutions like the AMA had no qualms about editing their letters. Thus, at every turn, the Northern, white woman was expected to carry out the prescribed duties that the freedmen’s societies set out for her and to follow a particular pedagogical program. The ATS overtly stated this objective through its more general statements about the purpose of its pedagogical publications and then used its monthly educational tract, the Freedman, to convey this message to its teachers and students. For example, in its 1865 report, the ATS describes the purpose of The Freedmen’s Primer and, consequently, the work of the freedmen’s teacher in this way: “The text is designed to be the first of a series of books for the use of the Freedmen in their school, families, &c. While it teaches to read and write, the series will aim to communicate also religious and moral truth, and such instruction in civil and social duties as is needed by them in the new circumstances in which they are placed” (qtd. in Morris, Introduction 2). The ATS did not hesitate to translate these aims for its teachers and students in the first lesson of the inaugural issue of the Freedman. As noted above, in “Instruction for the Freedmen,” the white, Northern teacher sits with her black students and explains that she will “instruct them in useful knowledge” (1). Mirroring the ATS’s plans for the publication of The Freedmen’s Primer, the useful knowledge that this teacher was to impart to her students was twofold. First, her job was to provide the civic instruction that would teach students to “continue to show themselves worthy of freedom” so that they might “win the respect and esteem of the whole nation.” Second and “above all things,” the teacher was to offer students a religious education so that they could “strive to become disciples of Christ, and heirs of eternal life” (1). Through these two publications, the pedagogical priority for the freedmen’s teachers and the institutions that supported them becomes clear. The freedmen’s teacher was to educate her students in civic duties and religious truth, and because the Northern, white woman was already deemed the champion of moral rectitude, religious observance, and dedicated patriotism,

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she was seen as the candidate best fit to carry out this educational mission. A closer look at the discourse surrounding these educational texts published by the ATS, however, suggests that this institution and others like it wanted their teachers to do more than simply help freed men and women manage the “new circumstances in which they were placed.” Although such objectives were certainly stressed throughout the ATS publications, there were other motivations for defining the work of the freedmen’s teacher in this way.

The Work of the Freedmen’s Teacher In the wake of the Civil War, the country was not only reeling from the death and destruction on the battlefields but was also deeply concerned with how freed slaves would make the transition from bondage to freedom. Many white citizens feared that the large emancipated population would only wreak more havoc on the national scene. With this situation as a pressing concern, individual educators and educational societies such as the AMA and ATS often defined freedmen’s education as a means to regain a sense of national stability. This educational goal made it clear that even though the care and concern these societies asked their teachers to show their black students far surpassed what was being done in the rest of the country, their progressive work mainly prompted students to conform to and quietly take their place in the lowest stratum of American society (J. Richardson 163). Educator J. P. Wickersham articulates the role of the school as a securing force in his 1865 speech “Education as an Element in Reconstruction.” Speaking before the National Teachers’ Association, Wickersham first quotes Wendell Phillips’s remark that “behind every one of Grant’s cannons there should be placed a school-house” (292). Wickersham then goes on to make this claim about freedmen’s education: American educators hold in their hands the destinies of this nation. Their task is not like that of the dashing soldier or the popular statesmen at whom all the world gazes; but in the unobtrusive quiet of the schoolroom, though no eye, save that of God, witness the work, they may infuse such a love of our country and its institutions into the hearts of coming generations of children, that the Republic, on its secure foundations, will stand as firmly as the Egyptian pyramids. (297)

Wickersham’s argument that the school should be the secure foundation on which the country rests was taken up and reworked by societies such as the American Freedmen’s Union Commission. This commission specifically envisioned education as a preventative and stabilizing mechanism that would ward off the ill effects that the seeming ignorance of the newly freed population might have on American society.

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Corresponding secretary for the commission James Miller McKim elucidates this point, writing in 1865 that the nation was just beginning to recognize the important work of education in “lifting up its ignorant & degraded masses, of relieving its perishing classes, & saving itself from its dangerous classes” (qtd. in Morris, Reading 151). This argument for freedmen’s education as a move to protect the country from the dangers of abolition only became more common in the years after the war, with one Southern doctor noting in 1867 that “there are hundreds of bright eyed, smart little darkies hereabouts . . . who must become educated and useful citizens of the country, or they will relapse into barbarism, and become a curse to themselves and to the country” (qtd. in Morris, Reading 151). Thus, one implicit and overarching aim for freedmen’s education was to protect the country by teaching freed men and women to find a slightly less subjugated position than that in which they lived before the war. The “civic duties” this education imparted did not encourage students to engage in a kind of active participation that effected social change; instead freedmen’s institutions advocated that their teachers stress social stability through a pedagogy based in student obedience, acceptance, and passivity. The counterpart to the ATS’s pedagogy of “civil and social duties” was instruction in “religious and moral truth.” As Joe Richardson writes in Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890, this pedagogical objective was grounded in Northern white educational leaders’ negative response to the black churches instituted before and after emancipation as well as the religious beliefs and practices articulated by black ministers and communities.4 In sum, AMA officials largely “perceived black ministers as ignorant and immoral and their congregations as loud, overly emotional, and sinful” (143). With this prejudicial assessment in mind, the AMA supported an educational program that guided students toward religious observance that looked and sounded like white America and that instilled in them “correct” ideas about Christian restraint, morality, and sobriety (144). The AMA articulates this educational goal throughout the American Missionary. In the June 1867 issue, for example, the AMA asserts, “We are firm in the conviction that this peculiar people, so religious in their natural instincts, and yet so uncultured in the practical moralities of religion, can be permanently benefited only by an education that is blended with religion” (123). Although the American Missionary did concede in its March 1867 issue that the instructional program was a “threefold one, physical, educational, and religious,” the association was quick to underscore the idea that “the religious instinct of the race is the deepest, and the one from which we have most to hope” (49).5 Again and again, the AMA stressed that

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religious instruction was the most prominent factor in freedmen’s teaching. As Jacqueline Jones notes, the prevailing function of freedmen’s work “became a ‘religion,’ interdenominational in character and guided by a set of compelling beliefs that called the faithful to action” (17). The religious instruction that the AMA promoted reinforced the objectives of social stability discussed above. The August 1867 issue of the American Missionary explicitly articulates how the religious factor worked toward the stabilizing ends of education. One writer celebrates the “success” of freedmen’s education in this way: “[Students] are fast becoming subdued by education coupled with the influence and power of the Gospel. After nearly five years’ experience in their schools, it is my deliberate conviction that to give them education without the restraining influence of the Gospel, would be to unchain the lion and teach him his strength” (173; emphasis added). The March issue of that same year restates this troubling point: “The religious instinct is the deepest and the one from which we have most to hope. If they are to be thoroughly mastered and used for the purposes of freedom and religion, it will be by informing and guiding that instinct” (49; emphasis added). In addition to comments such as these that stress the ways education can “master” and “subdue” newly freed people, the AMA’s focus on religious observation also pushed its teachers to limit and constrain the political work their students could do. In the July 1867 issue of the American Missionary, one teacher reports how students’ political interests were getting in the way of religious practice: “Political meetings are quite frequent among the colored people, and though there is some complaint of their being drawn from their work, and that they are less earnest in religious meetings than formerly, yet I cannot but think highly of the educating influence of the political discussions in their presence” (159). Although this teacher might think “highly” of her students’ political interests, it is clear that the official position of the AMA expected that religious education and observance should trump such worldly investments. Each of these American Missionary passages reflects the explicit and implicit function of freedmen’s education. To the AMA and, as we will see, the ATS, teachers should direct students to understand the realm of the political as secondary to religious devotion, because without such restraining influence, politically active black students could seriously disrupt white society. As the one American Missionary writer fears, in the absence of a regulated religious education, the danger of a lion could be unleashed on the American community.

A Rhetorical Education for Freedmen The “lessons” offered in the ATS’s educational materials prompted its Northern, female teachers to carry out these large-scale educational goals.

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On the surface, textbooks such as The Freedmen’s Primer and The Freedmen’s Second Reader, as well as the monthly publication the Freedman, provided the teacher with materials to teach students basic penmanship and elocutionary exercises; reading, writing and spelling lessons; math problems; and short religious, fictional, and political passages. The Freedmen’s Third Reader, for example, offers students instruction on how to hold a book (“hold the book in your left hand, avoid stooping forward, keep the shoulders back, and the chest full and round”); how to read aloud (“speak every word clearly”); and what to do with the lessons they have read (“commit to memory parts of the lessons, and repeat them with the book shut”) (v). Here, students were to gain the most preliminary literacy skills: they were learning to read, write, speak, and memorize. But underneath the surface of these teachings, the ATS reinforced its overarching purpose by explaining to students what they should do with their newfound literacy. Even the simplest reading and writing lessons in the Freedman constructed a specific kind of rhetorical education for these students—one that used both literacy instruction and behavioral advice to define and regulate their participation in civic and social life. ATS penmanship exercises, for example, taught students to write by asking them to observe and then copy the words on the page. Such lessons begin with students learning the alphabet or simple two- or three-letter words and then progress by prompting them to copy sentences and even a short paragraph. Through this practice in penmanship, though, students did not just learn to write; they were also being taught how they should and should not behave. For example, after asking students to copy the alphabet, one penmanship exercise invites students to replicate this paragraph: “I am free. I am no more a slave. But what is it to be free? Can I do anything I like both good and bad? No: I am free to be a good and noble man, and not an idle, bad, worthless fellow. This is what it means to be free” (“I Am Free” 15).6 When students copied such exercises, they were learning more than how to position their hand on the page. They were also learning the ways dominant society sought to position them in the world: they were to be good and noble, not idle or worthless. Such an exercise makes tangible James Gee’s contention that learning to read and write is “always learning some aspect of some discourse” (24). As these students practiced dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s, they also learned what it means to be “good” and “bad” and what the terms of their freedom were. This pedagogical emphasis becomes more overt in the religious and secular readings that the ATS provided its students. Not surprisingly, the religious discourse that pervaded these materials worked in lockstep with the prevailing concerns of the AMA. Through passages from the Freedman such as “Crosses,” readers learned that they should not demand recompense

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when they are wronged because they should strive to be like Jesus and accept these offenses as crosses to bear: “If people scold us, it is our cross to be good-natured” because it is “our cross to try and do every day what Jesus wants to have us; and we cannot be his children, nor go to live with him in heaven, unless we take up that cross” (6). Teachings such as this were replicated in issue after issue, as students were consistently reminded of what “God” dictated they must and must not do: “We must do no sin. We must not tell a lie. We must mind what we are told. We must be kind to all. . . . Each day, we must try to walk in his ways, and to do all that he has told us. By and by we shall die, each one of us; but if we love God, he will take us in his own home, that we may live with him, and be full of joy and love” (“Words of Four Letters” 6). Although these religious teachings might have been in line with Christian practice, they had a specific kind of rhetorical, social, and political effect for black people living in the United States after 1865. Through these lessons, students were to learn to be happy with the freedoms they received from emancipation—and nothing more. These newly freed men and women should not respond to white transgression by speaking out and demanding retribution or fair treatment. Instead, the ATS commands, they should see such transgressions as opportunities to become more “Christlike.” According to the ATS, the Bible taught that “good” Christians accept their lot, however unfair it might be, and focus their attention on heavenly reward. In contrast to religious instruction, secular readings played a much smaller role in the ATS’s educational program. For example, in one representative issue of the Freedman from March 1864, ten out of a total of fifteen lessons are overtly religious in nature, while three of the five remaining secular portions of the issue include an arithmetic lesson, an alphabet exercise, and a reading lesson focusing on “words of two letters.” When the ATS did include secular instruction, it would once again regulate the terms upon which its readers could and should act. Students, therefore, would find that George Washington’s most admirable attribute was that he could not tell a lie (“Speak the Truth” 14), or they would learn that freedom is really about obeying rules, because “it is safer to have laws and rules, and a way of learning what is right and best” (“Freedom” 30). More explicitly, one secular lesson in the Freedman reveals the extent to which the ATS delineated the kinds of “correct” behaviors its readers should adopt so they could find their “rightful” place in society. In the story “Faithful Yanko,” the title character, a “colored servant in an English family,” is entrusted to take the children of the family on a sea voyage. When a storm breaks and the boat begins to sink, another boat arrives to save them. But “there was not room for all of them. Either Yanko must get in and leave the

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children, or he must put them in and stay on the sinking ship.” “What did he do?” the story asks. Of course, Yanko chooses the “right” course of action and sacrifices himself for his white charges—“poor Yanko was buried in the waters. He gave his life to save those children!” (13). Here, the ATS instructs, Yanko does what all “good” black men should do: he sacrifices himself for the welfare of the white family. By positioning Yanko as the exemplar for black students, the Freedman defines their role in society: they should not only remain “faithful” to the white community they serve but also be ready to sacrifice themselves for their white counterparts at any moment. From its most basic penmanship exercise to its “Faithful Yanko” story, then, the ATS composed a powerful educational program for teachers and students that described exactly how these students should experience their long-awaited freedom. This pedagogical project is a form of rhetorical education because it advanced a unified and specific perspective concerning how students could and should use language to participate in the world around them. Although the lessons the ATS imparted were often elementary, they explicitly delineated the communicative options available to black readers. The pedagogical materials of the ATS made it clear that even after emancipation, black readers’ rhetorical repertoires were confined to discourses of obedience, forgiveness, and submission. By presenting students with debilitating exemplars of black participation (Yanko) and flaccid examples of American civic duty (Washington as truth teller), the Freedman advanced lines of argument and topics of discussion to students that only worked to recompose the asymmetrical power relationship functioning before the war began. Moreover, by asking students to accept the argument that “true” religious practice focused primarily on life hereafter, the ATS positioned students to take up a rhetorical and civic stance that responded to worldly injustice with sheer acceptance. In addition to these more specific instructions concerning the civic and religious role that students were to take up, the ATS also delineated for them what the form and function of their education should be. The ATS’s Freedman series is a perfect example of what Paulo Freire would describe as a banking model of education—a model in which the “scope of action allowed to the students extends only so far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits” (53). Students learning from the Freedman were expected to receive knowledge and accept instruction without reservation. In terms of the freedmen’s teacher’s work, then, she was to implement a rhetorical education that discouraged students from responding to lessons by questioning or reconsidering. Her job was only to instruct students to memorize what they had learned and habituate themselves to the civic and religious practices these instructional texts promoted.

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Becoming the Freedmen’s Teacher By the time she published The Freedmen’s Book in 1865, sixty-three-year-old Lydia Maria Child was very much aware of the position of female teachers in general and freedmen’s teachers in particular. Born Lydia Maria Francis on 11 February 1802, in Medford, Massachusetts, Child was one of the thousands of Northern, white women who entered the teaching profession during the early nineteenth century and helped to transform the classroom space into a woman’s place. Child began her career as a teacher in 1820, and she relays her excitement for this new position in the following letter to her brother Convers: I can’t talk about books, nor anything else, until I tell you the good news; that I leave Norridgewock and take a school in Gardiner, as soon as traveling is tolerable. . . . I hope, my dear brother, that you feel as happy as I do. Not that I have formed any high-flown expectations. All I expect is, that, if I am industrious and prudent I shall be independent. (Letters 5)

As Child’s letter suggests, securing this first teaching position in Gardiner, Maine, allowed her, as it did other women of the nineteenth century, an independence she could not experience as daughter, wife, or mother. But independence was not the only reason Child entered the classroom. This 1826 letter to friend Mary Preston reveals that, for Child, teaching was a lifelong commitment: You know, I suppose, that I am going to take a large school in Watertown . . . . I have been attending to French and drawing, with the view of fitting myself for a large and genteel, and perman[en]t school. As I shall probably never marry, this is peculiarly desirable to me. Oh, how I wish that a first rate one would be established at Hallowell under the patronage of Sprague or Mann &c. (Selected Letters 7)

Child did indeed open her school in Watertown, Massachusetts, and her work at this school reveals the beginnings of the dedicated teaching career she pursued throughout her life. The pedagogical ambition Child articulates in these letters does not mean she would spend the rest of her life in a traditional classroom setting, however, as the coming years saw her make a shift in her pedagogical trajectory. By 1830, Child’s life had changed dramatically: not only had she married David Lee Child in 1828, but she had also left behind her role as a conventional schoolteacher to become a writer and editor of children’s literature, as well as a domestic adviser. Two years before Child wrote her letter to Preston, she had already completed her first children’s book, Evenings in New England, and in 1826, the same year she opened her school in Watertown,

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Child became editor of and a contributor to the children’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany. In the following years, she went on to publish The Juvenile Souvenir (1827) and The Little Girl’s Own Book (1831) as well as a number of short stories. As a domestic adviser, Child was just as prolific by teaching female readers how to run a household or raise their children through such texts as The Frugal Housewife (1829) and The Mother’s Book (1831).7 This move out of the classroom and onto the literary page may seem like Child’s exit from her pedagogical past. But as Sarah Robbins points out in Managing Literacy, Mothering America, when women such as Child took up these literary genres, they situated themselves as both female writers and mother-teachers who would direct children’s “reading, writing, and oral language” while also “shap[ing] their public behavior” (3). Child’s work in children’s literature and domestic advice lends much insight into her position as an educator as well as her pedagogical beliefs. When she began her work as a successful writer of children’s literature, this genre was deemed a highly conservative pedagogical force. As Carolyn Karcher writes, children’s literature was to act as a “buttress for the dominant society’s hierarchies of race, class, and gender—not as a site for challenging them” (57). The writer of these texts, who was often a white, Northern woman, focused on teaching children middle-class values and behaviors. In the preface to her first issue of Juvenile Miscellany, Child perfectly acts out this pedagogical role: “I seldom meet a little girl, even in the crowded streets of Boston, without thinking with anxious tenderness, concerning her education, her temper and her principles. Yes principles! Children can act from good principle, as well as gentlemen and ladies” (v). As this examples shows, Child seemingly stays within the expectations of the children’s literature genre. She produces the impression that Juvenile Miscellany will instill the right principles in her young readers and, in turn, advance the “social mission” of children’s literature by “[promoting] domestic harmony [and providing] behavorial models for parents and children to emulate” (Karcher, First 57). But just as Child reinstantiates these social norms and values, she also pushes against them—a pedagogical practice she continues and expands upon in The Freedmen’s Book. As Etsuko Taketani has argued, Child’s stories in Juvenile Miscellany did not always work to preserve the status quo. Stories such as “The Little Rebels,” “The Irish Immigrants,” and “Mary French and Susan Easton” functioned to “politiciz[e] the relationship between parents and children by aligning children with marginalized groups [such as Native Americans and free people of color], thereby both explicitly and implicitly offering a critique of domestic colonialism” (23). Such an analysis of Child’s Juvenile Miscellany stories suggests that at the

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very beginning of her pedagogical career, Child was just as much concerned with societal awareness and critique as she was with societal cohesion. This paradox of educational priorities is what Karcher identifies as “symptomatic of tensions at the heart of Child’s career, which repeatedly found her poised between articulating her culture’s deepest convictions and pushing those convictions to their most radical limits” (First 60). Even though Child’s children’s literature and domestic advice may have subtly subverted dominant social structures, her work was celebrated throughout the country. The Frugal Housewife, for instance, gained an immediate and broad audience, going through thirty-three editions in the United States alone. Moreover, as Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled in 1899, during these early years of Child’s career, she was so popular as a writer of children’s literature that she was seen as the “omnipresent aunt” whose children’s magazine was “beloved forever by the heart of childhood” (108). The July 1833 issue of the North American Review confirms the popularity of and respect for Child’s work: “We are not sure that any woman in our country would outrank Mrs. Child. . . . for in all her works we think that nothing can be found, which does not commend itself by its tone of healthy morality, and generally by its good sense.” The Review continues to praise Child, writing that she is “just the woman we want for the mothers and daughters of the present generation” (“Works” 139). “We trust,” the Review predicts, “that Mrs. Child will continue her useful labors, and have no doubt that they will be received with constantly increasing favor” (163). This prediction of Child’s future acclaim could not have been more inaccurate. The same year that the North American Review applauded Child and her work, her popular success quickly diminished into what many saw as a terrible failure. In 1833, Child published her first major abolitionist text, Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and took on a new role as antislavery educator.8 Karcher describes the public’s response to the abolitionist lesson Child offered in the Appeal: Child’s fashionable acquaintances cut her dead in the streets; a rising star in Boston’s political sphere flung her book out of the window with a pair of tongs; the Boston Athenaeum hastily revoked the library privileges she had been only the second woman in history to receive; outraged parents cancelled their subscriptions to her children’s magazine, bringing about its collapse; and the sales of her other books plummeted. (“Censorship” 284)

Although the Appeal obviously took her out of the good graces of the American general public, it served an entirely different function inside abolitionist circles. Its publication marked the beginning of Child’s career as a prominent leader in the antislavery movement.9

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For the rest of her life, Child was recognized as one of the most active and prolific antislavery activists. Over the course of the next thirty years, she produced more than ten books and countless articles that examined and protested the institution of slavery. She was a primary and frequent contributor to abolitionist newspapers such as the Liberator, the Standard, and the New York Independent, and she also worked as editor of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and of the National AntiSlavery Standard from 1841 to 1843. Given the multitude of these writings, Karcher is right in her assessment that “No other woman and few (if any) men had published more for the antislavery cause over a period of thirtyfive years” (First 487).10 In many of these publications, Child combined her background in education with her dedication to abolition, as she taught, until 1865, her white readers about the subject of slavery, the possibility of emancipation, and the reality of black humanity and intellect. Child’s Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836) is just one example of her continued educational work on this issue. In this text, Child adopts the pedagogical format of the catechism to clarify abolitionist arguments: Q. Some say that these people are naturally inferior to us; and that the shape of their skulls proves it. A. If they think so, why do their laws impose such heavy penalties on all who attend to give them any education? Nobody thinks it necessary to forbid the promulgation of knowledge among monkeys. If you believe the colored race are naturally inferior read the history of Toussaint l’Ouverture, the Washington of St. Domingo. (16)

Especially in this instance, Child situates herself as the teacher and her readers as students while she conducts her educational course in the abolitionist cause.

Composing The Freedmen’s Book By the time the Civil War began, almost thirty years after the publication of the Anti-Slavery Catechism, Child’s interest in education and abolition had not waned.11 Child describes her fervent dedication to the antislavery movement in this 1861 letter to Lucretia Mott: “When there is anti-slavery work to be done I feel as young as twenty” (Selected Letters 376).12 Therefore, when white, Northern women traveled south to begin the educational effort for the newly freed black population, Child thought of joining them, but the illness of her husband, David, kept her home. She writes of her particular circumstance in this letter to William Haskins: “If it were not

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for that [David] needs so much care, I should myself be serving in some Hospitals, or teaching at Port Royal. As it is, I do all that I can, in my small way, making lint, bandages, garments, &c, and patching my old clothes, so as to contribute all the money I can save to help the many who are suffering” (Selected Letters 424). As a consequence of David’s illness, then, Child remained in Massachusetts, where she dedicated her energy to a new educational idea—one that would later develop into The Freedmen’s Book. It was not until 1864 that Child made one of her first formal proposals for this educational text, as evidenced in this letter to Gerrit Smith: I have a project in my head, and I want to advise with you about it. The Freed men and women are fast learning to read, and are much taken up with the new acquisition. There seems to be very few books suitable to their condition. I have had thoughts of compiling one, consisting of

Carte de visite photograph of Lydia Maria Child, by John Adams Whipple, 1865. Boston Athenæum.

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the best biographies of colored people, stories about slaves, good hymns, and the best pieces of poetry by colored people, &c. &c. The whole to be carefully adopted to their condition and especially to have a good moral effect and an encouraging effect. (Selected Letters 441)

In 1865, Child carried through with this project and completed The Freedmen’s Book, publishing her educational text through Ticknor and Fields and providing a $600 subvention for the text herself. Child set the price of the book at sixty cents, hoping it would be inexpensive enough for newly freed men and women to purchase. In addition, as she specifies in the preface, all proceeds from the sale of the book would be directed back to her readers and their education. She writes, “Whatever money you pay for any of the volumes will be immediately invested in other volumes to be sent to freedmen in various parts of the country, on the same terms; and whatever money remains in my hands, when the book ceases to sell, will be given to the Freedmen’s Aid Association, to be expended in schools for you and your children” (vi). Once The Freedmen’s Book was distributed to teachers and students in the South, it met much success. Teachers reported that their students preferred Child’s reader to those published by the ATS, saying that their students responded enthusiastically to The Freedmen’s Book and “derived positive lessons from the sketches of fugitives who had refused to accept their lot” (Karcher, First 503). One teacher commented on the strides her students had made since they replaced ATS tracts with The Freedmen’s Book, writing, “I have a feeling they have improved, not only in the mere point of reading, but in thought and understanding, even in the short time they had been reading the book” (qtd. in Karcher, First 504). Although the text met great popularity among freedmen’s teachers and their students, Child’s publisher could not compete with the well-funded ATS. In 1869, Child decided that she could not afford to continue distributing her text and asked Lewis Tappan, founder of the AMA, if he would publish it. Tappan agreed only on the condition that certain portions of the text be excised and replaced with Christian doctrine. Child “indignantly declined” this request and “elected to keep the book in circulation the best she could through her limited means” (504). But by the mid-1870s, The Freedmen’s Book was out of circulation. Tappan’s refusal to print sections of The Freedmen’s Book signals that the message of Child’s text was inconsistent with the submissive pedagogy that the conservative-minded AMA espoused. Ideologically and pedagogically, the aims of the AMA and the aims of Child were at odds. This comes as no surprise because The Freedmen’s Book did not advocate the same monologic

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discussion concerning religious and civic education. When The Freedmen’s Book moved readers beyond the “mere point of reading” and enabled them to engage in “thought and understanding” by providing them with exemplars who “refused to accept their lot,” it offered readers a rhetorical education that prompted them to question and critique, rather than blindly accept, both their education and the world around them.

Rhetorical Education in The Freedmen’s Book The rhetorical education that Child composes in The Freedmen’s Book offers readers a much different pedagogical picture than that of the ATS concerning how freed men and women should enact their religious and civic duties. In her text, Child refuses to speak to her readers in the singular and seemingly innocuous voice of the Northern, white freedmen’s teacher, and she rejects any instructional tactic that drills into these readers a politically weak option for public engagement. Child, instead, problematizes the dominant description of the freedmen’s teacher by creating a multivocal text that not only involves her readers in a much more complex discussion concerning their social and civic engagement but also offers them a robust inventory of new and more potent rhetorical models for political engagement and intervention. The primary way in which Child disrupts her role is by ensuring that her readers do not just hear from the white female teacher, who, as the ATS describes, “has come from her home in the North to instruct [her students] in useful knowledge.” Out of the fifty-four readings included in The Freedmen’s Book, only fifteen are written by Child. The remainder of the text is filled with selections from white and black writers, both male and female, who articulate rhetorics that in some cases reinforce and in others reject dominant arguments about black civic life. Child’s rhetorical education begins with her inclusion of other writers into her text, as she asks her readers to listen to this discussion and then consider where they stand inside it. Her pedagogy becomes even more powerful, however, when she presents her readers with the various rhetorical strategies these writers use to enter into this conversation. Figures such as Frances Harper and Frederick Douglass reject dominant prescriptions for black behavior and discursive practice, and as they do, they expose Child’s readers to new rhetorical options that work to disrupt the ineffectual rhetorical program the ATS and AMA, along with dominant white society, advocated. By including in her text these rhetors’ varied rhetorical strategies, Child produces a broader and more dynamic repertoire from which her readers might choose the civic and religious discourses they want to employ. Through such work in The Freedmen’s Book, then, Child creates a rhetorical education that offers

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her readers multiple visions of and approaches to participation, as she calls her readers to rethink exactly how arguments from civic duty and religious truth should guide their lives.

The Freedmen’s Teacher(s) At a number of points throughout the text, Child speaks to her readers as a freedmen’s teacher “should” by taking on the role of the Northern, white teacher. Selections such as “The Education of Children,” “Laws of Health,” “Kindness to Animals,” and “Advice from an Old Friend” sound much like ATS tracts. In these passages, Child, as the virtuous and nurturing female teacher, bestows her knowledge and goodwill onto her readers. Just as the Freedman calls students to “work on, learn all you can, and thank God for your kind teachers” (“Writing” 35), Child speaks to her readers in “Advice from an Old Friend” in this way: “For many years I have felt great sympathy for you, my brethren and sisters, and I have tried to do what I could to help you to freedom” (Freedmen’s Book 269). Here, both the Freedman and The Freedmen’s Book place the Northern, white, female teacher on a pedagogical pedestal and call students to be grateful for the work she has done. Child certainly constructs herself as the “normal” freedmen’s teacher in these sections, but she destabilizes her own pedagogical position when she makes space in her text for the other “teachers” to educate her readers. Although Child does open her text to the words of other white authors, such as William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Sigourney, Bernard Barton, and James Montgomery, she overtly directs readers to the black teachers of The Freedmen’s Book and advises her readers to heed their words. In the preface to the volume, she invites her readers to “derive fresh strength and courage from this true record of what colored men have accomplished, under great disadvantages” (iv). As a means for her students to know exactly what such “men have accomplished,” Child explicitly designates the black teachers in her text by placing asterisks next to their names in her table of contents. Such a designation ensures that her readers know whose words they are reading. In this case, they do not have to learn to tell the truth from George Washington, as the ATS promotes, but instead can learn to speak a different kind of truth by reading the words of black religious leader Reverend Peter Williams. Like Washington, Williams also admits that he cannot tell a lie, but his move to truth-telling is to expose the inequity of the American social system. “We have toiled to cultivate [the land], and to raise it to its present prosperous condition,” Williams argues, “we ask only to share equal privileges with those who come from distant lands to enjoy the fruits of our labor” (“Reasonable Request” 110).

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But the text’s teachers are not just those like Williams whose words find a place inside The Freedmen’s Book. Child also designates the readers of her text as teachers. In the preface, she transforms her readers into teachers by explaining, “I have prepared this book expressly for you, with the hope that those of you who can read will read it aloud to others” (iv). Child reasserts this idea in her concluding contribution to the volume, “Advice from an Old Friend”: “You may be too ignorant to teach [your children] much of book-learning, and you may be too poor to spend much money for their education, but you can set them a pure and good example by your conduct and conversation” (222). Thus, Child opens and closes her text by urging her readers to take on the role of teacher and teach each other, even if they do not see themselves as qualified in terms of “classroom” knowledge. Child’s move to place black readers and writers at the head of the classroom is especially important because it challenges the dominant practice of many freedmen’s educational institutions during this period. Of course, Child’s strategy disrupts the established positioning of white teacher/black student. But at the same time, it also flies in the face of the covert attempts that many freedmen’s societies made to thwart the advancement of black teachers. Although numbers of white educators believed, along with J. P. Wickersham, that the “best and most economical mode of educating the freedmen [was] to prepare teachers from among themselves, and thus enable them to teach one another,” others had no intention of turning over the educational reigns (294). Jacqueline Jones’s research reveals that freedmen’s societies often stood in the way of black teachers, citing a number of white officials who were “almost perverse in their attempts to thwart black selfhelp in education,” by engaging in practices that ranged from “denying literate blacks teaching commissions to subverting the Savannah Education Association” (206).13 When Northern educational associations did support the appointment of black teachers, they often made it quite clear that these teachers would have to be well conditioned in terms of their pedagogy and ideology. The March 1867 issue of the American Missionary sets out the terms upon which the AMA would accept black men and women as teachers: “Those who are to become teachers, from among the colored people, must be developed as rapidly as possible, must be made as nearly as may be like Northern teachers and Northern thinkers” (59). Child’s decision to situate black writers and readers as teachers in her text differentiates The Freedmen’s Book from ATS tracts. In making this choice, she subverts the idea that white teachers are the only suitable guides for black students and, consequently, speaks in concert with such black scholars as W. E. B. Du Bois, Victoria Earle Matthews, and Carter

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G. Woodson, who argued vociferously that black students need to learn from the successes of their race.14 Like Woodson, who believed that black people “have been shoved out of the regular schools through the rear door to the obscurity of the backyard and told to imitate others whom they see from afar” (144), Child realized the importance of positioning such figures as Frederick Douglass and Phillis Wheatley as teachers for her readers to “imitate.” But Child does more than simply introduce readers to exemplars of their own race. To enable her readers to question the dominant discourses that defined black religious and civic practice, Child invites into her text many teachers who are in no way “made” like Northern teachers and thinkers, as the AMA and ATS would want. The teachers in The Freedmen’s Book upset the safe, conservative, and stabilizing pedagogy steeped in religious obedience and civic duty that the Northern, white, female teacher was supposed to advocate.

Religious Truth Child’s most implicit intervention in the stabilizing educational discourse perpetuated by dominant institutions comes in the way she presents arguments from religion that determine black civic participation. Instead of demanding that her students adopt a religious worldview that only allows for Christian forgiveness and obedience, Child creates a text that prompts readers to be skeptical of how “the word of God” is deployed, especially in discussions concerning the role of black people in post–Civil War society. The hesitancy that Child promotes throughout her text most probably grew from her own views about the ways religious discourse was used to leverage both pro- and antislavery arguments during the antebellum period. This 1856 letter to Lucy Osgood reflects Child’s ideas on the topic: “I think the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery proponents have both tried to twist the Bible to sustain their respective theories. I tried to follow the plain truth only, wheresoever it might lead. . . . How absurdly the Old Testament is used by Christians! Used for convenient purposes, neglected whenever it is inconvenient!” (Selected Letters 277). Child’s outrage at the way the Bible was “twisted” to serve “convenient” purposes is reflected in The Freedmen’s Book.15 In this text, Child encourages skepticism towards religious discourse by asking her readers to make sense of a number of competing articulations that assert the role religion has and should play in their lives. But before looking at what Child included in her text, it is important to see what she left out. As Child writes in her farewell editorial in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, “What is not inserted is a better criterion of pure taste and correct judgment than what is inserted” (“Farewell” 190). Thus, a comparison of Child’s table of contents with that

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of the ATS’s Freedmen’s Third Reader allows for a greater understanding of exactly which kind of religious instruction Child chose not to insert. On the inside cover of the Third Reader, a note to the freedmen’s teacher makes clear the purpose of the text. The note reads, “If we would supply the Freedmen with religious truth, we must connect it with their efforts in reading. . . . [This text] is thoroughly Christian, containing numerous selections from able and interesting writers on religious subjects, and from the Word of God.” Selections such as “Praise to the Creator,” “I Will Come to Jesus,” “The Miracle at the Red Sea,” and “Jesus as a Guide” exemplify this religious focus. A look at Child’s table of contents reveals a much different pedagogical project. Her text includes only one passage from the Bible (“An Excerpt from the Tenth Psalm”) and just four overtly religious readings (James Montgomery’s “The Kingdom of Christ,” Phillis Wheatley’s “The Works of Providence,” Frances Harper’s “The Dying Christian,” and George Horton’s “Praise of Creation”). In comparison to the Third Reader, Child’s text is marked by the exclusion of religious material and reveals what Cheryl Glenn calls “the purposeful uses and deliveries of silence” (Unspoken 155). Child’s pedagogical omissions reflect an “absence with a function” (157) in that she leaves out overtly religious readings and deploys her silence as a strategic means to designate her own convictions concerning “pure taste” and “correct judgment.” As Child’s readers listen to the silences of distinctly religious instruction in The Freedmen’s Book, however, they do encounter a number of messages that both replicate and complicate the “normal” way in which arguments from religion are deployed. In sections of text that are not overtly religious, “teachers” such as Judge Kelly and Ignatius Sancho perpetuate a familiar educational message. Kelly’s “Speech to the Colored People of Charleston” instructs readers that even though they “no longer have earthly masters, there is a Ruler in heaven whom [they] are bound to obey” (261). As Kelly teaches readers to obey their “heavenly master,” Sancho reiterates discourses of forgiveness and servitude, instructing readers to “be above revenge. If others have taken advantage of your guilt or your distress, punish them only with forgiveness; and if you can serve them at any future time, do it” (6). The messages of these two figures certainly echo the dominant educational message that the freedmen’s teacher was supposed to promote, as Kelly and Sancho use the “word of God” to limit black engagement to submissive activities. But at the same time that Child presents her readers with the teachings of these figures, she also incorporates other voices into the text that challenge this normal and debilitating argument. Critical analysis. In one of her own contributions to The Freedmen’s Book, “The Beginning and Progress of Emancipation in the British West

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Indies,” Child makes a direct commentary on the ways religious discourse functioned to sustain and defend the existence of slavery. Here, she records how both slave owners and traders justified their inhumane practice to English citizens by constructing a logical fallacy that linked owning and trading slaves with religious observance. Child writes that slave owners “deceived themselves as well as others, and really thought they were pious, because they observed all the ritual forms of religion” (124). Taking the fallacious argument of slave owners a step further, Child points out that slave traders “were even shameless enough to defend [slavery] and praise it as a benevolent scheme to bring savages away from heathen Africa and make good Christians of them” (126). Child goes on to write that in spite of these religious arguments, the English people were not persuaded. They had a “great deal of common sense” and did not see “stealing,” “torturing,” and “selling” men and women as a “pious missionary exercise.” Child teaches her readers that after many years of “unremitting labors to suppress the unrighteous traffic,” activists such as Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce debunked these illogical arguments and realized their goal: England abolished the slave trade in 1808 (127). In presenting her readers with this historical instance, Child describes the egregious use of religious discourse and a successful intervention in this argumentative strategy. Child’s move to put forth both these illogical and commonsense interpretations of the Bible implicitly challenges the idea that all arguments and teachings framed in religious doctrine should be seen as divine forms of instruction that must be followed. Her historical account asks her readers to see the ways the Bible can indeed be “twisted.” In so doing, she prepares her readers to assume a skeptical stance that positions them to analyze other discriminatory practices supported by presumably indisputable arguments based in “religious truth.” As a result, the critical commentary Child models here teaches students to reflect on the form and function of religious discourse and to enact the same kinds of analyses and interventions when this discourse is used to justify white dominance and black submission. Religious vocabulary. Child continues to model this kind of intervention in dominant religious discourse when she includes the biographies of William Boen and Phillis Wheatley, two figures who experience religion differently than through the prescribed ways advocated by such texts as the Freedman. In her biography of Boen, Child recounts his religious beliefs and experiences, writing that he spent his life following an “inward light” that would “sho[w him] that the thing is wrong.” Boen’s reliance on inner guidance, Child tells readers, enabled him to become “careful not to do anything which did not bring peace to his soul.” Through Boen, Child teaches her

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readers that religious belief does not have to come from the educational texts they receive. Instead, she offers her readers a different terminology and perspective on religious practice, writing, “Religion comes in many different ways to human souls” (27). Here, she adds to the conventional vocabulary used to describe religious observance: her readers can rely on their own “inward light” to guide their spiritual and civic practice rather than follow the external dictates of the AMA and ATS. Child once again expands, rather than restricts, the discursive realm of religious observance when she describes an African religious practice in her biographical sketch of Wheatley. Child writes that once Wheatley learned to speak English, “she could remember nothing about Africa, except that she used to see her mother pour out water before the rising sun.” Child then interprets this practice for her readers: Almost all of the ancient nations of the world supposed that the Great Spirit had his dwelling in the sun, and they worshipped that Spirit in various forms. One of the most common modes of worship was to pour out water, or wine, at the rising of the sun, and to utter a brief prayer to the Spirit of that glorious luminary. Probably this ancient custom had been passed down, age after age, in Africa, and in that fashion the untaught mother of little Phillis continued to worship the god of her ancestors. (87)

In this explanation, Child reveals her own prejudice when she implies that Wheatley’s “untaught” mother might not perform such a practice if she were educated. But even in light of this prejudicial statement, Child does strive to discuss with her readers a religious perspective that is completely ignored—if not overtly erased—by institutions such as the AMA and ATS. As she presents her readers with this explanation and celebrates Boen’s version of religious observance, Child broadens her readers’ rhetorical repertoire by adding to the vocabulary used to discuss religious practice. In so doing, she creates a rhetorical education that complicates the educational conversation (or monologue) initiated by these dominant institutions and affirms the idea that her readers should indeed critique, question, and then choose the religious vocabulary and practice that supports, rather than thwarts, their spiritual and civic fulfillment. Biblical revisions. Child’s final complication of the dominant rendition of “religious truth” comes through her inclusion of the Tenth Psalm and Frances Harper’s poem “Ethiopia.” Although these texts are religious in nature, they blatantly counter the rhetoric of Christian forgiveness and submissiveness that pervaded contemporary educational texts. By bringing the Tenth Psalm into The Freedmen’s Book, Child offers readers a biblical passage that suggests God has indeed “kept score” of past injustices and

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will require recompense from those who have oppressed the powerless. The passage reads: “The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor. He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten; He hideth his face; He will never see it. Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand” (qtd. in Freedmen’s Book 12). By instructing her readers with this psalm instead of such biblical teachings as the Prodigal Son, Child imparts a religious instruction that completely diverges from the messages of the AMA and ATS. In this particular pedagogy, the figure of God does not demand acceptance, submission, and forgiveness. Instead, this biblical passage instructs readers to take up a different form of rhetorical action, as it calls them to engage in a conversation in which God has seen the “wicked” and has not forgotten what they have done. This biblical directive revises dominant visions of the black-white relationship; it pushes readers to create civic discourses and actions driven by the idea that just as God has not forgotten, neither should they. Harper’s poem “Ethiopia” offers a biblical allusion that, like the Tenth Psalm, advocates a similar kind of redress of wrongs and a similar kind of rhetorical intervention. Harper writes: Yes, Ethiopia yet shall stretch Her bleeding hands abroad; Her cry of agony shall reach Up to the throne of God. ............................. Then, Ethiopia, stretch, O stretch Thy bleeding hands abroad! The cry of agony shall reach And find redress from God. (Freedman’s Book 24–25)

In this poem, Harper references and builds her message from Psalm 68:31, “Princes shall come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God”—a revolutionary verse that, according to Shirley Wilson Logan, is said to be the “most quoted verse in black religious history.” The popularity of this verse inside the nineteenth-century black community is undoubtedly due to the fact that it offers a prophecy about “the future international dominance of African people” (“We Are Coming” 23). Harper’s allusion to this verse and the connotation behind it do not in any way signify the usual tone of sympathy for the white slave owner found in other educational tracts of the period. Instead, Harper revises dominant uses of the Bible to take a radical stance and compose an argument that calls for

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“redress” from God. By providing her readers with this poem, Child exposes them to Harper’s revolutionary rhetoric and enables them to understand how they might use the Bible as both heuristic and proof for radical social change. When Harper becomes the freedmen’s teacher, readers learn how the Bible can be leveraged as a liberating force that enables them to create arguments that work for, instead of against, black advancement.

Civic Duty Unlike the Freedman’s dedicated focus on religious education, most of The Freedmen’s Book consists of more secular conversations that speak to readers about how they might enact their civic and social duties. Not surprisingly, when Child takes up this issue, she complicates any unified message by presenting her readers with arguments that reiterate and challenge dominant statements about black participation. For example, Child reproduces the educational imperatives of the AMA and ATS when she includes the “Extract from [a] Speech by Hon. Henry Wilson to the Colored People in Charleston, S.C., April 1865.” In his speech, Wilson calls for enduring gratitude from the black community—“O remember the sacrifices, that have been made for your freedom, and be worthy of the blessing that has come to you!” (259). Wilson then goes on to persuade his listeners to accept yet another form of subservience: But your duties commence with your liberties. Remember that you are to be obedient, faithful, true, and loyal to the country forevermore. . . . The great lesson for you in the future is to prove that we were right; to prove you were worthy of liberty. We simply ask you, in the name of your friends, in the name of our country, to show by your good conduct, and by efforts to improve your condition, that you were worthy of freedom. (260)

Wilson’s argument for obedience and good conduct does not stand alone in The Freedmen’s Book. A number of Child’s own contributions echo Wilson’s teaching and call readers to prove they are “worthy of freedom.” In sections such as “Laws of Health” and “Advice from an Old Friend,” Child calls readers to see how social behaviors like frugality, domestic organization, personal hygiene, and social etiquette will garner appreciation from the white community. For instance, in “Advice from an Old Friend,” she instructs, “Your manners will have a great effect in producing an impression to your advantage or disadvantage” (270). Offering another piece of advice, Child writes, “The appearance of your village will do much to produce a favorable opinion concerning your characters and capabilities” (271). In this entry, Child avoids the dominant religious argument for social stability that depends on a causal relationship between good behavior and

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eternal salvation. As she sidesteps this argument, however, she makes a less severe but still problematic assertion about her readers’ participation in public life. Her argument rests on the idea that if her readers follow the rules and behave well, they should expect (and possibly even demand) immediate reward. The educational advice she gives only slightly disrupts the established power relationship between white and black communities. Child does assert that her readers should be rewarded here on earth, but her program for black involvement only serves to maintain an already prejudicial social, political, and civic system. Although this pedagogy seems a bit more progressive than that of the AMA, it still articulates an agenda of white control over her black readers and their modes of participation. Nevertheless, even as Child instructs her readers in this way, she also fills her text with dissenting voices that advance a different kind of civic duty—one based on social change rather than social stability. Disruptive questions. At two points in her text, Child positions Frederick Douglass as a teacher, and both times he articulates arguments that question those pervasive rhetorics that worked to control and disempower the black community. In one selection titled “A Pertinent Question,” Douglass explicitly critiques the reasoning behind Child’s idea that following white social codes will translate into equal treatment for blacks. Douglass asks, “Is it not astonishing, that while we are ploughing, planting, and reaping . . . that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, authors, editors and teachers . . . that we are still called upon to prove we are men?” (93). Here, Douglass challenges Child’s causal connection between hard work and equality by casting doubt on the very idea that following the rules brings advancement and respect. Douglass points out that even when blacks “do what they are told” and attempt to be fine, upstanding citizens, the white community hypocritically pays no attention and still expects them to “prove [they] are men.” When Douglass’s words are placed next to more conservative pieces of advice (like Child’s), readers are prompted to consider how they will engage in the work they do in their everyday lives and what they should expect from it. By allowing voices like Douglass’s to emerge, The Freedmen’s Book encourages readers to ask a question much like the one Audre Lorde would later pose in 1979: “Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?” Like Lorde, Douglass persuades readers to understand that the master’s tools “may allow [them] to temporarily beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable [them] to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 99). Thus, through Douglass’s teaching, readers encounter a completely different line of inquiry than what they would find in the ATS materials.

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His words model a rhetorical strategy of disruptive questioning that works toward social and civic unrest by asking readers of The Freedmen’s Book to consider how far “good” behavior will take them. Child sets up Douglass’s second pedagogical contribution to The Freedmen’s Book when she includes an account of his life that focuses on his education. In this biographical sketch, Child relays white sentiment toward black education by citing Douglass’s master’s justification for refusing to allow him to pursue an education: “It is contrary to law to teach a nigger to read. . . . It is unsafe, and can only lead to mischief. If you teach him to read the Bible, it will make him discontented and there will be no keeping him. Next thing he will be wanting to learn to write; and then he’ll be running away himself” (165–66). Child records that when young Douglass heard this refusal, “he resolved that he would learn to read. He carried a spelling-book in his pocket when he went of errands, and persuaded some of the white boys who played with him to give him a lesson now and then.” Child explains to her readers that Douglass soon earned enough money to buy a book called the Columbian Orator, which “contained many speeches about liberty.” As Douglass learned what these speeches had to say, he became “discontented. He was no longer lighthearted and full of fun. He became thoughtful and serious. When he played with white boys, he would ask, ‘Why haven’t I as good a right to be free, and go where I please, as you have?’” (166). By including this portion of Douglass’s biography, Child presents her readers with a much different argument about how education should function in their lives than that offered by the ATS. To Douglass, education should not teach students to obey and acquiesce; it is not a restraining or subjugating mechanism. Instead, education should be a force that enables students to challenge oppressive conditions by interrogating social norms and asking such questions as, Why haven’t I as good a right to be free, and go where I please, as you have? When Douglass becomes the teacher of The Freedmen’s Book and asks these questions of education, he sets out a viewpoint on literacy similar to that which Keith Gilyard articulates in Let’s Flip the Script. Both Gilyard and Douglass make it clear that even though “reading, writing and instruction do act powerfully” on students, students can also “act powerfully on and through reading, writing, and instruction” (Gilyard 24). The presence of Douglass’s educational narrative in The Freedmen’s Book sets out the possibility for Child’s readers that they, like Douglass, might also “act powerfully” and use what they have learned to question, rather than accept, the rules and regulations of dominant white society. Rhetorical examples. At the same time that Child places teachers in her text like Douglass who question the systems that control black life, she also provides her readers with evidence that enables them to counteract the pervasive

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arguments built from accepted commonplaces concerning black intelligence. The dominant logic that guided the pedagogical practices of the AMA and ATS was based on the assumption that black students were innately simple and ignorant. As the AMA reported, its students were marked by “their peculiar susceptibility, their natural imitativeness, and their proneness to follow in the beaten paths” (American Missionary March 1867, 59). The AMA built its debilitating pedagogical practice from this belief: because students were only intelligent enough to “follow in the beaten paths,” the role of the teacher was to guide them down the intellectual and political paths they could seemingly handle—those of submissiveness and obedience. In The Freedmen’s Book, Child offers her readers the rhetorical tools needed to debunk such assessments when she includes in her text black exemplars who achieved great intellectual success. For instance, in her biography of Benjamin Banneker, she defines him as a black scientist whose inventions far surpassed the accomplishments of many of his white contemporaries. Child writes that Banneker lived in 1732, a time “when there were very few schools and very few books in this country, and when it was not as easy as it now is for even white people to obtain a tolerably good education” (14). In spite of such difficulties, Banneker went on to succeed: he made the first clock in this country and became so knowledgeable in astronomy that he “pointed out two mistakes made by celebrated astronomers in Europe” (16). Through Banneker, Child proves to her readers that black individuals have outdone a number of white society’s finest achievements—they have invented and critiqued what white Americans have not. In addition to providing readers with Banneker as an example of black intellectual success and superiority, Child also includes the literary works of Phillis Wheatley, Frances Harper, and George Horton to make a similar claim about black artistic excellence. Wheatley’s highly stylized poem “The Works of Providence” once again negates the idea that black people cannot compete intellectually with their white counterparts. One stanza from Wheatley’s poem confirms this point: Vast through her orb she moves, with easy grace, Around her Phoebus in unbounded space; True to her course, the impetus storm derides, Triumphant o’er the winds and tides. (Freedmen’s Book 94–95)

By placing Wheatley’s poems and discussing Banneker’s inventions in her text, Child recovers for her readers what Jacqueline Jones Royster would call their “intellectual ancestry” (266).16 The presence of such “ancestors” in The

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Freedmen’s Book makes it possible for readers to “see what success looks and feels like and be energized and strengthened for their own struggles” (267). But just as these figures offer readers the inspiration they might need to follow in their forebears’ footsteps, they hold yet another important purpose for Child’s rhetorical education. The intellectual achievements of Banneker, Harper, Horton, and Wheatley also operate as rhetorical examples. By including these instances of black success in her text, Child supplies her readers with persuasive evidence that enables them to create arguments that reject the commonplaces of black inferiority and defy any dominant logics that build from definitions of black individuals as people who only “follow in the beaten paths.” Their presence in The Freedmen’s Book offers readers the argumentative support they would need to dispute such appraisals of intellectual deficit and to leverage new arguments not only about the significance of black thought in the past but also about its significance in the future. Revolutionary memory and revolutionary invention. Child adds to the rhetorical repertoire she sets out for her Freedmen’s Book readers when she rewrites dominant histories of black rebellion in order to celebrate figures who have openly rejected white culture and fought for their own rights and ways of life. Child’s biography of Toussaint l’Ouverture in particular introduces readers to the politicized practice of historiography, the rhetorical function of memory, and the possibilities for inventing new kinds of arguments. She writes: For a long while great injustice was done to the memory of Toussaint l’Ouverture, and also to the blacks who fought so fiercely in resistance of Slavery; for the histories of St. Domingo were written by the prejudiced French writers, or by equally prejudiced mulattos. But at last the truth is made known. Candid, well-informed persons now acknowledge that the blacks of St. Domingo sinned cruelly because they were cruelly sinned against; and Toussaint l’Ouverture, seen in the light of his own actions, is acknowledged to be one of the greatest and best men the world has ever produced. (82–83)

In this passage, Child teaches her readers about the subjectivity of history and historiography and the very real ways that powerful figures control the representation and reception of the past. Because the histories of l’Ouverture were written by “prejudiced French writers,” Child instructs, l’Ouverture was recorded as a dangerous radical. But when his life is read from another, more “well-informed” perspective, l’Ouverture becomes a different kind of figure: Child’s historical “truth” reveals him to be “one of the greatest and best men the world has ever produced.”

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The historiographic comments that Child makes here teach her readers to see the function of history in a new way. Child points out in this example that history is far from an objective report but is instead, as Toni Morrison defines it, “a form of willed creation” (qtd. in Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford 413). When it comes to addressing historical “creations” and understanding how history functions, Child makes it clear that her readers cannot just accept what they read. Instead, their responsibility is to reflect critically on this history and, in Morrison’s words, “dwell on the way it appeared and why it appeared in that particular way” (413). By teaching readers to analyze history in this way and to see that prejudiced writers will indeed produce prejudiced histories, Child opens up the possibility for her readers to choose for themselves the kinds of history that they want to call their own. The choices the readers of The Freedmen’s Book make about what and how they want to remember is, of course, not just a decision about which “past” they want to adopt. The history they identify with will also affect the ways they compose themselves and the ways they participate in the world. History is, in fact, a kind of memory, and memory is, of course, a path to rhetorical invention. History is a heuristic through which arguments are made. Thus, when Child offers her history to her readers and asks them to remember her version of l’Ouverture, she enables them to create arguments from a memory of a revolutionary and resistant hero who went “preaching on Sundays, exhorting the people, with fiery eloquence, to remember that the cause of Liberty was the cause of God” (69–70). Child’s historical account and analysis teaches her readers about the liberating and debilitating powers of memory and invention. She uses this example to show how these rhetorical concepts operate in ways that both “constrain and shape who can know and what can be known” (Ede, Glenn, and Lunsford 411). As Child’s readers learn from the various and varying voices in The Freedmen’s Book, it is for them to decide which they will remember and which they will forget as well as which they will invent from and which they will disregard.

The Freedmen’s Teacher and Rhetorical Education: Challenging Definitions, Challenging Practices Lydia Maria Child’s move to call her readers to remember and to forget, to invent and to disregard is one that drives the rhetorical education she composed in The Freedmen’s Book as well as the pedagogical performance she invokes as a freedmen’s teacher. Child’s text provides a detailed picture of how a white, Northern, female teacher challenged the memory of who the freedmen’s teacher should be and what her work should do. Her pedagogy also reveals how she worked from this memory to invent a complex peda-

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gogy that, at once, established and questioned the kinds of religious truths and civic duties her readers were to adopt as they moved to participate in their post–Civil War world.

Complicating the Freedmen’s Teacher When Child creates a rhetorical education so markedly different from that of the AMA and ATS, she implicitly alters the figure of the freedmen’s teacher. Child projects an alternative to the prevailing description of this teacher when she includes in her text teachers who are black and white, male and female, liberatory and conservative. Through this variety, Child broadens the scope of the freedmen’s teacher’s work. She presents her readers with teachers who promote forgiveness and compliance as well as those who advocate redress and resistance. The many teachers in her text disturb the conventional definition of who the teacher should be and implicitly argue for different visions of freedmen’s teaching and the freedmen’s teacher. Although Child complicates the figure of the freedmen’s teacher by incorporating other voices into her text, it is significant that her own contributions often articulate the “party line” that freedmen’s teachers were supposed to promote, as her words regularly replicate the dominant discourse of the AMA and ATS. Throughout the text, Child does present herself as the angelic mother figure who, while “saving” her students, sustains the asymmetrical power relations of the day. Her voice often instructs her readers to be good and patient, and her words often assure them that change will eventually come if they do what they are told. By advancing these ideas, Child in many ways embraces her prescribed pedagogical role. But her decision to destabilize this role over and over again suggests her discomfort with this position and her search for other options. Moreover, these moments of adoption and rejection imply that Child could not revise her role without first addressing the most pronounced definition of the freedmen’s teacher circulating in her world. Child’s complicated position here highlights the double bind that many nineteenth-century women confronted when they wanted to speak out (or teach differently) but knew that in order to be heard they would need to conform, in some way, to their gendered expectations. Child’s preface to her 1833 Appeal gives insight to the ways in which she tried to negotiate this expectation at a much earlier time in her life: Reader, I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title. Read it, if your prejudices allow, for the very truth’s sake:—If I have the most trifling claims upon your good will, for an hour’s amusement to yourself, or benefit to your children, read it for my sake:— . . . Read it from sheer curiosity to see what a woman (who

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had much better attend to her household concerns) will say upon such a subject. (6)

Here, Child attempts to carve out a space for a woman to speak about antislavery: her readers should read out of “sheer curiosity” (not actual interest) and because of the feminine and maternal role she has already played for her readers as domestic adviser and author of children’s literature. Thirty years later, it seems that Child was still considering how a woman could speak out on such issues. The fact that she composed The Freedmen’s Book as she did signals the possibilities she saw before her as a freedmen’s teacher. It seems that her voice—the voice of a Northern, white woman—carried with it too many expectations of who she was supposed to be and how she was supposed to teach. The many teachers Child includes in The Freedmen’s Book, then, indicate her attempt to revise the work of the traditional freedmen’s teacher by bringing into her text those who could teach in ways that she could not. Her text as a whole is a reflection of the negotiations she had to make as she both adopted and revised the role of the freedmen’s teacher. Thus, Child’s work in The Freedmen’s Book reveals the push and the pull—the tensions that she dealt with as she entered into and protested this educational army. Child’s acceptance and rejection of her role should not just be seen as a singular instance in which one teacher resisted prescribed pedagogical practice. Instead, her work should call into question how other women—women such as Sarah Jane Foster, Maria S. Waterbury, Sarah Chase, Lucy Chase, and Julia Routledge—took up the role of the freedmen’s teacher. It should not be assumed that these teachers did the work that the AMA and ATS advocated and, in many ways, enforced. Rather, Child’s pedagogy should open up a space to consider how white female teachers such as these might have also enlisted in and resisted the same educational army. But just as Child’s work should prompt questions about the kinds of pedagogies these white female teachers advanced, it is also vital to note how this focus on her work “casts a shadow” on the vibrant and varied ways in which black women composed this same role for themselves (Royster and Williams 581). As noted earlier in this chapter, although white institutions often stood in the way of large-scale black educational programs and individual plans to become teachers, members of the black community certainly did not rely only on white initiatives to determine the form and function of their education. Logan records that when schools were established, a “legion of black women” took up the role of the teacher (“‘When’” 47). For example, in the years before and after the Civil War, Fanny Jackson Coppin and Mary Jane Patterson taught at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia; Lucy Craft Laney established a kindergarten, day school, and boarding school

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in Augusta, Georgia; Anna Julia Cooper and Hallie Quinn Brown taught at Ohio’s Wilberforce College; Frances Harper was a teacher in both Ohio and Pennsylvania; Ida B. Wells supported her family through her teaching position in Mississippi; and Fannie Barrier Williams taught at the School of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C.17 Thus, this focus on one white teacher’s revolutionary rhetorical education surely deflects attention from all of these “activist educators” who saw education as a vital part of the black struggle for advancement and equality in the United States (Logan, “We Are Coming” 18). This very short list of the black women who became teachers should inspire further investigation and recovery of their educational work. It is true that feminist scholars in rhetoric and composition such as Logan and Royster have already begun to examine the rhetorical success of women such as Harper, Cooper, and Wells. But there have been few analyses of how these rhetors might have translated their rhetorical prowess into rhetorical pedagogy. Research that takes up this methodological approach would both shed light on the specific pedagogical imperatives these women adopted and help to deepen understandings of the post–Civil War instructional practice that Child also engaged in.18 Edmonia Highgate’s pedagogy, for example, would undoubtedly prove to be a compelling study. As a black teacher working for the AMA, she critiqued this institution’s practices. The National Anti-Slavery Standard paraphrases her position concerning AMA pedagogy in this way: Even in the instruction given to the ignorant there lacks some of the main essentials for right instruction. The teachers sent out by the evangelical organizations do very little to remove caste-prejudice, the twin sister of slavery. . . . President Lincoln was accustomed to take credit to himself for moving forward no faster than the people demanded. The Republicans of the South do no better. We need Anti-Slavery teachers there; teachers who will show that it is safe to do right. (qtd. in Logan, “We Are Coming” 20)

A detailed examination of the pedagogy that coincided with Highgate’s thoughts here would offer a fuller picture of the challenges black female freedmen’s teachers made to the dominant educational prerogatives that refused to “remove caste-prejudice.” By recovering the educational work of figures like Highgate and Child, we can begin to see the ways in which the teaching profession was composed for and by black and white women during this period. Such studies would provide insight into how black and white women defined themselves as teachers and how the definition of the teacher also defined them and their work.

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Revising Rhetorical Education As this chapter details, Child revised dominant forms of rhetorical education in The Freedmen’s Book in two important ways. By composing the book as a multivocal text that offered conservative and radical ideas concerning black life, Child involved her readers in a complex conversation about their place in American society and asked them to consider where they wanted to stand inside it and how they wanted to contribute to it. And by presenting her readers with rhetors who invoke such rhetorical methods and strategies as disruptive questions, memory and invention, rhetorical examples, biblical revisions, religious vocabulary, and critical analysis, Child provided her readers with a rich repertoire of rhetorical tools from which they could choose as they considered how they would enact their religious truth and civic duty. Both of these strategies diverge from the dominant pedagogical practices of the AMA and ATS, which only advocated one myopic vision of and one strategy for black participation. And both of these strategies combine to reveal the overarching significance of Child’s nineteenth-century rhetorical education. First, by offering her readers revolutionary tactics and strategies, Child composes a rhetorical education that upsets the rhetorical concept of decorum. As both Aristotle and Cicero explain, this ancient precept guides rhetors to reflect on their given situation, their place in society, and their audience’s expectations so they might fashion their arguments appropriately. In Orator, Cicero explicitly details the idea of decorum: For after all the foundation of eloquence, as of everything else, is wisdom. In an oration, as in life, nothing is harder than to determine what is appropriate. Greeks call it /ρέ/ον; let us call it decorum or “propriety.” Much brilliant work has been done in laying down the rules about this; the subject is in fact worth mastering. From ignorance of this mistakes are made not only in life but very frequently in writing, both in poetry and prose. (339)

Through texts like the Freedman, the ATS set out specific guidelines for what it deemed to be decorous behavior and appropriate rhetorical activity for black students after the Civil War. These educational materials presented students with a limited choice when it came to addressing their white counterparts, as most instruction positioned them to adopt rhetorics of political submissiveness and religious forgiveness as the primary mode of appropriate interaction. Child’s work in The Freedmen’s Book, on the other hand, questions dominant prescriptions for rhetorical decorum by exposing her readers to the limitations students face when they abide by definitions of “appropriate”

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rhetorical exchange. Through her text, Child offers her readers examples of rhetors who refused to be decorous and who resisted the idea that they should follow the rules of dominant society’s rhetorical game. By asking disruptive questions, revising religious discourse, and inventing new arguments from new memories, figures in The Freedmen’s Book teach readers to achieve rhetorical significance by destabilizing ideas of “proper” behavior and rhetorical action as a means to invent new, more liberatory arguments. Gwendolyn Pough underscores the importance of providing students with exemplars who challenge what is seen as appropriate rhetorical activity. Reflecting on her own pedagogy, which brings the writings from the Black Panther Party into the contemporary classroom, Pough emphasizes how such voices create for students a “counter public discourse” that holds the “tremendous power not only to spark social change and empower students but also to cause disruptions . . . through public debate and protest” (468). Functioning much like these Black Panther writings, Child’s revolutionary contributors give insight to the ways that dominant descriptions of rhetorical decorum often stabilize and support asymmetrical power relations and make it possible for those in power to stay in power. Both Child and Pough, then, argue for and create a rhetorical education that encourages students to interrogate the rules of rhetorical decorum and to consider what it would mean not to follow these rules but to break them. When Child asks her readers to evaluate the benefits and consequences of rhetorical decorum, she offers a rhetorical education that invites her readers to create their own arguments as they enter public discussions. In The Freedmen’s Book, Child neither dictates to her readers right or wrong political positions, nor does she supply lessons for students to practice correct forms of rhetorical engagement or behavior. Instead, she composes her text as a conversation and uses it as a heuristic that prompts readers first to reflect on this discussion and then to invent their own positions, given their reflections. In creating a text that enables her readers to explore, judge, and then invent, Child espouses a pedagogical practice that both ancient and contemporary scholars have held in high esteem. Quintilian himself prized the ability to improvise and invent over the ability to merely imitate. As he teaches in book ten of Institutes of Oratory, “The richest fruit of all our study, and the most ample recompense for our labor, is the faculty of speaking extempore; and he who has not succeeded in acquiring it will do well in my opinion, to renounce the occupations of the forum, and devote his solitary talent of writing to some other employment” (154). Juanita Rodgers Comfort reiterates Quintilian’s educational goal when she explains that the “most successful student writers” are those who “move beyond

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merely imitating the prose styles and interpretive schemes of disciplinary discourses” (542). Like Quintilian and Child, Comfort celebrates those students who “animate” the discourses they engage “by inventing complex and versatile writerly selves” (543). Therefore, the significance of Child’s rhetorical education is not just that she shows her readers how others have bent (or broken) the rules of rhetorical decorum. By including her readers in a multivocal conversation and exposing them to a rhetorical repertoire unacknowledged by dominant educational institutions, she provides her readers with the rhetorical space to invent new arguments and to find their own way to engage the world. Finally, and most important, Child’s rhetorical education is one that consistently attends to the ways in which race inflects every aspect of her pedagogical endeavor and her reader’s civic participation. As a white teacher of black students, Child creates a politicized pedagogy that does not back away from the struggle against the racialized asymmetrical power relations that educational discourse produced and reproduced in 1865. Child’s text is one that intervenes in and revises dominant pedagogical practice by including her readers in the contested conversation concerning their place in American society. Child, of course, confronts her own whiteness by making her voice both distinct from and equal to the black voices in The Freedmen’s Book. By placing an asterisk next to the black writers in her table of contents, Child enables her readers to differentiate between the ways that black and white voices leverage arguments concerning education, religion, social advancement, civic duty, and obedience. Child carries this point further when she emphasizes the role race played in determining and defining the struggles of figures like Douglass and l’Ouverture. She does not pretend that academic success and social change are easy accomplishments for either her black teachers or her black readers. Instead, she highlights the barriers, blockades, and detours constructed by white society that the black activists in her text had to overcome. Through this pedagogical practice, Child acknowledges that she cannot (and should not) avoid race (her readers’ or her own) when it comes to creating pedagogies for civic engagement and social change. The Freedmen’s Book addresses issues of race on every page as Child and her fellow teachers consider, in their very different ways, how prejudice and discrimination will continue to frame and interanimate her readers’ place in American society. If, then, the end of rhetorical education is participation, Child’s pedagogy makes it clear that considerations of race must be a priority in working toward this goal.

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Resisting Scripts Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School As months passed over me, I slowly comprehended that the large army of white teachers in Indian schools had a larger missionary creed than I had suspected. It was one which included self-preservation quite as much as Indian education. —Zitkala-Ša, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” 1900 All that Zitkalasa has in the way of literary ability and culture she owes to the good people, who, from time to time, have taken her into their homes and hearts and given her aid. Yet not a word of gratitude or allusion to such kindness on the part of her friends has ever escaped her in any line of anything she has written for the public. By this course she injures herself and harms the educational work in progress from which she sprang. In a list of educated Indians we have in mind, some of whom have reached higher altitudes in literary and professional lines than Zitkalasa, we know of no other case of such pronounced morbidness. —The Carlisle Indian School’s Red Man, 12 April 1901

I

n 1900, Zitkala-Ša, a Sioux and former teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, published three autobiographical essays in the Atlantic Monthly: “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians.” In these essays, Zitkala-Ša does more than simply discuss her life as an Indian student and teacher in the off-reservation boarding school system.1 She uses her writings, instead, to launch a strategic critique of off-reservation Indian education in general and the Carlisle Indian School more particularly, for it was at Carlisle that Zitkala-Ša was “an Indian teacher among Indians,” and it was during her time there that she realized the “large army of white teachers” had a “missionary creed” that “included self-preservation quite as much as Indian

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Resisting Scripts

education.” Moreover, by publishing her writings in the Atlantic Monthly, she reaches out to this predominantly white readership and offers them a depiction of Indian education from an Indian perspective—a perspective that institutions like Carlisle did not want to promote. As the second epigraph shows, Carlisle did not take Zitkala-Ša’s criticisms lightly.2 The Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the first and most prominent off-reservation Indian school in the country, and Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder and president, celebrated Carlisle for its “success” and for the example it set for all other off-reservation schools to follow. To promote his educational message, Pratt sent the school’s newspapers, the Indian Helper and the Red Man, to sites all over the country. These publications proudly informed supporters of Indian education of the ways Carlisle’s teachers were successfully “civilizing” Indian “savages” by transforming them into self-sufficient individuals. Compounding this effort, Carlisle continually offered interested readers proof of its “good” work by presenting them with exemplary Indian students and teachers who were thankful for the education and opportunity that Carlisle had provided. It is no surprise, then, that when Zitkala-Ša published her essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Carlisle fervently objected to her portrayal of Indian education. Zitkala-Ša’s essays were particularly offensive to Carlisle because, through them, she not only offered an entirely new narrative about Indian education but also refused to carry out the gendered role Carlisle prescribed for her as an Indian female teacher. For Carlisle, the Indian woman as teacher was the greatest sign of educational success, because once the Indian woman became “civilized” enough to teach at Indian schools, she could then enact a shift in cultural pedagogy. Instead of initiating her students into Indian culture, this “civilized” female teacher could now introduce them to white, “American” culture and teach them to adopt new cultural and civic practices. Thus, Zitkala-Ša’s essays signaled a challenge both to Carlisle’s pedagogical program and to the gendered role she was to play inside it. In this chapter, I argue that when Zitkala-Ša resists her gendered role and speaks out against Carlisle’s educational narrative, she intervenes in the school’s iteration of rhetorical education by claiming what Scott Lyons has called “rhetorical sovereignty.”3 Specifically, Carlisle’s form of rhetorical education was one that promised both its Indian students and white America that these students could participate in and contribute to dominant white society if their teachers carried out two major pedagogical imperatives. First, these teachers must rid students of their “savage” behaviors and teach them those “civilized” bodily and social practices of dominant white society. Second, they must silence students’ tribal languages and instruct them to speak

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English. Through this two-step process, Carlisle proclaimed, the teacher transformed the Indian savage into a civilized American individual. Zitkala-Ša counters this pedagogical process and refuses to fulfill the gendered expectation of the Indian female teacher by overtly asserting and implicitly arguing for rhetorical sovereignty in her Atlantic Monthly essays. As Lyons defines it in “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” rhetorical sovereignty is the “inherent right and ability of peoples to determine their own communicative needs and desires . . . to decide for themselves the goals, modes, styles and languages of public discourse” (450).4 Zitkala-Ša acts upon this right when she voices her perspective on Carlisle’s rhetorical education and calls her Atlantic Monthly readers to listen to a more complex narrative that details the devastating effects this pedagogical practice has on its Indian students. This chapter examines how Zitkala-Ša rejected the gendered role that Carlisle set out for her as a means to challenge the school’s rhetorical education and claim her own and her people’s rhetorical sovereignty. To make this argument, I first outline the history of the Carlisle Indian School, its educational plan, and the particular role that both white and Indian female teachers were to play inside it. As a way to gain insight into Zitkala-Ša’s life and work, I provide a brief biographical account of this writer and teacher, paying specific attention to the time she spent as a student and teacher in Indian schools. I then analyze Zitkala-Ša’s Atlantic Monthly essays by placing them in conversation with Carlisle’s publications—publications that tellingly detail every aspect of the school’s rhetorical education. This juxtaposition highlights the ways Zitkala-Ša redefines herself as an Indian teacher and establishes her rhetorical sovereignty. Here, it becomes clear that Zitkala-Ša uses her essays to resist the script of Carlisle’s educational narrative and call for change in Indian students’ rhetorical education.

Constructing Carlisle By the time Zitkala-Ša, or “Miss Simmons,” as the Indian Helper and the Red Man called her, arrived at Carlisle in 1897, Indian education topped the list of the American educational agenda.5 Since the Civil War, there had been a definite shift in public opinion toward Indians. The prevailing idea that the “only good Indian is a dead Indian” began to lose favor, while the possibility that one could “[kill] the Indian in him, and save the man” became a much more acceptable solution to “the Indian problem” (Pratt, “Advantages” 46). At an increasing rate, Indian sympathizers who dubbed themselves “Friends of the Indians,” pro-Indian texts such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1888), and publications like the New York Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly began to define Indian people in new ways and

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called for government policies that corresponded with these definitions. 6 As John M. Coward writes, such sympathizers acknowledged that Indians “might still be ‘savage’ but they could also be seen as innocent victims of their ‘degraded’ state . . . [who] could be civilized” (201).7 The government policy that most directly spoke to this civilizing initiative was the 1887 General Allotment Act, more widely known as the Dawes Act. This act focused attention on one key component to white American life: land ownership. Through a two-step process, the federal government proposed that Indians could eventually become civilized, landowning American citizens. First, Indians must sever all ties to the tribe and its concomitant communal land, and second, they must take ownership of land as individuals. To carry out such a plan, the Dawes Act prescribed that all tribal lands be divided into separate allotments and distributed to individual Indians. Those individuals assigned a parcel of land were no longer seen as members of a tribal nation but as members of the American public. This act certainly had devastating effects on tribal culture, but white America saw it as the only viable solution to the Indian problem, for, as Scott Riney describes, it was believed that “with no reservations, there would be no tribes and no Indians, only new patriotic citizens scarcely distinguishable from their white neighbors” (6). As the Dawes Act aimed to transform Indians into civilized, landowning citizens—a right that would not be granted them until 1924—a corresponding question came to the fore: How would the nation prepare Indians for both civilization and citizenship? The answer to this question was, of course, education. The “Friends of the Indian” had agreed that the best treatment for Indians was to place them in schools and engage them in a rigorous civilizing process. In 1880, for example, the Board of Indian Commissioners reported, “The only alternative left is to fit [the Indian] by education for civilized life. . . . It is [education], supplemented and reinforced by a pure morality and the higher principles of Christianity, that is to enable him to resist the old currents of habit, which, like a mighty river, would otherwise sweep him to certain disaster” (194). Although there was considerable debate concerning the kind of education that would fit the Indian for civilized life, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt had what many believed to be the most persuasive and most feasible plan: the off-reservation boarding school. Pratt’s plan, which differed from the two other schooling alternatives of the period, the on-reservation boarding school and the reservation day school, would take Indians from their tribes; transplant them to Carlisle, an Eastern and “civilized” city; and teach them white ways. Pratt believed that by removing Indians from tribal life and bringing them to the off-reservation school, educators could achieve their goal. “Transfer the savage-born infant into the surroundings of civilization,”

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Pratt proposed, “and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit” (“Advantages” 56). Pratt argued that the off-reservation boarding school was the only way educators could prepare Indian people to contribute to life in the U.S. because this system would enable educators to “plan[t] treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large” (57). The original seeds of Pratt’s “treasonous” project of off-reservation boarding school education were not planted in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, however. “Carlisle” actually began in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with seventytwo Indian warriors. As David Wallace Adams describes in Education for Extinction, these warriors, from Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes, had been captured and charged by the U.S. Army with a “host of crimes committed during the so-called Red River War of 1874” (37).8 After being charged with such “crimes,” the prisoners were escorted from Fort Leavenworth to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, under the supervision of Pratt, a lieutenant in the army at the time. Once in St. Augustine, Pratt, “entirely free of any direct supervision by superiors, . . . decided to carry out a bold experiment: he would turn his prison into a school for teaching civilization to the Indians” (39). Like many of the Indian sympathizers discussed above, Pratt’s position toward his prisoners was more liberal than most, and he began his educational experiment by first attempting to initiate a cross-cultural understanding intended to dispel prejudices among both white and Indian people. He writes in his memoir, The Battlefield and the Classroom: I conceived it my highest duty to correct the unwarranted prejudice promoted among our people against the Indians through race hatred and the false history which tells our side and not theirs, and which has been so successfully nursed by keeping them remote and alleging that they alone have irredeemable qualities. It was just as important to remove from the Indian’s mind his false notions that the greedy and vicious among our frontier outlaws fairly represented the white race. (120)

Although Pratt explains that he planned “to correct the unwarranted prejudice” among white and Indian people, he concentrated his attention on his Indian prisoners. Pratt constructed a multipronged system that would make these prisoners more palatable to white onlookers by ridding them of what white society saw as their “irredeemable qualities.” He started this process by making the prison into a military camp. Pratt removed the prisoners’ leg irons, cut their long hair, dressed them in used army uniforms, and commanded them to take part in daily drills and exercises. He also required that these Indian prisoners, who now looked much like U.S. soldiers, take part in various kinds of military and industrial work.

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Finally, and most significantly, Pratt insisted his Indian “soldiers” attend classes in a small school that he established at the prison.9 When Pratt looked to staff his school, he turned to a number of female teachers living in the area, a gendered practice he would continue when he instituted his educational program at Carlisle. Women such as Mrs. Carruthers, Mrs. Couper Gibbs, Mrs. King Gibbs, Miss Mather, Miss Perritt, and Mrs. Pratt were among those who worked in Pratt’s first school and created a curriculum aimed at civilizing these Indian students by coupling basic literacy and language lessons with Bible study and Christian hymns. Pratt soon came to believe that it was the work of these women in the classroom that most significantly carried out his educational, cultural, and civic mission, and he praised his female staff in this way: “To the faithfulness of these and other fine women was largely due the quick progress in intelligence the Indians made, and the rapid growth among our people of a Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution sentiment in the Indians’ favor” (Battlefield 121). It was these women, Pratt recalls, who “created more interest in the white man’s power to repair the body and led the Indians to a greater desire to know and become a part of our civilization” (155). Pratt was right in his assessment. The teachers and students in his school did indeed create interest in Indian education, as many visitors to Fort Marion found his educational prototype to be quite effective. One very famous visitor to the school, Harriet Beecher Stowe, commended Pratt’s work, writing in an 1877 issue of the Christian Union that upon observing the classes held at the prison, she “found no savages. . . . The Indian is naturally a stern and hard one, but as they gathered around their teacher and returned her morning greeting the smiles on those faces make them seem even handsome. There were among pupils seated, docile and eager, with books in hand, men who had seen the foremost in battle and bloodshed” (qtd. in Pratt, Battlefield 156). Although figures such as Stowe deemed the experiment at Fort Marion a success, the school there did not last for long. Three years after Pratt and his prisoners arrived in Florida, the government informed him that the prisoners could be released. Significantly, the government also stated that it would not stand in the way of Pratt further developing his educational mission (Adams 44). Pratt did indeed intend to carry on with his experiment, so he asked his former prisoners if they wanted to continue the education they began. Twenty-two signed on, and for a brief period of time, Pratt and his students found an educational home at the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute, a primarily black educational institution. Pratt quickly grew intent on opening his off-reservation boarding school, however, and went to Washington, D.C., to lobby for such a school. After Pratt met with a

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number of government officials, including the secretary of interior, the commissioner of Indian affairs, and the secretary of war, his plan was approved and he was allowed to recruit 125 students for his school (48). Along with this authorization, these officials also pointed to the former army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, as a possible site. Pratt accepted this location, and by September 1879 he began recruiting students. As one of the first recruiters of Indian students to off-reservation schools, Pratt engaged in a practice soon marked by deceitfulness and cruelty: many recruiters tricked or told outright lies to Indian parents and children concerning the school and the potential student’s future.10 Of Pratt’s first foray into recruiting, Adams writes that his main strategy was a “relentless” one in which he persuaded Indian chiefs by “hammering away over and over again that the Indians’ only defense against the white man was to learn his language and ways” (48). Pratt’s hammering away was effective indeed; on 1 November 1879, 147 students began their education at the Indian Industrial School in Carlisle. Much like the treatment the Fort Marion prisoners received, the students at Carlisle also learned to become civilized by acting like soldiers. As K. Tsianina Lomawaima writes, “Pratt ran Carlisle in military fashion, with issued uniforms, close order drill, and students organized by company and by rank” (229). Pratt’s new army of students spent half the day at work and half the day at school, receiving both industrial and domestic training, as well as intellectual instruction. Each aspect of this education worked toward one goal: transforming Indian students into civilized, independent individuals ready to contribute to white, American society. The manual education each student received was, of course, gendered. Boys learned “printing, blacksmithing, shoe-making, harness-making, tailoring, wagon-making, carpentering, painting and tinning,” while girls were taught “cooking, sewing, laundry and housework” (Super 229). Although it may seem that this manual education would only function to teach students certain technical skills, the actual aim was to produce in students the “habits of civilization,” for it was thought that “industrial training taught punctuality, persistence, and attention to detail; in short, industry” (Hoxie 197). This goal only became more overt when students left their industries and entered the classroom. Classroom instruction focused primarily on teaching students to speak English while also inculcating in them the social behaviors and values of white society. Carlisle promised that if students made their way through this educational system, they would be well positioned to enter the American public successfully. Through such a curriculum, Carlisle established its own form of rhetorical education by offering students the supposedly inviolable tools that would provide access to and participation in their new American world.

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Pratt’s curriculum was well received by the white American public and the U.S. government. In his 1895 article “Indian Education at Carlisle,” Carlisle supporter O. B. Super congratulates Pratt on the apparent success of this pedagogical project, writing, “To Captain Pratt, the superintendent of this school, is due the credit of conceiving of and, so far as possible, of carrying out the idea that ‘the most effectual way of getting civilization into the Indians is to get the Indian into civilization’” (224). It was Pratt’s school at Carlisle that achieved the aim of “mak[ing] of the Indians thrifty, industrious, and capable American citizens” (228). Because of such “accomplishments,” Pratt’s educational vision evoked interest from many policy makers and reform organizations, and as a result, funding for Carlisle and other schools like it increased. As Adams points out, Although attendance at day schools grew slightly through the 1880s and 1890s, boarding school attendance rose at an enormous rate. By 1900, of the 21,568 students in school, nearly 18,000 were attending either offreservation or reservation boarding school. . . . [I]t is also noteworthy that as Congress continued to build off-reservation schools through the 1890s, a continually greater proportion of boarding school attendance can be attributed to off-reservation boarding schools. (58)

Pratt’s design for the off-reservation boarding school, with Carlisle as its most perfect example, was surely a success. But Pratt would not rest on his laurels. To ensure the continuance of such a system, he persistently informed the American public of the school’s triumphs.

Carlisle’s Education Script It was not long before Carlisle was recognized by dominant white society as the most successful educational institution in the country and the prototype for all other off-reservation schools (Hoxie 190). Carlisle supporter and promoter Elaine Goodale describes the school and its renown, writing, “Everybody has heard of Carlisle, almost everybody knows by reputation, if not by sight, the picturesque, low, white barracks, the tree-studded common, the four hundred dark faces and bright uniforms, the industrious labor, the accurate drill, the vigorous teaching, the perfect discipline”(6). The major way that “everybody” had heard of Carlisle and its “vigorous teaching” and “perfect discipline” was through Carlisle’s two newspapers, the Indian Helper and the Red Man. Pratt successfully instituted these papers as a means to spread the word that the school’s educational system was superior to its alternatives and that it was achieving the goals it set for itself: preparing Indian students for civilization and citizenship. In the Indian Helper and the Red Man, Pratt created an aggressive system of propaganda that articulated

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Students at work at the printing press, Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1895. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

and disseminated Carlisle’s master narrative by convincing readers of both the necessity for and the good of the off-reservation school.11 These newspapers spoke to two main audiences. First, Pratt made sure that white readers became familiar with and supportive of the school by sending these papers to every member of Congress, all the Indian agencies and military posts, and the most prominent newspapers in the United States (Bell 66). The patronage of white readership was vitally important to Carlisle’s success; their monetary and moral support was necessary for the school’s survival and the continuance of favorable government policy and funding allocations.12 Both publications made a concerted effort to persuade this audience that the off-reservation school was the only way for Indian students to become “American.” Second, these periodicals performed a number of roles for the students and teachers at Carlisle. The first was that of a pedagogical tool. As will

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be discussed in more detail below, these papers reinforced the objectives learned in the classroom by continuing to instruct current and former Carlisle students in the rules of etiquette, English, and civilized (white) behavior. These publications functioned as windows into and extensions of the classroom as they provided students with the rhetorical education that, Carlisle promised, would enable them to participate in dominant society.13 In concert with this instructional function, Carlisle’s publications also relayed news of those students who had dutifully learned all Carlisle had to offer and who had found success in American society. Through such profiles, readers were expected to understand that this pedagogical program did indeed work: students did leave the school and “made it” in the world as civilized individuals. Finally, these papers were a disciplinary and surveillance device meant to constantly remind teachers and students that they must comply with Carlisle’s plan. The newspapers enacted this work by first simply detailing and monitoring the day-to-day activities of teachers and students: “Capt. Pratt, Miss Burgess, Miss Senseney, Miss Barclay, Miss Seonia, Miss Simmons . . . took in the game Saturday” (Indian Helper 12 Nov. 1897, 3). The figure of the “Man-on-the-band-stand” in Carlisle’s publications took the project of surveillance a step further by making it clear that any deviance from Carlisle’s plan would be found out and be neither overlooked nor tolerated.14 The following excerpt from the October 1897 Indian Helper illustrates this point: Only reasonable things are asked of our boys and girls, and the word to be learned in every instance is O-B-E-Y. Obedience saves much time and energy. The Man-on-the-band-stand would have his boys and girls guard against INSOLENCE. No young person can afford to use INSOLENCE as a weapon of defence, especially when he knows that he is in the wrong. (“Obey” 3)15

If students did dare to “use insolence as a weapon of defence,” they would have to take into careful consideration the fact that they could not escape the watchful eye of the Man-on-the-band-stand. The 26 October 1888 issue of the Indian Helper reveals the Man-on-the-band-stand’s pervasive presence: “We believe the girls hold a Literary Society, but no one knows what they do except the Man-on-the-band-stand. Of course he will not tell unless they write something for him to tell. We hope they are not ashamed of their doings.” The literary figure of the Man-on-the-band-stand in the newspapers was complemented by the physical figure of the Man-on-the-band-stand on campus, and both clearly reveal that Carlisle’s pedagogical strategy

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was to monitor the goings-on at the school. Since the physical location of the bandstand was directly at the center of Carlisle’s campus, the “man” (who most likely was Pratt) on the bandstand could have full view of all students’ and teachers’ activities. The physical position of the bandstand and the Man’s gaze had much the same function as Foucault’s Panopticon, which “induces in the [student] a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Discipline 201). The “permanent visibility” of both the literary and the physical Man-onthe-band-stand constantly reminded students and teachers that their every step was being watched; therefore, they should do nothing that would make them “ashamed of their doings.” These specific roles that the Indian Helper and Red Man played for their white and Indian readers coalesced into an overarching program that aimed to showcase a united front of Carlisle teachers and students, and the newspapers articulated this front through the consistent use of the first-person plural pronoun we. The pages of these publications were filled with statements such as the following: “We do not like to keep alive the stories of the Indian’s past, hence deal more with his present and his future” (“Wants” 1); “We believe it is criminal to encourage the Indians to cling together in communities on reservations. . . . GO OUT! GO FORWARD! BE AN INDIVIDUAL! is our doctrine” (“They” 4). Through the use of the pronoun we, Carlisle’s papers persistently worked to re-create the idea that everyone at Carlisle, including its teachers, subscribed to its master plan for Indian students. Thus by promoting, monitoring, and speaking for Carlisle students and teachers through the use of the pronoun we, the Indian Helper and the Red Man not only outlined Carlisle’s educational script but also designated roles that teachers and students were supposed to play. The anecdotal information Carlisle provided revealed to readers that participants from every corner of the educational program were contributing to the success of the school. These papers confirmed that teachers were indeed teaching and students were indeed learning exactly what Carlisle wanted them to, proving how smoothly Carlisle’s educational machine ran on a day-to-day basis. In addition, Carlisle’s explicit focus on the success stories of Indian students like Zitkala-Ša who later became teachers functioned to reinforce Carlisle’s educational argument in a significant way. The fact that Indian students, and especially Indian female students, could be so thoroughly educated that they were able to become teachers proved the validity of Carlisle’s educational claim and added to its pedagogical accomplishments. These teachers and students functioned as convincing evidence of the program’s success and effectiveness.

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Teachers among Indians References to teachers in the Indian Helper and the Red Man were not the first attempts to describe who should be the teacher in the Indian school and what should be her role. In their initial discussions about Indian education, Pratt and other “friends” of the Indian identified the work of the teacher as an integral part of the civilizing mission. Just as the post–Civil War freedmen’s teacher was expected to continue the Northern fight in the schoolhouses of the South, teachers of Indians were also envisioned as manifestations of soldiers—soldiers who would not kill the Indian but would kill just the Indianness in the student and “keep the man.” In 1891, the president of the Lake Mohonk Conference, Merrill Gates, defined the teacher in the Indian school as a soldier, arguing that even though “time for fighting the Indian tribes is passed,” the Indian needs to be conquered “by a standing army of school teachers, armed with ideas, winning victories by industrial training, and by the gospel of love and the gospel of work” (qtd. in Adams 27).16 In 1900, Charles Bartlett Dyke of the Hampton Industrial School reinforced Gates’s statement, noting in his entry to the report of the superintendent of Indian schools that “the teacher is the maker and protector of our American civilization, and with him rests the future of the American Indian” (43). As Dyke and Gates made clear, the teacher, as a soldier in the U.S. educational army, was expected to defeat the Indian and protect “American civilization.” Carlisle’s teachers were no exception to this rule. In fact, as the school’s history confirms, the connections between the military and the Carlisle Indian School are eerily close. Given the military atmosphere that Pratt created on the school’s campus, Carlisle’s teachers must have been seen as soldiers who were expected to fall into the school’s ranks and carry out Pratt’s orders: to bring the Indian “out of savagery and into civilization and citizenship” (“Foundation” 1). In terms of who Carlisle’s soldier-teachers actually were, the profile, once again, replicated that of the educators of freed slaves. As was true of freedmen’s education, white women made up the largest contingent of teachers in Indian schools. Pratt’s first teachers at Fort Marion mark the beginning of this trend, for it was, in his words, those “excellent ladies” who “led the Indians to a greater desire to know and become a part of our civilization” (Battlefield 155). As the idea of the Indian school gained force, the figure of the female teacher only became a more dominant and visible presence (Adams 58). In his speech at the 1895 meeting of the National Education Association, superintendent of Indian schools Dr. W. N. Hailman historicizes Indian treatment in the United States and then points to the prevalence of female educators at this time:

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Until perhaps a quarter of a century ago, the only means for solving the Indian question were the few philanthropic men and women missionaries working among them, and after a long time they gradually stepped aside, and the schoolmaster stepped in or rather the schoolmistress stepped in, and she has accomplished now in a shorter time and in a far better way what the bullet could not accomplish during all the years that had passed. (81; emphasis added)

Hailman’s assessment that the schoolmistress, rather than the schoolmaster, “stepped in” is a correct one. Adams reports that the average teacher at an Indian school “appears to have been a single woman in her late 20s.” And although women only made up a “modest majority” of the teaching force inside Indian education in 1892, by 1900 white women held an overwhelming percentage of the available teaching posts, taking 286 of the 347 positions (82). As Adams explains, white female teachers seemed fit for the job not only because they were less expensive than their male counterparts but also because teaching enabled them to use their supposed natural “gifts in working with children” (82). Superintendent of Indian schools Estelle Reel underscores this point when she defines her instructors as “mother-teachers” (220) and then informs them that they must make use of their maternal qualities by “exercis[ing] infinite patience” when teaching Indian students (qtd. in Hoxie 195). The mother-teacher’s gifts (like patience) were held in high regard because Indian students, no matter what their age, were often defined as “mental” children.17 For instance, in his description of Carlisle’s educational work, O. B. Super disregards the fact that Indian students who entered schools like Carlisle were not always young children (remember Pratt’s first students were Indian warriors): “Nearly all of the teachers in the Carlisle school have had previous experience in teaching white children; and their testimony is, that these ‘children of nature’ do about as well on the average as the children who are the ‘heirs of the ages’ of culture and civilization” (230). Thus, white women once again found their “rightful” place in the educational system, this time, teaching “nature’s children” in the Indian classroom.

Indian Teachers among Indians Although white women monopolized the teaching positions in Indian schools, Indians trained as teachers also became part of this educational army. In the early years of his pedagogical project, Pratt himself was skeptical of the possibility of Indians becoming teachers, writing to H. L. Dawes in 1881, “[The] question of using graduates from this school and Hampton for the industrial and literary work of the Agency schools is one for the

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future to decide” (Battlefield 265). However, once the Indian schools and their students developed, Pratt’s initial hesitations diminished, as a number of Indian students became proficient enough (in the eyes of Indian educational officials such as Pratt) to continue on as teachers, and some, like Zitkala-Ša, were even employed at Carlisle. Ruth Spack’s findings in America’s Second Tongue help to clarify the numbers of Indian students who went on to become teachers in Indian schools. She writes, “Toward the end of the nineteenth century, an increasing number of Native people were hired to work in the government schools. By 1896, for example, 28 percent of the 493 employees were Native, among whom were 60 classroom teachers and 19 industrial teachers” (79). Like their white counterparts, Indian women were targeted as desirable candidates for teaching positions in Indian schools. However, the idea that Indian women would make good teachers came from a much different set of assumptions than those that supported the placement of white women in the classroom. As discussed above, the white woman was preferred as a teacher because she was able to guide Indian students with her inherently “superior” feminine qualities, which, of course, consistently reinforced the values of dominant white society. The qualities of the Indian woman were not viewed so favorably. As Katherine Weist explains in her study of nineteenth-century observations of Northern Plains Indian women, depictions of such women often defined them as “beasts of burden” and “slaves” whose supposedly “sexually lax” and “savage” behavior transgressed every nineteenth-century code of female propriety (29). Although such transgressions offended white society, the greater crime, it seemed, was that the Indian woman passed on her “primitive” ways to her children. Pratt’s thinking coincided with this dominant perception. He once asserted, “It is the women who cling most tenaciously to heathen rites and superstitions, and perpetuate them by their instructions to their children” (qtd. in Spack 144). Because of such descriptions, the “savage” Indian woman was deemed the polar opposite of the “civilized” white woman. Instead of teaching her children those “respectable” values that white women passed on, the Indian mother perpetuated tribal, Indian “savagery.” Even though Indian women were portrayed in such a negative light, Indian education officials saw in them a great pedagogical opportunity. These officials believed that if they could educate the Indian woman, a significant part of their civilizing work would be accomplished: an Indian woman who was fully educated in the ways of “civilized” society could pass on what she learned to her own children, and through such a process, the entire infrastructure of Indian home life would change. Long before the Indian school at Carlisle was instituted, Jedidiah Morse made such an

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argument in his 1822 Report on the Secretary of War of the United States on Indian Affairs: It is essential to the success of the project of the government, that the female character among our native tribes, be raised from its present degraded state, to its proper rank and influence. This should be a primary object with the instructors of Indians. By educating female children, they will become prepared in turn, to educate their own children, to manage their domestic concerns with intelligence and propriety, and in this way, they will gradually attain their proper standing and influence in society. (qtd. in Weist 37)

As the nineteenth century progressed, this argument for the education of Indian women gained force. Cora Dunn, superintendent of the Rainy Mountain School, reiterated the importance of training Indian women to adopt white ways of life, stating in 1900 that “if [educators] uplift the women of the [Indian] race[,] men will follow.” Indian women were important targets for education because, as Dunn argued, “the nonprogressive ideas of the women of the race [are] to-day the greatest bar to Indian advancement” (40). To enable such advancement, officials of Indian education called for an instructional program that would teach female students to become “proper” ladies and “civilized” mothers. The first priority in such a program was to provide these women with a domestic education that would speak to what Hampton Industrial School educator Josephine Richards saw as the “crying needs of the Indian home” (701). Richards put forth that schools must offer these female students training in the “domestic arrangements of the household, of promptness and orderliness,” which, not surprisingly, included sweeping, scrubbing, washing, ironing, cooking, “hygienic values of cleanliness,” ventilation, and the “love for household decorations” (702–3). In addition to these domestic values and activities, female students were also introduced to the tenets of true womanhood that dominated the era. The head of White’s Manual Institute, O. H. Bales, praised the achievements of his female students in this arena: “There is nothing . . . we observe with greater pleasure than the improvement of the girls in womanly grace and virtue from year to year” (qtd. in Spack 144). A primary goal of this education, then, was preparing the Indian woman to refine and civilize the Indian home, much like the well-mannered and virtuous white American wife and mother. As Lomawaima writes in “Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools,” Indian schools trained their female students so they would “serve as matrons of allotment households, promoting a Christian, civilized lifestyle and supporting their husbands in the difficult climb up the cultural evolutionary staircase” (231).18

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Besides teaching the Indian woman how to become proficient as a “civilized” wife and mother, this education also granted her the right to teach. The Indian woman’s progress through school proved that she had adopted white values and norms and could now take her knowledge to the classroom, just like her white counterpart. The education for female students at Carlisle followed this progression. As mentioned above, female students at the school did take part in a fully developed domestic education, but if and when they mastered such tasks, they were encouraged to enter the school’s normal department. Two of Carlisle’s propagandist texts, Indian Industrial School Carlisle, Pa. and Information concerning the United States Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Penna., offer insight to the teacher-education program at the school. The former publication presents a picture of the school’s “pupil teachers,” in which nine of the fourteen teachers in the picture are women. The corresponding text explains that “one of the most helpful features of the School is the normal training given students who show ability, and desire to qualify as teachers. This department becomes more and more important each year as the students thus trained increase in number and go out to fill positions in other schools” (13).

“Pupil teachers,” Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1895. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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The latter volume provides a more detailed description of the program by first explaining the school’s goals in creating the normal department: “The object in establishing and maintaining this department at Carlisle is to furnish temporary substitutes in the lower grades of our own school and to give the girls such training as will enable them to become more intelligent mothers or to take positions as assistants in other places where they will have the charge of children” (50). This text goes on to describe the standards that each potential student must meet before being admitted to the program: “The requirements for entrance into the normal room are a good moral character, a general knowledge of housework and a full share of time spent in the various girls’ industrial departments of our school. The matrons and heads of these departments are always consulted before a girl is admitted as a pupil teacher” (51). These prerequisites not only reveal the purpose of such training (to become adequate mothers and teachers) but also detail the kind of education the Indian “girl” must master before she becomes a teacher in an Indian school. Every student must display “good moral character,” (i.e., she must have adopted white social norms and behaviors), and she must be adept in both household duties and industrial work. Only after such training could the Indian female student gain admission to the normal room as a “pupil teacher” at Carlisle and then leave the school entirely to teach at various Indian schools across the country. Not surprisingly, Carlisle’s publications rarely missed an opportunity to acknowledge the fact that the school had educated its female students so thoroughly that they could now spread Carlisle’s word as teachers. Statements like the following functioned as consistent installments in Carlisle’s presses: “Miss Susie McDougal and Miss Flora Campbell, class of ’94, left for the West on Monday evening, the former to take a position as teacher at the Genoa, Nebraska Indian School, and the latter to teach at the Haskell Institute, in Lawrence, Kansas” (Indian Helper 30 Aug. 1895, 3). The Indian Helper highlights yet another female teacher in this way: “Mrs. Mary Smith, of the Tuscarora tribe of New York,” who was “on her way west to take a position at the Pierre Government Indian School in South Dakota, . . . said: ‘The very best thing that can happen [to] an Indian young man or woman is for them to have to go away from the tribe to live where they are obliged to speak English’” (“Tuscarora” 1). Such news made the implicit argument that these female teachers had joined the ranks of the U.S. educational army. Not only had these women seemingly adopted white gendered codes but they also agreed so much with Carlisle’s principles that they advocated the school’s form of education for all Indian men and women: as the Indian Helper records, Smith sees that leaving the tribe and speaking English are the “best things” for her people.

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Miss Simmons/Zitkala-Ša On 11 October 1895, the Indian Helper reported that “Capt. Pratt said to the school by way of encouragement for the Indians to learn to speak: ‘We need speakers for the Indians who can speak out and tell the country what the country ought to know. We need speakers who can speak with power and understanding’” (3). Five years later, after almost two years of teaching at Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša answered Pratt’s call. Her autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly did “speak” with power and understanding; however, they did not send the kind of message Pratt asked for or anticipated. Her essays described her involvement in Indian education as both a student and a teacher in a way that refused her prescribed gendered role and disrupted the educational narrative that Pratt had effectively established. By the time Zitkala-Ša entered Carlisle as a teacher in 1897, she had become an exemplar of Indian education. Her early years reflected, to the white public, the “good work” education could do for the Indian. Born Gertrude Simmons on 22 February 1876, Zitkala-Ša was part of a generation of Indians that included such figures as Luther Standing Bear, Angel DeCora, Charles Eastman, Francis La Flesche, and Carlos Montezuma—a generation that was targeted for the government’s plan for Indian assimilation through education. As a young girl, Zitkala-Ša moved from school to school, interspersing her educational stints with short visits home. In 1884, at eight years of age, she left her home on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota to attend White’s Manual Labor School in Indiana. After three years, she returned home, only to move on to the Santee Normal Training School in Nebraska from 1888 to 1889. After two years at home again, Zitkala-Ša became a student, for the second time, at White’s from 1891 to 1895 and then at Earlham College, also in Indiana, from 1895 to 1897.19 At Earlham, Zitkala-Ša excelled in both public speaking and music, and through this educational experience, she was seen as convincing proof that the boarding school experience could indeed transform the “savage” Indian girl into a virtuous and “civilized” woman. Zitkala-Ša showcased her rhetorical prowess during her tenure at the school when she placed second in a statewide oratorical contest. Her former school’s newspaper, the Santee School’s Word Carrier, celebrated both her winning speech, “Side by Side,” and her adherence to contemporary ideals of true womanhood: “Her voice was clear and sweet, her language was that of a cultivated young woman and her pronunciation was without a trace of a tongue unfamiliar with English. Her manner was real, womanly, and refined” (“Gertrude Simmons” 1). Such a performance seems to suggest that Zitkala-Ša achieved the specific goals that Indian education set for its female students: she spoke English

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without a trace of her tribal tongue, and she performed as a refined and genteel lady. The subject matter of her speech, however, did not reflect that her assimilation process was as thorough as Indian educators would like. As she would do in her future literary work, Zitkala-Ša used “Side by Side” to argue for her culture’s importance and to critique white American society. For example, she asserts in her speech that even though “the charge of cruelty has been brought against the Indian . . . the White Man has been the witness and the judge.” She moves on to point out that Indian people were not the only ones taking part in acts of cruelty, proclaiming, “Let it be remembered, before condemnation is passed upon the Red Man, that while he burned and tortured frontiersmen, Puritans burned witches and hanged Quakers, and the Southern aristocrat beat his slaves and set his blood hounds on the track of him who dared aspire to freedom” (178). In “Side by Side,” Zitkala-Ša takes up a complicated task: as she performs the role of the refined female student, she also resists this role by exposing the savagery of white America. This rhetorical move is one she would later extend and fine-tune in her autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly.20 The 9 July 1897 issue of the Indian Helper welcomed Zitkala-Ša to Carlisle with these words: “Miss Gertrude Simmons is the latest addition to our force of workers. Miss Simmons is a Sioux, seven years a student of White’s Institute, and of Earlham College two years, is temporarily assisting with the clerical work in Miss Ely’s office” (3). Although she came to Carlisle to work as an administrator and would later write that she is “not fond of teaching,” Zitkala-Ša soon entered the classroom as a debate instructor and music teacher, two pedagogical roles that focused on a key component of Carlisle’s pedagogical program for the formation of the “civilized” American—English-language acquisition (Letter to Montezuma, 3 Apr. 1901). The 21 January 1898 issue of the Indian Helper tells of her rhetorical instruction: “Miss Simmons . . . conducted a debate between her morning and afternoon schools upon the subject of whether or not the treatment of the Indians by the early settlers caused King Phillip to make war.” In addition, as the school’s debate instructor, Zitkala-Ša also performed in front of the school herself, most likely offering her work as an example for students to learn from and imitate. The Indian Helper records at least two readings given by Miss Simmons, “Blue and Gray” (3 June 1898, 2) and “The Achievements of the White and Red Races Compared” ( 24 Sept. 1897, 2). The newspaper especially celebrates the latter speech, writing that it was “a most thrilling and earnest appeal to the youth of her race to show to the world by their earnestness of purpose that the history of the Indian has been wrongly written, and that their motives as a people has been misunderstood.”

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In her music classes, it seems that Zitkala-Ša specifically confronted the issue of English-language acquisition. The 4 February 1898 issue of the Indian Helper “visits” Miss Simmons’s classroom as she instructs her students in singing. The publication explains to readers Miss Simmons’s apparent problems with her Indian students’ language use: “When asked to sum up the difficulties of her room in one word, she said, ‘Language.’” The paper continues to explain “exactly” what Miss Simmons meant by such a comment, interpreting her words in this way: Her pupils are at the stage when they are able to speak English glibly, so as to make themselves understood, but seem somewhat careless and indifferent at times as to correct composition. But by patience and never ceasing care regarding incorrect expressions she hopes to overcome many difficulties, and to bring her pupils up in the use of correct forms of speech. (2)

The Indian Helper’s analysis of Miss Simmons’s response reflects Carlisle’s attempts to define teachers as invested participants in the school’s educational agenda. Here, Miss Simmons is the exemplary Indian teacher of Indians. She is first on the battle lines, fighting to rid her fellow Indians (her students) of their languages so they could learn “the correct forms of speech.” Because the Indian Helper had so often praised Miss Simmons for her model teaching, the newspaper bid the teacher a fond farewell once she left Carlisle in 1899 to pursue a musical career in Boston: Miss Simmons has gone to Boston to take special musical training. In her life as a teacher with us she has made a host of friends who wish her the greatest success in her new field. Miss Simmons has musical talent, and no doubt will make her mark on the world as a violinist. It will be remembered that Miss Simmons is a Sioux Indian maiden who has worked her way through school and partly through college, having attained prominence in her college life at Earlham College, Indiana. (6 Jan. 1899, 3)

Once in Boston, Zitkala-Ša did not devote all of her energies to musical training but divided her time between music and writing. As a writer, Zitkala-Ša was quite prolific. She published her first literary pieces, her autobiographical essays, in the Atlantic Monthly only one year after she arrived. Soon after these essays were in print, she placed a number of short stories in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and Everybody’s Magazine.21 And in 1902, she published a collection of Native Iktomi, or trickster tales, entitled Old Indian Legends.

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Zitkala-Ša, photographed by Gertrude Kasabier, 1898. Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, negative no. 2004-57784.

A change in profession was not all that occurred while she was in Boston. During this time, Gertrude Simmons also changed her name to Zitkala-Ša (“Red Bird”) and used this new name in her published work. Interestingly, the impetus for this change was neither the need for a literary nom de plume nor the recovery of the Indian name she had as a child. Rather, it was brought on by a dispute over education she had with her brother’s wife. Zitkala-Ša writes,

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[My] brother’s wife—angry with me because I insisted upon getting an education said I had deserted home and I might give up my brother’s name “Simmons” too. Well—you can guess how queer I felt away from my own people—home-less—penniless—and even without a name! Then I chose to make a name for myself—& I guess I have made “Zitkala-Ša” known—for even Italy writes it in her language. (Letter to Montezuma, June–July 1901)

While making a name for herself in the literary world, Zitkala-Ša also became engaged to Carlos Montezuma, an Apache doctor and Indian activist, whom she most likely met while he was a physician at Carlisle. Soon after their engagement, however, tensions rose in their relationship when Zitkala-Ša decided to move from Boston and return home to the Yankton Sioux reservation. She writes to Montezuma, “I do not plan to give up my literary work, but while the old people last, I want to get from them their treasured ideas of life. This I can do by being among them” (20 Feb. 1901). This decision effectively ended their engagement because Montezuma refused to leave his practice in Chicago and live on the reservation with her.22 When she returned home, she met and married Raymond Bonnin (Sioux), a clerk for the Indian Service. The couple had one son, Ohiya (“Winner”), who was educated at a Catholic school in Illinois. For the rest of her life, Zitkala-Ša continued the kind of political and educational work for Indians she began as a twenty-four-year-old writer of autobiographical essays. In 1913, she became active in the Society of American Indians, and three years later, she took a post as secretary of this organization and moved with her family to Washington, D.C. She edited the American Indian Magazine from 1918 to 1919 and founded her own political organization, the National Council of American Indians, in 1926. In addition, Zitkala-Ša lectured and campaigned across the country speaking on issues of Indian citizenship, employment of Indians in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, equitable settlement of the tribal land claims, eradication of peyote use, and stabilization of laws relating to Indians (Fisher xv). She fought for these causes until her death on 26 January 1938, in Washington, D.C. As her biography indicates and as P. Jane Hafen illustrates here, ZitkalaŠa’s life was, to say the least, complicated: She clung to her traditional beliefs while practicing Catholicism and other versions of Christianity; she had a Mormon funeral in Arlington, Virginia. She was wrenched from her traditions by the assimilating boarding school experience, yet she sent her only son to a Catholic school in Nauvoo, Illinois. She performed in public arenas and pandered to sentimental, colonial images while demanding legal rights and national

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sovereignties for Indians. She resisted Col. Pratt’s model of assimilation but joined with him in the campaign against legalized peyote use and in advocating the power of education. (xi)

Although these paradoxes are almost impossible to reconcile, in many ways Zitkala-Ša’s life answers the question Gerald Vizenor poses when he asks, “What did it mean to be the first generation to hear the stories of the past, bear the horrors of the moment, and write to the future?” (51). Her autobiographical essays published in the Atlantic Monthly were one way Zitkala-Ša expressed “what it meant” to be an Indian student in the government’s assimilationist schooling program and an Indian teacher at the most prestigious and powerful Indian educational institution in the nation.

Scripting Carlisle/Scripting Critique Judging by Carlisle’s publications, Zitkala-Ša seemed to be the model teacher who had mastered all requisite domestic and intellectual instruction, only to become a dutiful soldier in the school’s educational ranks. This teacher’s three autobiographical essays, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” however, offer a contrast to this depiction and reveal that Zitkala-Ša refused to play the part Carlisle had sketched for her. Once Zitkala-Ša left Carlisle for Boston, she was able to escape the omnipresent gaze of the Man-onthe-band-stand and the pervasive we of Carlisle’s Indian Helper—a title that Zitkala-Ša herself called a “farce name” (Letter to Montezuma, 27 Apr. 1901). And given Zitkala-Ša’s words to Montezuma, there was no mistaking her intention to question Carlisle’s form of Indian education. She writes, “It is just this spirit in me which offends the Col [Pratt]—who has said I am too independent! I won’t be another’s mouthpiece—I will say just what I think” (5 Mar. 1901). Zitkala-Ša found a way to say just what she thought by publishing her work in the unmonitored discursive space of the Atlantic Monthly, and when she did, she threw a dangerous wrench into Carlisle’s “civilizing machine” (“School Days” 190). Through her essays, Zitkala-Ša initiates a conversation with Pratt’s most important and indispensable audience, white financial supporters and Indian education sympathizers, and asks them to observe a side of Carlisle’s education that the Indian Helper would never publicize. Therefore, as Carlisle worked diligently to script the nation’s Indian educational agenda, Zitkala-Ša used her essays to erase this script and inscribe her own version of this educational narrative. More specifically, when she speaks from her experiences in school, ZitkalaŠa rejects the idea that the female student and teacher easily surrenders her

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culture and promotes white social behaviors and language practices. She does not believe, as the Indian Helper relayed about Mrs. Mary Smith, that “the very best thing that can happen to an Indian young man or woman is for them to have to go away from the tribe and live where they are obliged to speak English.” Instead, Zitkala-Ša exposes her readers to the severe consequences of and inherent problems in Carlisle’s two-part rhetorical education. Carlisle promised over and over again that its students would gain access to American life if they, first, replaced their tribal ways, dress, and cultural traditions with the bodily practices and social graces of white society and, second, exchanged their tribal languages for English. Zitkala-Ša intervenes in this seemingly simple civilizing process by arguing that instead of providing willing and eager students with those prized tools that enable access to American society, Carlisle’s educational plan is actually a violent form of cultural erasure that not only extinguishes valuable Indian practices, languages, and social codes but also inhibits participation in both Indian and white worlds. Zitkala-Ša’s essays make it clear that even though Carlisle might celebrate its program for Indian civilization and citizenship, her readers should see how an Indian student and teacher describes the effects of this rhetorical education. Ultimately, Zitkala-Ša asks her readers to listen to her story. She calls on them to reconsider Carlisle’s propaganda and to rethink their support of Indian education. It is through such a practice that Zitkala-Ša makes her claim for rhetorical sovereignty and demands that Indian people have the right to “set at least some of the terms” of the ongoing educational debate (Lyons 462).

Civilizing Savages Carlisle’s educational plan rested on the “fact” that Indians were savages who must be civilized. A vital part of Carlisle’s educational process, then, was to remove Indians from the reservation, rid them of any tribal or savage characteristics, and teach them the good and civilized behaviors of white culture: [When] we agree with the oft-repeated sentiment that the only good Indian is a dead one, we mean this characteristic of the Indian. Carlisle’s mission is to kill THIS Indian, as we build up the better man. We give the rising Indian something nobler and higher to think about and do, and he comes out a young man with the ambitions and aspirations of his more favored white brother. (“Wants” 1)

As this excerpt from the Indian Helper makes clear, Carlisle easily established a simple dichotomy between Indian and white cultures. For Carlisle, Indian life was bad, tribal, ignorant, and savage, while white American life was

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good, individual, intelligent, and civilized. To integrate its Indian students into white American ways of life, Carlisle’s periodicals frequently discussed the necessity to eradicate the “savageness” in the Indian: “Indian heathenism is a poisonous and disgraceful element of our American home life, and whatever soils and corrupts the purity and integrity of our American home life ought to be either destroyed or put outside” (“House” 4). The only way to rid students of their “Indian-ness,” claimed Carlisle, was by inculcating in them the “civilized” behaviors and practices that would make their Indian students into “men.” Carlisle’s publications ref lect the constant attention to this specific educational project. Functioning in many ways like a nineteenth-century conduct book, the Indian Helper consistently advocated certain behaviors and condemned others. The publication would often, for example, instruct readers about proper bodily comportment: Do you want to be graceful? If you do[,] practice this movement: Stand squarely on the soles of the feet then raise and lower the body upon the ball of the feet and toes, making the movements repeatedly for several minutes. This will help you to walk easily and lightly, never walk heavily on the heel, throw [the] weight of the body on the ball of the foot if you wish to walk well. (“Girls” 1)

Following this same pedagogical trajectory, the publication would also advocate specific forms of social etiquette, teaching students not to use “profane and indecent language” and to be always “neat and genteel in appearance” (“Boys” 4). Such a practice was only compounded by a number of the Indian Helper’s short articles that consistently employed Don’t in their titles and warned students to avoid such practices as gurgling their drinks (“Don’t! Don’t” 4); spitting on the floor (“Oh, Don’t!” 4); taking a seat at the table before the ladies are seated (“Don’t” 4); and filling their mouths with too much food (“Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!” 4). Instructions regarding such (im)polite behavior would often be accompanied by explanations of the repercussions one would receive when these social codes were transgressed. In an article instructing students about correct table manners, the Indian Helper writes that this education “will be of great service to [the Indian student] when he goes out into the world for his behavior at table will certainly put a stamp upon him, either for good or evil consequences. It will be worth many dollars for him to know how to behave at table and may be the means of deciding whether he shall be the possessor of a fortune or a beggar” (“Are Any” 4). These lessons, which were always saturated in a condescending and pedantic tone, did more than advocate the practices of dominant white

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society. Carlisle’s effort to teach students correct, civil ways of life was always based on the school’s prevailing assumption that Indian life was completely bankrupt of both concern with and rules for socially acceptable behavior. This move becomes especially clear in Carlisle’s frequent practice of using pictures of Indian students as advertisements for the school. For instance, one article in the Indian Helper promises to send readers “a small but true and striking picture of a band of eight reservation Indians in full and hideous dance dress, or rather undress with more feathers and toggery than clothing” (“Chance” 1). This article goes on to state that the purpose of this picture is to “sho[w] from what degradation and barbarism, the Carlisle Indian school would rescue the Indian youth if encouraged to do so” (1). As another example, the Indian Helper often offered “before-and-after” photographs as rewards for readers who garnered new subscribers to the school’s publications: For ten [subscriptions], Two photographs, one showing a group of Pueblos as they arrived in wild dress, and another of the same pupils three years after, or, for the same number of names we give two photographs showing still more marked contrast between a Navajoe [sic] as he arrived in native dress, and as he now looks, worth 20 cents a piece. (“Standing Offer” 4)

The “before-and-after” effect of these pictures surely presented the argument that Carlisle transformed the Indian from a savage being who lived by the most base social codes (if any at all) to a civilized and respectable man or woman who could deploy the correct behaviors that would enable him or her to enter white American society. Through the use of these photographs and the advocacy of white social etiquette, Carlisle positioned itself and its teachers as the Emily Post for Indian students and prepared them intellectually, socially, and physically to participate in white society. As it enacted such a practice, the school composed a narrative of noblesse oblige, one that promoted the idea that it was Carlisle’s civic and moral obligation to take pity on the Indian community by instructing this poor, savage, and degraded class in those proper practices and behaviors that signal everything that is civilized, white, and, of course, American.

Savaging the Civilized Zitkala-Ša, well aware of Carlisle’s educational narrative, was incensed by the school’s assumption that its education transformed the Indian from savage to civilized. In this letter to Montezuma, she openly expresses her distaste for Carlisle’s bravado:

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I resent Carlisle’s talking of you as it does. Its talk-boast of you as a savage Apache and now an honorable physician in Chicago—the result of Education!! I guess if the character was not in you—savage or otherwise—Education could not make you the man you are today . . . Education has developed the possibilities in me—were they not there—no school could put them in! (12 Apr. 1901)

Just as she argues in this letter, Zitkala-Ša’s three autobiographical essays address the white = civilized, Indian = savage script that Carlisle advocated so vociferously. Zitkala-Ša’s project in her essays is to confront and then invert the dichotomy that Carlisle established as a means to ask her readers to reexamine the school’s educational project and to consider what “civilized” and “savage” behaviors look like from an Indian point of view. Zitkala-Ša begins her first essay by reflecting on her life on the reservation before she attended school. In these recollections, she does not depict herself as a wild and uncultivated savage, as Carlisle might portray. Instead, she describes herself as an obedient girl who stayed close beside her mother and took part in “practical observation lessons in the art of beadwork.” During these lessons, Zitkala-Ša carefully watched her mother’s refined practice and took note of how she “spread upon a mat beside her bunches of colored beads just as an artist arranges the paints upon his palette” (“Impressions” 40). Zitkala-Ša’s education in Indian art and custom does not end here. She goes on to write about the Indian cultural codes that governed her community. She recalls her mother’s “hospitality” when she would cordially “invite the neighboring old men and women to eat supper,” after which came the time when “old legends were told” (38). Zitkala-Ša informs her readers of a particular rule of etiquette that went along with making this invitation: “My mother used to say to me, as I was almost bounding away for the old people: ‘Wait a moment before you invite any one. If other plans are being discussed, do not interfere, but go elsewhere’” (39). This hesitation was particularly important to Zitkala-Ša and her community because, as her mother taught her, there should be “no fear save that of intruding [her]self upon others” (37). It is in these first few passages that Zitkala-Ša begins to intervene in Carlisle’s narrative by countering Carlisle’s equation between Indianness and savagery and by inscribing an Indian world for her readers that they could only recognize as civilized. Zitkala-Ša takes this point a step further when she describes her time in school. Her reflections on this period in her life not only ascribe what is civilized to what is Indian but also equate white behaviors with savage behaviors. After recounting her cultural education on the reservation, Zitkala-Ša defines herself as a child who entered school already civilized.

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It was during her boarding school experience, Zitkala-Ša argues, that she first suffered “extreme indignities” of a savage and cruel white world (“School Days” 187). Zitkala-Ša makes this point clear when she describes the different styles of dress of the “palefaces” and Indians. She observes and evaluates this difference, writing, “As I walked noiselessly in my soft moccasins, I felt like sinking to the floor, for my blanket had been stripped from my shoulders. I looked hard at the Indian girls, who seemed not to care that they were even more immodestly dressed than I, in their tightly fitting clothes” (186). In Zitkala-Ša’s essays, it is not the Indian savage who, as Carlisle reports, offensively dons the “full and hideous dance dress, or rather undress with more feathers and toggery than clothing.” Instead, she recognizes those Indian students dressed in white apparel as the ones who violate tribal codes of modesty and appropriateness. Zitkala-Ša once again inscribes a kind of white savagery when she discusses how white, seemingly civilized actions actually transgress cultural practices of great importance to Indian people. To assert this position, she cites the time in her education when the “paleface” teachers cut their students’ “long, heavy hair.” She informs her readers that this practice was not taken lightly by Indian students, for their “mothers had taught [them] that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!” When Zitkala-Ša recalls her haircutting experience, then, it is not the Indian who is seen as savage but the white teachers who take part in crude and barbaric behaviors. She writes, “I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit” (“School Days” 187). The white educators did not help Zitkala-Ša develop her civilized nature; they were the savages whose weapons “gnawed” at her braids and who forced her to lose her Indian spirit. Through her narratives, Zitkala-Ša reveals and then breaks down the false dichotomy that supported Carlisle’s educational project. She convincingly shows that, to the Indian, white society does not save Indian children from their savage ways by teaching them civilized practices and behaviors. It is this supposedly refined society that savagely transgresses the Indian social code she learned as a child by continually “intruding itself upon others.” In reversing this dominant dichotomy, Zitkala-Ša disputes Carlisle’s educational narrative and intervenes in what Vizenor would call Carlisle’s system of “manifest manners.” Manifest manners, Vizenor explains, are “the simulations of dominance; the notions and misnomers that are read as the authentic and sustained representations of Native American Indians”

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(5–6). Zitkala-Ša’s move to re-present Indian life to her readers and describe an Indian world governed by art, culture, and social etiquette is not only an act of rhetorical sovereignty. It is also an act of Indian “survivance,” an act that, as Vizenor describes it, “undermines and surmounts with imagination and the performance of new stories, the manifest manners of scriptural simulations and ‘authentic’ representations of the tribes in the literature of dominance” (17). Zitkala-Ša undermines Carlisle’s formulation of manifest manners by asking her readers to see that the dominant narratives of Indian education offer only inauthentic simulations of Indian life that ignore both Indian civility and white savagery.

Teaching English Because Indian languages were inextricably tied to tribal life and “savage” ways, one of Carlisle’s most basic and central missions was to eradicate tribal languages and teach students English. Learning English, Carlisle argued, was a vital component of being American, and Carlisle promised that every student would learn “English, industry, and incentive” (“Not the First” 1). To educational officials at Carlisle (and across the country, for that matter), Indian adoption of English was not simply a sign that Indian students could now communicate with their white counterparts. As Spack argues, educators of Indian students believed the English language “represented an entire culture and functioned as the conveyor of mainstream ‘practical, self-reliant’ values” (29). In essence, the use of English stood for a number of supposedly superior American values. For instance, it was thought that to know English meant one was “virtuous and that to be ignorant of English [was] to be susceptible to vice” (31). Carlisle’s educational narrative certainly made such a claim. Once students learned English, the school promised, industry and incentive would follow.23 Carlisle worked to make good on this promise by instituting an English-only language policy in which students were required to use English at all times––before, during, and after school. Carlisle even made sure that students were not speaking their tribal languages in the privacy of their dormitory rooms: administrators placed students from different tribes together so that English would be their only common language. Moreover, through its publications, Carlisle frequently defined and celebrated the work of its language policy inside and outside school walls. Installments of the Indian Helper as well as the school’s promotional texts describe an English-only rhetorical education replete with elocutionary work, spelling bees, instruction in grammar, composition, and speech, as well as letter writing. As Zitkala-Ša’s experience at the school reveals, Carlisle also saw both music lessons and debating societies as opportunities to teach students

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English.24 Readers of the newspaper would not only learn of successful debates between such societies as the Invincibles and the Standards but would also gain insight on the way in which Carlisle enacted its language pedagogy. Through articles such as “Indian English,” “Not an Indian Girl’s Composition but a Girl’s,” “Dictionary English,” “Good Gymnastics for the Indian Tongue,” and “Indians Don’t Make All the Mistakes in English,” readers would observe students’ seemingly successful transition from their tribal language to English, as well as their transition from Indian to American. Articles about students’ language acquisition obviously stressed both the Carlisle teacher’s ability to teach students English and the student’s willingness to learn the language. But Carlisle’s argument concerning the effects of its language pedagogy did not end there. Carlisle also made the point of explaining to its readers that the linguistic successes at the school were also welcomed by major figures inside the Indian community. The following Indian Helper article exemplifies this “successful” pedagogical project by including this “comment from an Indian named Chief Whirlwind of the Cheyenne tribe who visited the school”: I want to thank you for the work you’ve done in teaching these children. That you have done good work is shown here to-night. Washington is a famous city. It is known all over the world; just so the Carlisle School is famous among the Indians. I have visited many reservation Indian schools, but none are up to Carlisle. Here I see many different tribes, but I can’t tell one tribe from another because they use one common language. Here by my side are two students of Carlisle who speak for themselves and show what education has done for them. (“Visit” 1)

This comment clearly reflects Carlisle’s desire to convince readers that its pedagogical plan not only worked—students were speaking English and forgetting tribal languages—but also that Indian students and, even better, Indian chiefs accepted and welcomed the English language.

Surviving English In her Atlantic Monthly essays, Zitkala-Ša is not the teacher who, as the Indian Helper describes, dutifully falls in step with Carlisle’s language policy and fervently teaches English with “patience and never ceasing care regarding incorrect expressions” (4 Feb. 1898, 2). In contrast, Zitkala-Ša uses her essays to expose the English language as a force that only brought “unjustifiable frights and punishments” into her life (“School Days” 188). Her reflections on her early education show that the foreign, English-speaking voices of teachers and other students magnified the chaos she experienced as a young girl at school. But even though these “voices murmuring in an unknown

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tongue” created a “bedlam within which [she] was securely tied,” she did learn to speak English—not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Zitkala-Ša implicitly argues that not being able to speak to the teachers at her school was an enormous liability, and learning English became the only way for her to make her feelings known and to defend herself at school. For example, as soon as Zitkala-Ša arrived at school, she realized she wanted to return home: “Oh, I want my mother and my brother Dawee! I want to go to my aunt!” she cried, but her white teachers were deaf to her demands; the “ears of the palefaces could not hear” her. There was only one way the teachers could stop her from crying—to break protocol. Zitkala-Ša writes, “I was tucked into bed with one of the tall girls, because she talked to me in my mother tongue and seemed to soothe me” (186). “School Days of an Indian Girl” includes another event that more significantly reflects the injustices that accompanied English acquisition at Indian schools. Here, Zitkala-Ša writes of an instance when she was “still deaf to the English language” (187). She explains: “One morning we learned through [Judewin’s] ears that we were forbidden to fall lengthwise in the snow. . . . However, before many hours we had forgotten the order, and were having great sport in the snow, when a shrill voice called us.” The girls were caught by a teacher and brought one-by-one into the teacher’s office. Judewin, the only one of the group who could speak even minimal English, anticipated that the teacher would ask each girl, “Will you play in the snow again?” Given this assumption, Judewin instructed her friends, “If she looks straight into your eyes and talks loudly, you must wait until she stops. Then after a tiny pause, say, ‘No.’” When the first girl entered the office, the others listened at the door as “the paleface woman talked in very severe tones.” Her English words “fell from her lips like crackling embers, and her inflection ran up like the small end of a switch.” As they were listening, Judewin realized “all too late that she had taught [them] the wrong reply” and translated the teacher’s question to be, “Are you going to obey my words the next time?” Zitkala-Ša reports that the teacher was more than unhappy with the girl’s defiant response and “meant her blows to smart, for the poor frightened girl shrieked at the top of her voice” (188). Through this retelling, Zitkala-Ša links the English language with the brutal beating of an Indian child and shows how problematic and dangerous the pedagogy at Carlisle was. Students were being beaten not because they were overtly defiant but because they didn’t know the language well enough to communicate their thoughts. In addition, as Zitkala-Ša describes the beating, she also defines the sound of the English language as destructive and intimidating to the Indian student. She writes that the English language fell from the teacher’s mouth “like crackling embers” and her inflection felt

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like “the small end of a switch.” Not only is the use and misuse of English linked to danger and brutality for the students, but the very sound of the language also enacts a kind of violence on them. Through this story, ZitkalaŠa contends that learning English was not a task Indians anxiously wanted to undertake. It was imperative for their survival and safety. Moreover, as students learned this language, they were not proceeding through a comforting pedagogical experience; instead they were enduring yet another kind of punishment as they felt the “switch” of the English language every time they listened to it. Given the fact that she wrote these essays in English, Zitkala-Ša obviously learned the language so well that she was able to use her command of it to publish her essays in the Atlantic Monthly and challenge Carlisle’s educational system. Through the stories she tells in her essays, however, Zitkala-Ša makes sure her readers understand the impetus for and the cost of her English acquisition. As Martha Cutter argues, Zitkala-Ša implicitly claims throughout her work that the English language is itself “problematic, an ambivalent tool—both the sign of oppression, and the means of escaping it” (37). Even though she uses her writing to “escape oppression” by critiquing Indian education in the Atlantic Monthly, her acquisition of English was not made without a significant exchange. When she speaks of how the English language has changed her, she writes, “I no longer felt free to be myself, or to voice my own feelings” (“Impressions” 47). English had taken part of her identity. This connection Zitkala-Ša makes between identity and language complicates what Carlisle promoted as the seemingly easy transition from tribal language to English and from Indian savage to American citizen. Zitkala-Ša shows her Atlantic Monthly readers that this is not a simple exchange but a violent imposition that works to extinguish a rich cultural existence. Zitkala-Ša’s perspective on English acquisition in the nineteenth-century Indian school resonates with that of Joy Harjo and many twenty-first century educators, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Donaldo Macedo, who argue that a part of one’s culture and identity is lost when one is forced to give up one’s first language. Harjo writes: My frustration with the language, particularly the English language, stems from anger with the colonization process in which English language was a vicious tool. The colonizers knew what they were doing when they tried to destroy tribal languages and which, infuriatingly, they were successful at in many instances. Language is culture, a resonant life form itself that acts on the people and the people on it. The worldviews, values, relationships of all kinds—everything, in fact, is addressed in and through language. (99)

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Harjo’s point here only compounds Zitkala-Ša’s assessment of the enforcement of English acquisition as a site of white cultural hegemony that attempts to erase Indian identity. For Zitkala-Ša, each word in her Atlantic Monthly essays functioned as a strong reminder of the price she paid to participate in American society.

Creating Individuals Carlisle’s two-part rhetorical education that focused on inculcating “civilized” behaviors and enforcing the English language worked toward one specific end: independent individualism. Carlisle used its publications to argue that independence was the key for Indian survival and that the school’s educational program successfully prepared students to become selfsufficient participants in American society. Carlisle’s focus on the importance of Indian independence is difficult to miss. The school’s publications frequently reinforced this point by publishing statements like these: “The day of real progress for the Indian will begin when each Indian becomes an individual. . . . There is life, health and happiness for the Indian as a free man and an individual” (“Foundation” 1). “Go yourself and FIND OUT for yourself. That is what Carlisle teaches in every move you make. FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF, and BE INDEPENDENT!” (Indian Helper 29 Mar. 1895, 2). These maxims operated both as pedagogical strategies that taught students to become self-reliant individuals and as advertisements that reminded white readers of the school’s overarching educational goal. Just as Carlisle’s publications repeatedly announced its educational focus on individualism, it also constantly alerted its readers to those students who progressed through the school’s civilizing system and achieved success in American society. The school’s publications were littered with news of students who had accomplished what the school saw as the greatest sign of independence: they had found jobs and could now “earn their keep.” Carlisle showcased such signs of accomplishment by publishing letters from former students who had achieved the goals Carlisle set for them. The conventional Carlisle success story usually followed the general formula of this letter from a former student: “I am now working at a large store as bookkeeper and Assistant-Postmaster. . . . That is what a chap like me can do when he tries. I have been working here ever since my return from Carlisle. . . . I can thank Carlisle for what it has done for me, because it has done worlds of good to me” (“From a Carlisle Boy” 4). Testimonials such as this underscored the idea that Carlisle’s educational program worked: students not only left the school with the behaviors and language that would enable them to engage in and contribute to American society but were also grateful for the education that made them self-reliant individuals.

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Creating Exiles The manner by which Zitkala-Ša addresses Carlisle’s claims concerning the ultimate goal of Indian education reflects her high level of rhetorical sophistication. Rather than explaining to her Atlantic Monthly readers the value of a tribal culture as opposed to individualistic lifestyles, she chooses to describe her early years in terms her readers would understand. In so doing, Zitkala-Ša performs what Malea Powell would call a “kind of civilized Indian-ness” in that as she writes to her audience as an “Indian,” she also strategically deploys terms and ideas that her readers would recognize and respect, making it possible for her to achieve her rhetorical goal (“Rhetorics” 406). As Powell argues in “Rhetorics of Survivance,” writers like Zitkala-Ša used such “deliberately rhetorical” tactics to “engage in and critique beliefs about authentic Indian-ness that . . . nineteenth-century audience[s] clearly held to be true” (415). Zitkala-Ša especially troubles her readers’ ideas of “authentic Indian-ness” as well as “authentic American-ness” when she builds on their beliefs concerning individualism as a means to challenge Carlisle’s promise for Indian education. Zitkala-Ša calls into question the ends of this pedagogical project by positing that the school was not what allowed her to develop her individuality. Instead, it was the school that compromised and constricted the individual she had become as a young Indian girl. In her first essay, for example, Zitkala-Ša describes how her life with her mother cultivated the individual in her. When she received her lessons in the “art of beadwork,” Zitkala-Ša writes, “My mother required of me original designs for my lessons in beading. . . . The quietness of her oversight made me feel strongly responsible and dependent upon my own judgment. . . . She treated me as a dignified little individual as long as I was on my good behavior” (“Impressions” 40). Through her use of terms such as original, responsible, own judgment, and individual, Zitkala-Ša defines her experiences in terms her readers value and asks them to reconsider what “real” Indian life means to them. She challenges her readers’ understanding of Indian life even further when she contrasts her tribal experience with her experience at the off-reservation boarding school. Unlike the individuality she was asked to develop in her Indian community, the off-reservation school only impeded her individual development. Zitkala-Ša recalls that every morning she would wake from “happy dreams of Western rolling lands and unlassoed freedom” to the “iron routine” of the “civilizing machine” (“School Days” 190). Though she would “actively [test] the chains which tightly bound [her] individuality like a mummy for burial” (190), her “spirit” eventually “tore itself in struggling for its lost freedom,” and she realized “all was useless” (186). By juxtaposing her

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home life with her school experience, Zitkala-Ša demonstrates to her readers that the individuality they so highly regard is in no way being cultivated in the Indian schools; instead, these schools are extinguishing it. But Zitkala-Ša’s essays do not simply call into question the idea that Indian schools actually foster individuality. They also counter the stories of “successful” Indians in Carlisle’s publications. Zitkala-Ša, a seemingly successful Indian student and teacher, uses her own life experience to prove that education did not do “worlds of good” for her like it supposedly did for the Indian student quoted above. Her essays reveal that after her own progression through a Carlislesque rhetorical education, she faced extreme alienation and displacement when she returned home—the effects of an Indian education that Carlisle failed to advertise. In her second Atlantic Monthly installment, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkala-Ša describes the middle space that she unwillingly occupied between white and Indian worlds once she left school for the reservation: After my first three years of school I roamed again in the Western country through four strange summers. During this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos, beyond the touch or voice of human aid. My brother, being almost ten years my senior, did not quite understand my feelings and my mother had never gone inside of a schoolhouse, and so she was not capable of comforting her daughter who could read and write. Even nature seemed to have no place for me. I was neither a wee girl nor a tall one; neither a wild Indian nor a tame one. This deplorable situation was the effect of my brief course in the East, and the unsatisfactory “teenth” in a girl’s years. (“School Days” 190–91)

As a graduate of Indian education, Zitkala-Ša might have been deemed a success by white society, but her reflections offer a dimension of Indian “success” that supporters of such an education would rarely encounter in Carlisle’s publications. To Zitkala-Ša, education had created for her a “deplorable situation” and made her home into a foreign place to which she no longer belonged. Because of her education, she had “no place in nature” and existed in an unfortunate space between the “neither’s” and the “nor’s,” located somewhere on the borders of white and Indian worlds. One place where Zitkala-Ša belonged along this border space was as a teacher in the Indian school classroom. Teaching seemed to be one of the few occupations in which her Indian background and her white education were welcome. But as Zitkala-Ša points out in her final essay, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” it was quite difficult for her to become an active participant in Carlisle’s educational system and to lead other Indian students down her same path. Thus, it was both by taking a teach-

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ing position at Carlisle and by writing about her educational experiences that Zitkala-Ša began to answer Vizenor’s complicated question of “what it meant” to become a “successful” Indian in the eyes of the white world. Zitkala-Ša’s essays inscribe an educational narrative that challenges her readers’ sense of individuality and the kind of education meant to produce the American individual. Her reflections posit that her educational journey only led her into “the heart of chaos.” Through narrating her educational experience, she ultimately problematizes both the means and ends of Indian education.

Exposing Carlisle The first two of Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical essays, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” and “School Days of an Indian Girl,” are more general critiques of educational prerogatives established by the off-reservation boarding school system, obviously implicating Carlisle as its most visible example. However, Zitkala-Ša’s final installment in the Atlantic Monthly, “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” overtly exposes the hypocrisy and injustice she witnessed as a teacher at the school. Here, she speaks from personal experience as a soldier in Carlisle’s educational army to argue that the pedagogical program at the school was not what it projected itself to be. As one of Carlisle’s former teachers, she reveals the school’s master narrative as a lie that writes over and silences the “real” Indian educational experience. Zitkala-Ša tells a much different story in this essay about Carlisle’s teachers, their teaching strategies, and the school’s propagandist rhetoric that advertises student progress. In her concluding words, she leaves her readers with a troubling decision to make concerning their support for the work that schools like Carlisle do for their Indian students. Zitkala-Ša begins the essay by leveling the charge that the teachers at Carlisle are not the loving guides to white civilization the school presents in its newspapers. Instead, Zitkala-Ša posits, these teachers often cruelly berate, beat, and belittle their Indian students. She writes that she finds it “hard to count that white man a teacher who tortured an ambitious Indian youth by frequently reminding the brave changeling that he was nothing more than a ‘government pauper.’” When she went, “[burning] with indignation,” to discuss this teacher’s behavior and other “instances no less shameless” with the higher officials at Carlisle (Pratt being the most obvious candidate), her complaints were ignored; “there was no present help” (“Indian Teacher” 385). From what Zitkala-Ša had seen, Carlisle’s teachers were not the caregivers that welcomed Indian students to white American society; instead, the school’s educational system was riddled with cruel teachers who cared little for their Indian students.

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Zitkala-Ša next inscribes Carlisle as an institution that constructs a false reality of student experience to convince government officials that the school is indeed achieving its pedagogical goals. She tells of the instances when Carlisle “hoodwinked” government inspectors by showing them “students’ sample work made for exhibition” (“Indian Teacher” 386). Here, she implies that the student writing published in the Indian Helper and the Red Man does not represent the true Indian experience at Carlisle. These presentations are instead Carlisle’s self-serving effort to prove the effectiveness of its educational system. Zitkala-Ša explains that this work is purposefully doctored to trick decision-making and money-granting government officials, and it functions only to paint a positive picture by leaving out any negative student experiences. Through this process of unveiling Carlisle’s practices, Zitkala-Ša prompts her readers to reevaluate the educational narratives they may have encountered and to consider how such narratives may have falsely informed their impressions of Indian education. In this third and final Atlantic Monthly installment, Zitkala-Ša also criticizes the ways the Indian educational program is interpreted by white patrons, a group among which her readers might count themselves. She argues that, upon visiting Carlisle, these patrons only superficially observe the Indian educational experience and never actually see the real work of the school. “I remember how,” Zitkala-Ša writes, “from morning till evening, many specimens of civilized peoples visited the Indian school.” These people were “astounded at seeing the children of savage warriors so docile and industrious”; the visitors then left “well satisfied: they were educating the children of the red man!” (“Indian Teacher” 386). Zitkala-Ša explains to readers that supporters of Indian education rarely do more than make a cursory examination of Indian education and its effects on Indian students. Without making the effort to look past Carlisle’s sheen of pedagogical success, she assesses, these patrons continue to sponsor and celebrate schools such as Carlisle without ever really understanding what it means to train “savage warriors” to become “docile and industrious.” Zitkala-Ša builds on this evaluation of white attitudes toward Indian education to make her most persuasive and compelling critique of Carlisle’s educational narrative. In the final lines of this essay, she artfully speculates about those supporters of Indian education who “have passed idly through Indian schools in this last decade” and have “boast[ed] of their charity to the Native American Indian.” Zitkala-Ša closes her essay by reflecting on these visits, making a lasting comment about Indian education and white people’s understanding of it. Ultimately, she surmises that few of Carlisle’s visitors have ever “paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilization” (“Indian Teacher” 386).

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With these words, Zitkala-Ša completes her rhetorical endeavor and makes her final attempt to redefine Carlisle’s pedagogical project. She concludes her autobiographical narratives by naming Carlisle’s model civilizing process a mere “semblance” and asking her readers to reassess for themselves exactly what this education offers Indian students: real life or long-lasting death. Clearly, the expectation is that after reading Zitkala-Ša’s sketches, readers could only answer that Indian education offers nothing but the latter. It is at this climactic and persuasive moment when Zitkala-Ša’s resistance turns from critique to possibility. Zitkala-Ša claims rhetorical sovereignty not only by calling for the right of Indians to speak out for themselves and determine their own educational needs but also by attempting to “revive” a sense of “possibility” for Indian people (Lyons 449). Zitkala-Ša attempts to persuade her readers to discontinue their support of this kind of education and acknowledge that Indian people should, in Lyons’s words, “[set] at least some of the terms of debate” (462).

Containing Critique It should come as no surprise that Carlisle responded to Zitkala-Ša’s Atlantic Monthly essays by dedicating space in at least three issues of the Red Man to contain her critique. But before knowing either the content or intent of Zitkala-Ša’s essays, Carlisle published these words in the Indian Helper that lauded her accomplishments and boasted of her association with the school: Zitkala-Sa, interpreted from the Sioux tongue into English means, Red Bird, and is Miss Simmons’ Indian name. Miss Simmons was of our corps of teachers a year ago and has since been taking a course of violin instruction at the Boston Conservatory. She is a fine violinist. If her interesting articles get into such papers as the Atlantic Monthly her reputation is made along literary lines. . . . Thus the Indian is entering into the highest and best places. We are not content to be mediocre. (“We” 2)

Once her writings were made accessible to the public and the final and most stinging indictment of Carlisle was in print, however, Zitkala-Ša was no longer an Indian to make Carlisle proud. Carlisle retaliated against her claims by deploying two main lines of argument that worked to silence her voice and fortify the school’s educational agenda. First, Carlisle’s publications belittled Zitkala-Ša’s experiences and attacked her character. Carlisle asserted that instead of being appreciative of all the “good” her education had done for her, Zitkala-Ša only focused on the “few” negative aspects of Indian instruction. “Hunt for the South Side!,” published in the 14 September 1900 issue of the Red Man, makes this

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point: “There are people like Zitkala Sa, in her Atlantic Monthly articles a few months ago, who always insist upon sitting on the cold side of the hill. They have all sorts of experiences in life, happy as well as dull, but the remembrance of gloomy scenes and the dark pictures is alone retained” (1). The Red Man’s February 1900 issue also takes up this line of argument: We regret that Zitkala-Sa did not once call to mind the happier side of those long school days, or even hint at the friends who did so much to break down for her the barriers of language and custom, and to lead her from poverty and insignificance into the comparatively full and rich existence that she enjoys today. . . . [We] do feel that the home-sick pathos—nay; more the underlying bitterness of her story will cause readers unfamiliar with the Indian schools to form entirely wrong conclusions. Her pictures are not perhaps untrue in themselves, but, taken by themselves, they are sadly misleading. (“School Days” 8)25

According to Carlisle, Zitkala-Ša was an ungrateful Indian student and teacher who reaped the benefits of Indian education but then turned her back on those who helped and instructed her. Zitkala-Ša’s most egregious character flaw, though, was that she did not keep quiet about her discontent. She spoke out and attempted to color people’s opinions of Indian education by “caus[ing] readers unfamiliar with the Indian schools to form entirely wrong conclusions.” Thus, these Red Man articles conveyed to readers that Zitkala-Ša had fallen short of Indian “success.” As “Hunt for the South Side” goes on to explain, Zitkala-Ša did not “make light of small trials and push them aside that sunshine and cheer may enter.” Unlike Zitkala-Ša, the “successful” Indian is one who only highlights the good; it is the hopeful and “cheery” person, Carlisle reminds its readers, “who [makes] the world worth living in” (1). Carlisle’s second line of attack was to admit that although some of Zitkala-Ša’s critiques might be true, nothing was more harmful to the Indian population than tribal life. In “Two Sides of Institutional Life,” Carlisle explains, “Nearly everything that is said of life in the Indian boarding school—its loneliness, its lovelessness, its dangers to health and morals in the indiscriminate association of large numbers of children, is . . . true.” But, the article continues, this assessment should not change the way readers conceive of Indian education, because this situation “is true at all, of all large boarding schools and educational or reformatory or philanthropic institutions.” Carlisle admits, “the Babies Homes, the ‘Sheltering Arms,’ the schools for the feeble-minded, the blind, for deaf-mutes or other unfortunate classes of children are all alike in that they are institutions, and cannot give the personal touch, the individual atmosphere of the ideal

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home.” Nevertheless, Carlisle argues, these problems are far less harmful than those inherent in life on the reservation; the off-reservation boarding school must be preferred over “the homes of the Indians” because they “fall so far below our standard as to be wholly out of the question as a nursery for our future citizens” (1). Through these two lines of argument, Carlisle delegitimates Zitkala-Ša’s claims. First, Zitkala-Ša was ungrateful for what Indian schools have given her, and second, even though her critique might, in part, be true, Carlisle asserts that anything white America does for the Indians is better than the “barbaric” state in which they were already living. “Compare even the least attractive of Indian schools with the average home of the pupils,” Carlisle argues, “and you cannot hesitate an instant between them. . . . Better a good institution than a miserable or degraded home; better a hundred times.” These two argumentative strategies worked to recontain Zitkala-Ša and her resistant rhetoric, placing her back into what Carlisle saw as her rightful, deferential, and subordinate place: “Those,” like Zitkala-Ša, “who take it upon themselves to point out the defects of the present system” should be thankful for what white society has done and “should not fail to recognize the alternative, which is, in most cases, an environment of dirt, poverty, mental stagnation, and unmoral if not actively immoral influences” (“Two Sides” 1). Inscribing its narrative once again, Carlisle asserts that the education it provides its students is surely not a semblance but is instead the only chance Indians have for civilization and citizenship.

Resisting Scripts/Reforming Rhetorical Education Carlisle’s overt attempts to delegitimate Zitkala-Ša’s essays prove that she had touched a very sensitive nerve. But Carlisle was not the only one to react to her critique. Zitkala-Ša writes to Montezuma that “in contrast with Carlisle’s opinion of my work—Boston pats me with no little pride” (17 Mar. 1901). Elisabeth Luther Cary’s review of Zitkala-Ša’s work in the Book Buyer is just one sign of the acclaim Zitkala-Ša received: When, however, we read the biographical papers of Zitkala-Ša, contributed to the Atlantic a year or so ago, a very different note arrests our attention, a poignant and utterly despairing note of revolt against what Stevenson calls “the dingy, ungentlemanly practice of civilization.” . . . Zitkala-Ša is not only an educated Indian, but a writer of unusual quality. Her work is nine times heated by the cruelty of her mental and moral experience. (24–25)

Zitkala-Ša had, it seems, made her way into white American consciousness and called its attention to the injustices of Indian education. By entering into a public space not regulated by Carlisle’s Man-on-the-bandstand, Zitkala-Ša

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used her Atlantic Monthly essays to challenge the school’s educational narrative. The challenges that she made, however, functioned as more than an intervention into an educational script. Her essays represent a moment when an Indian woman and teacher claimed rhetorical sovereignty as a means to resist and reform Carlisle’s debilitating iteration of rhetorical education.

Native Women/Native Resistance Before Zitkala-Ša could make any move toward rhetorical sovereignty, she had to reshape the gendered role that dominant white society had set for her. Federal schools like Carlisle saw Indian women as vital parts of their civilizing program. Their work hinged on the idea that female students must master the arts of domesticity and adopt the ideals of true womanhood. Of course, for this pedagogical process to begin, educational officials resolved that these female students must reject all connections to Indian life. As Estelle Reel instructs, “because our grandmothers did these things in a certain way is no reason why we should do the same” (qtd. in Lomawaima, “Domesticity” 231). Only after the female student divested herself of her Indian heritage could she learn to tend to her new home as a proper wife and mother or transmit these white, American values and beliefs to other Indian students as a teacher in an Indian school. Through her autobiographical essays, Zitkala-Ša informs her readers that the educational process she underwent did not achieve its goals. She did not become an Indian teacher who inculcated in Indian students white values, behaviors, and language practices. She was one who contested this process and worked against the cultural erasure happening at schools like Carlisle. Her effort to question the definition of the Indian teacher did not end with her three installments in the Atlantic Monthly, however. In her 1901 publication Old Indian Legends, Zitkala-Ša turned the dominant pedagogical transaction on its head and taught white children about the value of Indian life and culture. She articulates this purpose in the introduction to the volume: And now I have tried to transplant the native spirit of these tales—root and all—into the English language, since America in the last few centuries has acquired a second tongue. The old legends of America belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine. And when they are grown tall like the wise grown-ups may they not lack interest in a further study of Indian folklore—a study which so strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind, and by which one is so forcibly impressed with the possible earnestness of life as seen through the teepee door! . . . [T]he American aborigine . . . demands a little respect. (vi)

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Much like she did in her autobiographical essays, Zitkala-Ša reformulates the gendered role that dominant society set out for her. Although she does indeed “teach” her readers, she works here to translate Indian folklore into America’s newly acquired “second tongue” for her white readers. Her attempt reflects the work of an Indian woman who continued to transmit and articulate the relevance of Indian ways of life by teaching, this time, white children to respect Indian beliefs and practices. When Zitkala-Ša rejects the government’s plan for her work as an Indian woman and teacher, she joins with other Indian women who have negotiated dominant gender roles to perpetuate their culture, language, and tradition. One nineteenth-century example of such negotiation is the group that ran and attended the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females in Ardmore, Oklahoma. This academy was unusual in that it was not only a school for females but was also controlled by the Chickasaw Nation (Cobb 6). Although the school did offer its female students a similar education to that of the federal schools, the aims of Bloomfield were markedly different. As Amanda Cobb describes in Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories, “Students were trained to become Republican Mothers and ‘True Women’ who could effect change in their own lives and in the lives of others and help ensure the survival of the Chickasaw Nation through that change” (58). Unlike schools such as Carlisle, at Bloomfield the survival of the Chickasaw Nation was a primary objective for its teachers and students. As its 1873 report describes, the school was to be “carried on in a manner that would reflect honor on the Nation, besides conferring a lasting good upon the rising generation . . . and in their belief we ask the help and support of every sober thinking mind of our country. Let us inaugurate schools that will elevate our children to an equal footing with our white brethren” (qtd. in Cobb 55). The educational situation at Bloomfield reflects the complex ways that discourses and practices of white domesticity functioned inside Indian communities. Even though these women received an education similar to that at Carlisle, the end of their education was different. Students at Bloomfield were expected to “honor the Nation” and “confer lasting good upon the rising generation.” It is important to note that these acts of the Indian woman’s resistance and negotiation did not end in the nineteenth century. Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, Native women have explicitly rejected the U.S. government’s attempt to use them as conduits to assimilation. As M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey write in “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America,” “Anywhere confrontations over Indian rights are occurring in the United States, Native Women are playing crucial roles” (330). Their

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participation in such organizations as the White Buffalo Calf Society, the Women of All Red Nations (WARN), the Inuit Women’s Society, the Sacred Shawl Society, the Northwest Indian Women’s Circle, and the Indigenous Women’s Network signal their persistent effort to ensure the survival of their Native communities. These women make their commitment to cultural continuance concrete by “preventing family violence and alcohol abuse; training midwives; improving educational systems and opportunities for education; supporting cultural preservation, especially that of tribal languages; and preventing the loss of a subsistent way of life” (Green 90). Phyllis Young, founder of WARN, explicitly defines the overarching purpose of these organizations in this way: “What we are about is drawing on our traditions, regaining our strength as women in the ways handed down to us by our grandmothers, and their grandmothers before them” (qtd. in Jaimes and Halsey 329). Thus, Estelle Reel’s attempt to break cultural ties between turn-of-the-century Indian women and their grandmothers did not work. As indicated by Young’s statement, the presence of these Native women’s organizations only begins to indicate the pervasive practice of Native women who continue the work of those like Zitkala-Ša and strive to enable their people, culture, and traditions to thrive.

Rhetorical Sovereignty/Rhetorical Education When Zitkala-Ša and other Native women like her speak out on behalf of their communities, they claim their rhetorical sovereignty—their right to articulate their ideas, beliefs, and arguments for the sake and betterment of their people. Zitkala-Ša’s particular act of rhetorical sovereignty called attention to assimilationist pedagogical practices that Carlisle was promoting, as she used her voice to reach out to her Atlantic Monthly readers and reveal to them the problematic nature of the school’s rhetorical education. Carlisle asserted that if students adopted certain behaviors and learned English, they would become self-sufficient individuals and be able to participate in white American life. Through her autobiographical essays, Zitkala-Ša challenged the key elements of Carlisle’s plan by not only revealing the horrific effects this education had on its Indian students but also arguing that just as white society had its rules for participation, so too did Indian society. Her essays detail the codes of conduct, social etiquette, and language practices that enabled access to what her readers would surely define as a civilized Indian world. But just as Zitkala-Ša’s arguments intervene in Carlisle’s particular form of rhetorical education, they also bring to the fore a number of important understandings concerning this pedagogical practice. First, Zitkala-Ša’s work emphasizes how the figure of the body “figures into” rhetorical education. Of course, rhetoricians from Cicero and John

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Bulwer to, more recently, Lindal Buchanan, Debra Hawhee, and Stephen Lucas have identified the body as a vital part of the fifth rhetorical canon in particular and rhetorical education more generally. While Cicero pointed out that delivery must be “controlled by bodily carriage, gesture, play of features, [and] changing intonation of voice” (De Oratore 291), Bulwer’s 1644 rhetorical treatise Chironomia; or, The Art of Manual Rhetoric focuses attention on gesture as a vital mode of delivery. Bulwer writes, that whereas man by a happy endowment of nature is allowed two instruments, speech and a hand, to bring his concealed thoughts unto light; the tongue, without the hand, can utter nothing but what will come forth lame and impotent, whereas the hand, without the discourse of the tongue, is of admirable and energetical efficacy, and hath achieved many notable things. (156–57)

Present-day speech communication textbooks might not focus attention on rhetorical gestures in such detail, but the question of the speaker’s body continues to endure inside discussions of rhetorical education. For instance, Lucas’s textbook Art of Public Speaking not only covers issues of volume, pitch, rate, vocal variety, pronunciation, and articulation but also advises students to “dress and groom appropriately” before giving a speech (307). Moreover, Lucas instructs students to be particularly attentive to the body and the voice while delivering a speech: “Good delivery does not call attention to itself. It conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly, interestingly, and without distracting the audience. If you want to mumble your words, shuffle your feet, gaze out the window, or talk in a monotone, you will not get your point across” (294). Lucas’s advice to his twenty-first century readers might seem like a (far) distant cousin to Carlisle’s “do’s” and “don’ts.” But even though neither Zitkala-Ša nor Carlisle focus attention on how to deliver a speech, the interchange between the two broadens and complicates concerns about the corporeality of rhetorical education. In particular, Carlisle’s assertions and Zitkala-Ša’s interventions emphasize the physical aspect of what it means to enter rhetorical space and what it means to become part of the citizen body. Zitkala-Ša’s essays highlight the physical process that Carlisle put its Indian students through before it would even begin to imagine them as a suitable part of the body politic. Having students’ hair cut and having them wear certain clothes were the first and most elementary steps toward this bodily ideal. But even when the body looked somewhat “acceptable,” Carlisle moved on to instruct students to adopt certain bodily practices—ways of walking, dining, and interacting with others. Zitkala-Ša’s work shows that the ideals that Carlisle promoted were in no way objective “goods” but

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were instead cultural understandings of what it meant to be presentable and acceptable members of the white community. Her essays call attention to how these civilizing practices reverberated inside Indian communities as they worked to erase valued and equally refined Indian practices. Thus, Zitkala-Ša’s interventions in Carlisle’s narrative reveal how the pedagogical focus on corporeality functioned as an argument about culture, about citizenship, about acceptability. Zitkala-Ša’s challenge to the corporeal aspect of Carlisle’s education extends understandings of how pedagogies concerning delivery and the body function inside rhetorical education. As Lindal Buchanan writes, discussions about delivery “traditionally suffe[r] from a number of ‘blindspots’ because [they] focu[s] on the speaker’s vocal and physical presentation of discourse, which is too narrow a framework to allow for a full exploration of delivery’s complexities for disenfranchised rhetors” (159). Zitkala-Ša’s critique exposes the many preliminary and culturally debilitating steps that Carlisle believed students had to take to even be seen as a viable part of the body politic, much less to be ready to participate in American society. Through Zitkala-Ša’s writings, it becomes clear that pedagogies for and discourses about delivery make a number of unarticulated assumptions concerning how one should look, act, walk, and talk before the rhetor can even imagine taking part in a rhetorical performance. More particularly, her essays demonstrate that the rules for entrance into the American body politic are cultural and that they ask, in this case, Indian students to make a meaningful and devastating exchange, one more complicated than simply replacing moccasins with shoes. Thus, Zitkala-Ša’s work offers a much broader conception of the complex ways in which disenfranchised students and teachers have learned, resisted, negotiated, and engaged the canon of delivery. In addition to complicating understandings of the corporeality of rhetorical education, Zitkala-Ša’s essays also accentuate the part Englishlanguage education plays in this pedagogical practice. Of course, Carlisle instructed students that the only way for them to participate in American society was to learn English, and the school imposed a strict and steadfast English-only policy to ensure that students did so. Zitkala-Ša’s essays reveal how problematic—and even dangerous—this policy could be for students both because many could not speak English and because teachers could not understand their students. More generally and strategically, though, this aspect of Carlisle’s pedagogical program functioned to break connections to the tribe and disable participation inside it. As will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, any kind of rhetorical education that aims to eradicate other languages or to impose a monolingual policy causes a deep strain on students’ cultural connections. For Indian communities in

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particular, ever since Carlisle and other schools like it invoked such a policy, these communities have felt the strain that English-only programs put on tribal life and on the ability of members to use their language as a means to identify with and communicate to one another. But, like Zitkala-Ša, these communities have found ways to resist. One of the main ways in which they have done so is by creating their own alternative and revolutionary forms of rhetorical education that work against such assimilationist policies by offering students pedagogies that position multilingualism as a vital means to participate in tribal and white worlds. Tribally controlled schools, colleges, and universities are major sites that promote and produce this kind of rhetorical education. Although these institutions educate students to act as U.S. and tribal citizens, their emphasis is consistently connected to the latter. In contrast to the off-reservation boarding schools of the nineteenth century, these schools are controlled by Native peoples, and their mission is “directly related to preparing the next generation to defend the interests of the tribe” (Huff 175). To position their students to defend such interests, these schools create culture-based curricula that blend courses in tribal law, government, history, spirituality, mythology, and science with courses in technology, English, business, and math. Tribal language plays a major part in this instruction, as many of these schools have established cultural learning centers where students and community members can take language courses and work in language labs that offer the opportunity for them to listen to and experiment with tribal languages (Simonelli). Although language learning is a central part of the work of these centers, they also serve as world-class museums and are used for college graduations, community meetings, tribal candidate forums, as well as cultural events and classes. By situating language classes and labs inside these centers, tribal schools reinforce the important part language instruction plays in tribal connection and participation, as language learning is intrinsically (and spatially) connected to other cultural and political activities vital to the continuance and maintenance of the tribal community. Like Zitkala-Ša, cultural learning centers challenge dominant practices of rhetorical education that direct how language instruction affects civic and communal participation. Instead of speaking out against such practices, as Zitkala-Ša did, these centers make clear the alternative ways rhetorical education can function. Rhetorical education can, as in the instance of Carlisle, use language instruction as a means to break cultural ties. Or a rhetorical education can, as in the case of these tribal schools and cultural learning centers, use language instruction as a way to participate in multiple communities and, most importantly, to support cultural survival. Zitkala-Ša

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anticipates this kind of resistant, multilingual pedagogical practice both by opposing Carlisle’s effort to eradicate tribal language and by making use of her own facility with the English language as a means to reach out to her readers and call for change. This attempt to speak to her white readers, though, reveals another lasting (and final) commentary on rhetorical education if we envision Zitkala-Ša’s Atlantic Monthly essays as a pedagogical moment in which she taught her readers to listen. When Zitkala-Ša claimed her rhetorical sovereignty, she used English to speak to her white audience, teaching them a new story about Indian education. This pedagogical moment was, however, marked by a severe imbalance of power between “teacher” and “student.” As Ernest Stromberg writes in “Rhetoric and American Indians,” “Indians who would speak or write on behalf of Native rights and cultures were often and still are addressing an audience that generally assumes its own superiority. It is not a situation conducive to mutual dialogue” (5). Thus, Zitkala-Ša’s claims for rhetorical sovereignty and her contest over rhetorical education were couched in a painstaking, asymmetrical, cross-cultural communicative and pedagogical endeavor that depended on her readers’ hearing what she had to say. In offering her story and in hoping her readers would learn from her words, Zitkala-Ša underscores a vital component of rhetorical education: the art of listening, which, as Krista Ratcliffe has pointed out, is consistently overlooked inside rhetoric and composition studies today (196). Zitkala-Ša’s pedagogical attempt connects to Ratcliffe’s work in that Ratcliffe argues for a kind of rhetorical listening in which participants do more than simply hear what someone has to say. As Ratcliffe asserts, and as Zitkala-Ša’s work implies, rhetorical listening is an important practice in that it asks participants to “stan[d] under” discourses rather than simply understand them by “first, acknowledging the existence of [multiple and competing] discourses; second, listening for the (un)conscious presences, absences, unknowns; and third, consciously integrating this information in our world-views and decision-making” (206). The idea of listening in this way—of working to hear multiple discourses and worldviews—is central to Zitkala-Ša’s pedagogical effort in the Atlantic Monthly and central to the project of many other Native writers and rhetors. As Malea Powell writes, a major rhetorical move for figures such as Sarah Winnemucca and Susan La Flesche Picotte was that of alliance building, a practice that relies heavily on the audience’s willingness to listen. Such a focus on rhetorical listening and alliance building stresses the idea that a rhetorical education does not have to teach students to persuade as a means to change minds. Instead, a pedagogy that focuses on rhetorical listening moves students to speak and listen in ways that value “respectful and reciprocal relationships that

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acknowledge the degree to which we need one another (have needed one another) in order to survive and flourish” (“Down” 41). Zitkala-Ša’s work inspires further thinking about how rhetorical listening could become a more vital part of rhetorical education, as she teaches her readers to listen to the presences and the absences in Carlisle’s script so that they might recognize the semblances of civilization in Carlisle’s rhetorical education.

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4

Claiming Cultural Citizenship Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and La Crónica [This] does not at all mean that our children should not be taught the language of the land that they live in, since it is the means that will enable them to communicate directly with their neighbors, and that will equip them to appreciate their rights. What we simply meant to say was that we ought not disregard the [Spanish] language, because it is the official stamp of the race and of the people. —A. V. Negra [Jovita Idar], “The Conservation of Nationalism,” 1911

I

n 1911, Jovita Idar, along with fellow teachers Marta Peña and Leonor Villegas de Magnón, contributed numerous pedagogically oriented articles to La Crónica (The Chronicle), a Spanish-language newspaper based in Laredo, Texas.1 As Idar’s excerpt above exemplifies, these three Mexican teachers used their writings in La Crónica to construct for their readers a rhetorical education that both preserved their language, culture, and tradition and prepared them to participate in their increasingly Anglicizing society in Texas.2 By creating a pedagogy with such a dual focus, these teachers did not simply replicate a rhetorical education that could be practiced inside the border of Mexico. Idar, Peña, and Villegas advanced a rhetorical education that mediated between these two competing worlds and taught readers to negotiate the conflicting definitions of their civic and cultural membership. Their pedagogical emphasis centered on valuing their readers’ Mexican cultural identity as well as attending to the realities of the often discriminatory world in Texas. But even though these teachers worked toward a similar pedagogical end, they each used their space in La Crónica in different ways. It was largely Jovita Idar who enabled La Crónica to become a diverse pedagogical space that welcomed the work of teachers like Peña and Villegas. Idar was indeed a Laredo teacher, but she was also the daughter of Nicasio 121

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Idar, the owner and publisher of La Crónica. Working under her father and with her brothers, Clemente and Eduardo, Idar took on both writing and editorial duties. As a contributor writing under the pseudonym A. V. Negra, Idar published at least two educational articles in La Crónica, “The Conservation of Nationalism” and “The Mexican Children in Texas.” In addition, Idar also republished at least one article from her own educational newspaper, El Estudiante (The Student), in her family’s press.3 Through her contributions to La Crónica, Idar argued specifically about the need for instruction in Mexican culture and the Spanish language, communal control of schools for Mexican students, and English-language instruction that built on the intellectual and cultural strengths of Mexican students. Given that she had a hand in the direction and the content of the newspaper, Idar was instrumental in making it possible for Peña and Villegas to advance their own pedagogical arguments and programs. Villegas invoked a seemingly eclectic pedagogy through her three articles, as she instructed her La Crónica readers about Mexican politics in “Mexican Evolution,” Western cultural tradition in “The Mona Lisa,” and Spanish-language preservation in “The Advancement of Mexicans in Texas.” Peña, on the other hand, took up a distinctly uniform pedagogical agenda by educating readers about Mexican civic duty in her “Sections for Mexican Children.” These differing educational contents and strategies suggest the diverse ways these three teachers called on their readers to identify with one another and with Mexico while still paying heed to the very real demands of life in Texas. In this chapter, I argue that through their differing pedagogical strategies Idar, Peña, and Villegas call for and compose a rhetorical education for cultural citizenship. As Rina Benmayor, William V. Flores, Blanca Silvestrini, and Renato Rosaldo discuss in Latino Cultural Citizenship, members of a culture construct a cultural citizenship when they join together and identify certain practices, beliefs, and understandings as central to the way they live their lives (Flores and Benmayor). Cultural citizenship centers on the right of its members to maintain their culture even when certain cultural claims run counter to the broader requirements and expectations of national citizenship. Therefore, cultural citizenship refers to the ways a community defines itself on its own terms and then positions itself within the national landscape. As Rosaldo explains, “Cultural citizenship attends not only to the dominant exclusions, but also to the subordinate aspirations for and definitions of enfranchisement” (37). Silvestrini reinforces such a definition when she describes cultural citizenship as that which creates in members a “sense of belonging to a community, a feeling of entitlement, the energy to face everyday adversities, and a rationale for resistance” (43). Thus, the construction of a cultural citizenship hinges on questions of belonging and

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resistance as well as communal and civic participation. As I will discuss throughout this chapter, I see Idar, Peña, and Villegas advancing a rhetorical education for cultural citizenship because through their pedagogies they teach their readers to claim their right to participate in communal and civic discussions, while they also debate what this participation means and how this participation should occur. Because their rhetorical education works to maintain Mexican ties while attending to the educational, cultural, and civic pressures inside the U.S. border, I also identify the rhetorical education that Idar, Peña, and Villegas invoke as bicultural. Antonia Darder defines biculturalism as a “a mechanism of survival” adopted by people of color that enables them to respond to “the dynamics of living in constant tension between conflicting cultural values and conditions of cultural subordination” (Culture 48–49). Darder extends this definition, conceiving of biculturalism as a “critical perspective [that] acknowledges openly and engages forthrightly the significance of power relations in structuring and prescribing societal definitions of truth, rules of normalcy, and notions of legitimacy which often defy and denigrate cultural existence and lived experiences of subordinate groups” (“Politics” 2). The bicultural rhetorical education that Idar, Peña, and Villegas articulate offers their readers a “mechanism of survival” that openly addresses power relations on the border. In their La Crónica articles, these teachers place Mexican culture in conversation with Anglo culture, instead of sublimating Mexican life below or replacing it with Anglo ways.4 Either explicitly or implicitly, each teacher helps her readers to resist the dominant educational agenda and claim their right to cultural citizenship. All three teachers use negotiation as the primary strategy of their educational work, as each identifies the exchanges she thinks the Mexican community should be willing to make while also setting out those parts of Mexican cultural identity they should not sacrifice. In so doing, Idar, Peña, and Villegas educate their readers toward a cultural citizenship that replicates neither Mexican nor Anglo society but instead proposes a new kind of cultural and political practice for those living on the border. When these three women compose their rhetorical education for cultural citizenship, they also disrupt the gendered role they occupied as Mexican women. The traditional role for Mexican women at this moment was to preserve and perpetuate their culture by teaching it to their nation’s children. Idar, Peña, and Villegas certainly accepted this gendered duty, but they also politicized their role when they began to consider what it meant to promote Mexican culture and language inside the Texas border. All three of these women created an aggressive pedagogical stance for themselves that enabled them to teach their La Crónica readers to claim a new kind

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of cultural and civic voice. For Idar, Peña, and Villegas, teaching became a platform for them to speak out about issues of language, culture, citizenship, and participation, and they used this platform to redefine the female teacher as someone who can and should argue for new forms of cultural identity as well as communal and civic engagement. To realize how Idar, Peña, and Villegas redefined the work of the female teacher as a means to create a rhetorical education for cultural citizenship, it is important first to understand the dominant presence and significance of the Mexican female teacher in Laredo schools at this moment. Although the sheer numbers of female teachers reveal her prevalence, the significance of her work can only be conceived by gaining a better sense of the social, political, and educational scene in which she lived and taught. This context suggests that any kind of pedagogical practice that promoted Mexican language and culture was working in direct contrast to state and national education programs. With this context in mind, the rhetorical education that Idar, Peña, and Villegas proposed through La Crónica gains importance.

The Mexican Teacher in Texas A quick skim through the pages of La Crónica reveals that it was quite normal to find a Mexican woman teaching in Laredo schools. The newspaper continually publicized local academies such as the Holding Institute, the school where Jovita Idar earned her teaching credentials. It applauded aspiring teachers like Vivia Molina and Filiberta Reyna when they traveled to San Antonio “to study for the necessary time with the objective to graduate as educators” (“Intellectual Advancement” 1). And it highlighted the fact that once such women completed their education at teaching institutes in Laredo or elsewhere in the state of Texas, they would often find positions in local schools. As one La Crónica article explains, The majority of the female teachers are Mexican women, and they have been educated in the public schools of the city and in the Normal Schools of the State; among these teachers there are a few who are already well known and beloved because of their aptitude and dedication to the arduous task of teaching, such as the intelligent Srtas. [Señoritas] Teodora Vizcazya and Clara Hall who have endured continual labor for more than ten years, and Srta. Berta Barbosa, a graduate of the Laredo Seminary, was a teacher at “Emory Queen” school in Mexico City for some time, and now she has been working with constancy and care in this county for five years. We had the opportunity to observe their work, and we permit ourselves to congratulate them with respect and love for their excellent teaching. The County has other Mexican teachers who, since they are

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fluent in English, teach their vast knowledge with exemplary self-sacrifice, and among these we want to remember Isabel Reyna, Maria Santoy, Srtas. Salinas, Treviño, Garza and many others whose names we regret not to record here. All these women will soon go to different points in the County, since their respective schools open on the 12th of the coming month as we have been informed. (“Local Notes” 1)

Such everyday references to female teachers suggest not only that great numbers of Mexican women were entering the classroom to teach but also that La Crónica writers and readers expected these women to take on this role and commended them for doing so. Extending this practice of observing the numbers of female teachers in Laredo classrooms, La Crónica frequently advertised small, private schools, or escuelitas, run by these female teachers and praised the work they did in them. For example, a 7 September 1911 article informs readers that “Senorita Profesora María Rentería will soon open a new kindergarten that was previously occupied by Profesora Margarita L. Gomez” (“New Kindergarten” 1). La Crónica highlights another Laredo teacher, María Jesús de León, director of La Luz school, writing that her work with “elementary and accelerated classes” will surely bring about “the practical, moral, and intellectual progress of its students” (“La Luz” 1). A 9 July 1910 article entitled “A Beautiful School Party” makes a similar assessment of the female teacher’s work, as it describes for readers the successful examinations and congratulatory celebration at the “Private school of elementary instruction at the ranch of San Pedro, Zapata County, Texas”—a school under the direction of “the wise and praiseworthy Profesora Hortensia Peña Barrera” (3). These sentiments indicate that the Mexican female teacher was an accepted figure in her Laredo community and that her work, while celebrated, did not seem to make any serious political, social, or pedagogical interventions. This general acceptance and expectation of the Mexican female teacher in Laredo schools makes sense, given the fact that only a few miles south of the Texas border, thousands of Mexican women had recently transformed their traditional role as mothers and moved from the home to the classroom as teachers. Throughout Mexican history, women had always been expected to teach their children about Mexican culture while they raised them in their homes. As mothers, they were seen as purveyors of Mexican custom and tradition, and although this role was held in high esteem, it was inscribed as largely apolitical. Carmen Ramos defines the role of the middle- to upper-class Mexican mother in this way: Submission, self-denial and disinterest in the world of politics and social concerns are preached and insisted upon for the bourgeois woman. . . .

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[Her] home is understood to be a special, untouchable environment, reserved only for family life, free from tensions and totally free from the social world. Beyond the home, outside of it and disconnected from it, is the sphere of public life, the world of business and big decisions, the man’s world. (qtd. in Lomas xxxiv)

Traditionally, Mexican mothers controlled the home and took care of their children, and as a consequence, their duties were considered to be largely “disconnected” from public concerns. As Jocelyn Olcott writes, Mexican femininity and motherhood were synonymous with the ideal of abnegación—the understanding that women should be guided by “selflessness, martyrdom, self-sacrifice, an erasure of the self and negation of one’s outward existence” (16). But as much as this gendered role and ideology remained intact through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, changes in Mexico’s sociopolitical scene from 1880 to 1910 greatly affected women’s position and enabled them to transport their educational duties from the space of the home to the space of the school. This period, named the porfiriato after the Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, called upon women to benefit “from the new system of ‘order and progress,’” and apparently a great number of them took advantage of this opportunity (Pablos 75).5 As Julia Tuñón Pablos writes in Women in Mexico, while women from “the popular classes increasingly took jobs in the factories (textile and tobacco, mainly), middle-class women showed more and more interest in education.” These middle-class women, many of whom would soon travel to cities like Laredo, were educated in institutions such as the Escuela Normal para Señoritas (Women’s Normal School) and the Escuela Nacional Secundaria para Niñas (National Secondary School for Girls) and were trained to extend their traditional, familial duties to teach other people’s children their country’s culture and traditions (Pablos 75). The number of these female teachers quickly grew, as women soon occupied more than two-thirds of the primary-school teaching positions in Mexico. These women were encouraged to take such positions not only because this profession was categorized as “women’s work” but also because the schools could pay them less than men, about “two pesos a day, a sum that barely supported one person.” Much as they were in Laredo, Mexican teachers were applauded throughout the country because through their “self-sacrificing devotion to their young students [they] were conforming to the role that had always been expected of women in Mexican society” (Macías 10). Given the dominance of Mexican female teachers in Mexican schools, it makes sense that women living in Laredo—a city just inside the Texas border—would also enter the classroom to teach and, possibly, continue to

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carry out their gendered role of perpetuating Mexican cultural values. But as these teachers made their way into Laredo classrooms, they encountered a much different educational situation than the one they faced in Mexico. First, these teachers needed to consider the general and pervasive prejudice that Mexican people in Texas lived with on a day-to-day basis. Second, they had to address the specific kinds of educational discrimination that required Mexican students to reject their cultural identification to Mexico and adopt those skills and practices that would make them into American citizens—citizens with limited power and opportunity, of course. Only after confronting these two important aspects of Texas culture could Mexican teachers like Idar, Peña, and Villegas compose their pedagogical projects.

Mexicans in Texas Idar, Peña, and Villegas wrote and taught during a period of great political, economic, and social change. The onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and the years of economic hardship and political upheaval preceding it caused thousands of Mexicans to emigrate to Texas.6 The Laredo Weekly Times records the increasing emigration from Mexico to the United States and to Laredo in particular, writing that “from July 1, 1907 to the close of the fiscal year [that] ended June 30, 1909, 25,000 Mexicans, principally laborers, entered the United States, of which number 18,000 passed through the port of Laredo” (“Immigrants” 2).7 For primarily economic reasons, Anglo citizens of Laredo welcomed this new faction of immigrants to the city. In the years following the Civil War, Laredo had become a commercial center. Its two major railroads, the Texas-Mexican and the International & Great Northern, as well as the city’s agricultural and industrial growth, made it a place where Anglo entrepreneurs saw in Mexican immigrants a valuable resource. J. W. Favella boasts of the city’s burgeoning success in his locally published souvenir album entitled Laredo, “The Gateway to Mexico” (1917): “The building of the railroads into this city, giving it communication with the outside world, was the inception of the regeneration of the place and caused the awakening of the lethargic town and the development of the latest resources of the surrounding country” (16). Favella continues to celebrate Laredo, writing that in addition to an abundance of natural gas, a street railway, electric lighting, water systems, and the availability of four railway lines that “radiate from the city,” Laredo also lays claim to “an inexhaustible supply of labor attainable at an extremely low cost” (28). This “inexhaustible supply of labor” was the Mexican population both living in and immigrating to the city. The Laredo Weekly Times describes Mexican workers in this way:

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No other class of people can survive the long hot summers, or compete with [the Mexicans] when the actual cost of living remains as high as at present. . . . [T]heir wants are few, their living expenses low, and during the cotton picking season entire families can earn enough to add to the common fund to guard against the every emergency during the idle seasons. (“Immigrants ” 2)

As this article indicates, the Anglo position toward Mexicans was primarily concerned with their labor. For the majority of the Anglo community, Mexican people were simply workers who had the potential to contribute to the agricultural and industrial situation in Laredo. Although the Laredo Weekly Times might have captured Anglo attitudes toward Mexicans at this moment, it is not accurate to say that all Mexican people who came to Texas were laborers. As Louis Mendoza makes clear, Mexican people entering the United States during this period by no means consisted of “an homogenous class of people who necessarily share[d] a common identity, ideology, degree of education or vision of the future” (108). Alongside the numbers of laborers who emigrated from Mexico to places like Laredo were activists, educators, and writers seeking political refuge and safety. In fact, Laredo was a major hub for activists and revolutionaries who used Spanish-language newspapers to disseminate political ideals. Leonor Villegas de Magnón is one such example. Villegas spent her life crossing and recrossing the border, but after becoming involved in the Mexican Revolution in support of leader Francisco Madero, she remained in Laredo both to teach in local schools and to write for politically active newspapers such as La Crónica, El Progreso, and El Radical (Lomas xxiii). Thus, the Laredo Weekly Times dismissed the arrival of activists, educators, and writers like Villegas when it concentrated on Mexican immigrants as laborers (xiii). In addition, this focus on Mexican laborers immigrating to Laredo also ignored those who had been residing in Texas long before 1910. As a result of the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the annexation of Texas to the United States in 1848, the border “literally migrated” over the people living in the region, and the Mexican citizens residing in the new state of Texas soon found themselves systematically disenfranchised from the communities they once controlled (Zavella 77). Due to various discriminatory practices, many Mexicans lost their government positions, were relegated to low-skilled jobs, and received meager pay for their work. David Montejano’s examination in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 also reveals that Mexican landholders were forced to give up a good deal of land due to “taxes, mortgage debts, legal battles, the effects of the erratic cattle and sheep market, outright coercion and fraud, as well as the cash offer

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of land speculators” (113). The 10 April 1910 issue of La Crónica summarizes this drastic reduction of Mexican-owned lands, reporting that “The Mexicans have sold the great share of their landholdings and some work as day laborers on what once belonged to them. How sad this truth!” (qtd. in Montejano 113). In the face of these diminishing economic and political opportunities, a number of Mexican families did manage to sustain middle- to upper-class status.8 For instance, Nicasio Idar not only owned and operated La Crónica but also held positions as assistant city marshall and justice of the peace in Laredo. Even though a few families, such as the Idars, may have narrowly escaped complete social, economic, and political devastation, Mexicans from all classes and backgrounds felt the effects of the virulent discriminatory discourses circulating in the United States concerning “the Mexican.” American literature, both popular and academic, defined Mexicans as unskilled workers and then continued from this definition to make judgments about their intelligence, culture, and work ethic. As Gilbert Gonzalez writes, Anglo writers composed a narrative about Mexican people that followed this kind of storyline: “Over the centuries, Mexico formed a cultural and biological hybrid, a cross between Indian and European that exemplified the worst of both worlds” (“‘Mexican Problem’” 201). William Lighton reinforced this dominant perception of Mexicans in his 1899 Atlantic Monthly essay “The Greaser.” Lighton begins by inscribing the socially and intellectually barbaric Greaser as one who “will not in any wise sincerely adopt and conform to the new order of things, called civilization; he can do nothing save to withdraw himself, there to ponder his impending doom.” The Greaser, Lighton continues, is irrevocably lazy and shiftless: he is the “ideal [sheeptender]. There is a strong temperamental affinity between the dullness of the sheep and the indolence of the man” (754). And the Greaser is naturally inferior to the Anglo: “he is the basest of cowards . . . . When the white nudges with his elbow and demands that the Greaser give more room, the poor little chap has not the ‘nerve’ to jostle him again” (755). O. Henry’s 1912 poem “Tomales” reinstantiates Lighton’s description, depicting the Mexican as lazy, worthless, and unkempt. This is the Mexican .................... Why has he left his land Land of the lazy man, Land of the bull fight, fleas and revolution.

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Finally, Samuel Bryan’s 1912 essay “Mexican Immigrants in the United States” concurs with both Lighton’s and O. Henry’s judgments as he assesses Mexican immigrants and their impact on the workforce: “[Their] low standards of living and of morals, their illiteracy, their utter lack of political interest, the retarding effects of their employment upon the wage scale of the more progressive races, and finally their tendency to colonize in urban centers, with evil results, combine to stamp them as a rather undesirable class of residents” (730). Such assertions concerning Mexican lifestyle and work ethic created a base from which Anglo communities could solidify a societal structure that continually subordinated members of the Mexican population. It should come as no surprise to find that this discriminatory discourse that allowed for job-related bias and loss of Mexican land extended to the classroom. Across the state of Texas and the city of Laredo in particular, Mexicans teachers and students faced prejudicial educational practices that in no way catered to their cultural survival or allowed for full-fledged civic participation inside the United States.9

Mexican Education in Texas As part of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States agreed to grant full citizenship to all Mexicans living in what is now California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. Although this promise of citizenship guaranteed educational rights to Mexican people living in the new territory of the American Southwest, the United States in general and Texas more particularly did not abide by the tenets of this treaty. In the sixty years between the treaty and the onset of the Mexican Revolution, Texas state officials completely neglected Mexican students and failed to provide them with the facilities and materials necessary to meet their needs. As George Sánchez points out, “before 1910, almost no one seemed aware that there were far-reaching issues and problems [for Mexicans]. Virtually no thought was given to the educational, health, economic, and political rehabilitation of the Hispanos” (121). One can understand how the Mexican community could be ignored during this period. In addition to pervasive prejudicial attitudes toward Mexicans, Texas school officials had a full-scale educational crisis on their hands. After the Civil War, Texas politicians dedicated much of their time and energy to debates over the role and function of state schools, taking up such issues as revenue and taxation, local or state control of schools, formation of districts, school supervision, teacher education, and school law (Eby 193–95). Although such concerns were indeed a priority in state

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discussions, Texas’s fiscal situation thwarted these efforts at every turn and aggravated the already weak educational system. Frederick Eby records such dire straits in his 1925 text The Development of Education in Texas, noting that in the 1870s and 1880s “the scholastic population of Texas was increasing far more rapidly than the income for the support of the schools. In consequence, the people could only expect the school system to grow steadily poorer each year, unless some new means of increasing the revenues could be devised” (205). Due to these economic circumstances, Texas schools were not well positioned to accommodate either Anglo or Mexican students as the twentieth century made its turn. Theodore Harris’s speech at the 1907 Conference for Education in Texas elucidates this crisis situation: Texas today is doing only one-fourth of her duty in educating her children. She ranks thirty-sixth in point of illiteracy of native white men; she accords to her children the most miserly limit of school age in all the United States; she ranks thirty-eighth in the average number of days of school taught per year; she ranks thirty-eighth in the amount expended per pupil. (23–24)10

Given the widespread problems in Texas’s educational system, it comes as no surprise that there was little concern for Mexican students and their educational futures. To compound matters even further, due to the various discriminatory practices that barred Mexicans from local and state government positions, there were few, if any, Mexican school officials who could help to solve these problems and argue for their community’s educational concerns (Cockcroft 21). This atmosphere of disregard would not last long, however. In the years immediately preceding and during the Mexican Revolution, when thousands of Mexican people entered the state, Texas educators had to pay much closer attention to Mexican students and the kind of education they needed. From 1900 to 1910, the population of foreign-born Mexicans in Texas grew from 70,981 to 124,238 (Bureau of Extension 8). Such explosive growth in the immigrant Mexican population forced Texas educators to respond to this previously ignored student population, and one of the primary responses was segregation. In terms of Texas law, the state could only enforce the segregation of black and white (Anglo) students, and since Mexicans were either categorized as white (if they were born in Texas) or foreign-born white, segregation was not legally possible under the guise of racial difference. However, as Arnoldo De León clarifies in “Blowout 1910 Style,” Anglo citizens and school officials did find ways to segregate Mexican students from their Anglo counterparts:

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On such pretexts that separation was the better policy for the non-English speaking, that children were ill-clad, that “greasers” were unclean and immoral, that proximity might lead to interracial contact, that Mexicanos were not white but Aztec or Negro descended, the separate policy developed a pattern congruent with the ways whites felt about Mexicanos at the time. (124)

To enact such a separation policy without actually creating a new state law, Texas school officials built schools in Mexican barrios and Anglo neighborhoods and mandated that each contingent attend the school in that group’s respective geographic location.11 This kind of “residential segregation” forced Mexican students to attend the underfunded and ill-equipped schools in their neighborhoods, while most of citizens’ tax money, which included Mexican taxpayers’ contributions, went to Anglo schools, teachers, and equipment (Gonzalez, Chicano Education 21). As another form of discrimination, Texas public schools also developed pedagogical practices that functioned to make Mexican students more “useful” to the Anglo community. While Anglo students received both practical and academic training, the dominant educational program for Mexican students was primarily manual and domestic, preparing them for vocations that would preserve the dominant social order (García, Desert Immigrants 112). For example, the superintendent of the El Paso School District, F. M. Martin, argued in 1908 that since Mexican students often left school between the fourth and sixth grades to enter the workforce and aid their families’ income, schools should concentrate on “the practical side of education.” Martin went on to argue that “the supervisor of manual training be instructed to devise proper means by which to direct the activities and latent energies of the Mexican children into channels which will lead them . . . to be more useful, and incidentally to become happier in the exercise of these God given faculties” (qtd. in García, Desert Immigrants 112). The Women’s Civic Improvement League of El Paso made a similar assessment of Mexican education. This group believed Mexican girls should receive a specific kind of domestic education since, the league’s members assumed, these girls would later perform such services for the Anglo community. The league therefore supported an education for Mexican girls consisting of housekeeping, cooking, and sewing, so they would be properly trained to serve their future Anglo employers (113). In addition to segregating Mexican students, providing them with dilapidated educational facilities, and offering them only manual and domestic education, Anglo educational officials also expected Mexican students to assimilate into American culture and, in turn, reject the Spanish language

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and their Mexican cultural traditions. These ideas about assimilation were gaining ground not just in Texas but across the country as concern for a homogenous American identity became a national priority. Calls for a uniform American society were, in large part, a response to the 18.2 million people who immigrated to the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Mexico between 1890 and 1920 (Archdeacon 113). This influx of immigrants to the United States prompted heated discussions about how the newcomers’ character traits, languages, and belief systems compared to the characteristics of the “old” stock of immigrants. Ultimately, as this representative article from an 1891 issue of the Nation reveals, the supposed differences between the new and the old immigrant sounded an alarm that a seemingly unified and uniform American culture was now at risk: The most serious aspect of the immigration statistics is the evidence that the tide of German, Scandinavian, English, Scotch, Dutch, and Swiss arrivals has been checked. These nationalities have always furnished the most desirable additions which have been made from alien soils to our population. Their representatives are frugal, industrious, of good average intelligence, and the great majority of them come to this country to make homes for themselves and become citizens. . . . It would be a sad change for the American people if there were to be a steady decline in the number of recruits to our citizenship from these countries, and a steady gain from the countries which showed an increase last year, but it would be at present premature to fear such results. (“Quality” 108)

Although this writer advises readers not to fear the current situation, many political and social leaders fastidiously composed a variety of solutions to the “immigration problem” that were grounded in nostalgic (mis)remembrances of the nation’s fictional good old days. The most popular solution to this “immigration problem” was Americanization. The Americanization movement, which was backed and promoted by the federal government, began in the first decade of the twentieth century, gained even more attention at the onset of World War I in 1914, and then fell out of favor in the 1920s.12 This nationwide movement attempted to make real the metaphor of America as a “melting pot” and worked to assimilate immigrants into American society by educating them to adopt those values, practices, and languages deemed uniquely American.13 Even though a number of movement leaders, such as Nathan Peyser, made the claim that Americanizers should not “adopt the attitude that to become an American the immigrant must cast off everything,” many who were involved in the movement did believe that American values were simply superior and that

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immigrants should be willing to make this exchange (217). For example, in his 1923 text Essentials of Americanization, sociologist Emory Bogardus spells out the definition for the term Americanization: “In the case of the foreign born, Americanization means giving up one set of well-known and, in part, precious loyalties for another set of loyalties, more or less new and unknown. To renounce one group of loyalties for another group involves a deep-seated and delicate readjustment of mental and social attitudes” (16). This process of readjusting attitudes was advanced by a number of civic and social institutions. During the decade of the movement’s height, settlement houses, adult education courses, government agencies, and local societies all took up the work of Americanization. The most important of these institutions, however, was the public school. As Lewis Rockow writes in his 1917 Education article, the public school is “the pillar of our democracy”; it is the site at which “the process of Americanization is kept at white heat” (176). Because the school was seen as the primary institution responsible for Americanization, the Anglo female teacher, who had already taken her place at the head of the classroom, was seen as the one to keep the fires burning.

Americanization and the Female Teacher Anglo-American women certainly took on a number of important leadership roles inside Americanization programs, especially those that targeted immigrant women. In 1916, Helen Varick Boswell, chairwoman of education in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, asserted: It is the privilege and it is the duty of club women to give their time, their powers of instruction and their enthusiasm to the work of getting our language and understanding of the principles of our common life into the hearts and minds of the foreign-born women. Once [you] start these foreign women in the paths of learning and your task is not difficult; they believe in you, and after a little while will break away from their hidebound traditions and will become plastic for your moulding. (208)

Sounding much like Indian educator Estelle Reel, Boswell argues that the immigrant woman must be a focus because “the mother, far from being an aid in Americanizing her family, becomes a reactionary force. Sadly or obstinately as it may be, she combats every bit of Americanism” (205).14 At the same time that women such as Boswell called on club women to “mold” the minds of immigrant mothers, female teachers were simultaneously expected to Americanize these mothers’ children in the school. John McClymer articulates this point in “Gender and the ‘American Way of Life,’” writing “women had long since dominated the ranks of grammar school

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teachers, and it was from their ranks that the large majority of Americanization teachers would come” (6). Similarly, Frank Van Nuys explains that there was indeed a “feminization of Americanization” as many school leaders and officials “held an expectation that any upstanding, patriotic woman could teach a citizenship class” (134). Thus, as the primary figure in the Americanization movement, the female teacher was to compose an education steeped in distinctly Anglo-American ideals. Her job was to instruct her immigrant students to discard their cultural claims and, in exchange, learn civic duty and responsibility, adopt American values and beliefs, and speak the English language. Emma Miller Bolenius was one female teacher whose work in the textbook industry provides insight to the specific kind of Americanizing language pedagogy that she and her female colleagues were to carry out. In the opening pages of her 1921 Advanced Lessons in Everyday English, Bolenius presents the following pledge to students, prompting them to make this pledge to both the United States and the English language: “We pledge allegiance to the flag and to the language for which it stands—the English language, which we pledge ourselves to speak and to write correctly, a little better each day” (xviii). Bolenius reiterates this statement pages later, writing that the “ability to speak well and to read intelligently will help to make you into good Americans” (1). Although this language pledge and pedagogy might make immigrants into what many believed a “good” American to be, it certainly did not mean that the goal of such Americanizing tactics was to educate immigrants to become equal and participatory citizens. Instead, the work of the female teacher and the emphasis of Americanization were to create a homogenous and uniform society in which immigrant groups would simply blend in, abide by the status quo, and find their place in the social order.

Americanization of Mexican Students in Texas Proponents of Americanization believed that through an education like Bolenius advocated most immigrants could be Americanized in the public school system. They did, however, see a particular problem when it came to Americanizing Mexicans. Bogardus articulates this problem in detail: [Mexicans represent] in general a low, economic, social, and political level, [and] have been brought into our country in large numbers to meet unskilled labor needs in the Southwestern states, such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. One large group of Mexicans is transient; another is settling permanently in the United States. No large scale movement is on foot to help either group to understand us or to adopt our higher mode of living. The Mexican immigrants are relatively an uneducated class who are not learning to love our country. On occa-

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sion they even become suspicious of our ways and motives. Because of the proximity of their homeland and of the delicate international relations between Mexico and the United States, the scope of a sympathetic Americanization vision includes the Mexican immigrant. (29–30)

To Bogardus and many other Americanizers, it was difficult to make Mexicans into Americans not only because they were deemed apolitical and apathetic but also because they were seen as resistant to American ways of life. Roy Dickerson extends this point in his 1919 Pedagogical Seminary article, “Some Suggestive Problems in the Americanization of Mexicans.” Here, Dickerson reports that Mexicans have come to this country “speaking their own language, retaining their own customs, reading their own papers and to all extents and purposes maintaining their national life even in the midst of American forces and influences” (291). The project of the Americanization effort for the Mexican population in particular, then, was to counter the work of such outside cultural forces by using the public school and the female teacher to instruct Mexican students to become Americans. The ideals and practices of the Americanization movement were not difficult for the state of Texas to adopt. Even though the state continued to segregate Mexican students and provide them with manual and domestic education, it did make a concerted effort to Americanize Mexican students. One of the most vital parts of the Americanization process was, of course, requiring Mexican students to speak English instead of Spanish, and Texas was ahead of the game in this respect: the state had one of the earliest and most stringent laws against the use of Spanish. As early as 1841 the Texas legislature mandated that it was illegal to print laws in Spanish, and in 1858 state officials extended the dominance of the English language by making it the official language of the public schools (Cockroft 163). These English-only laws were welcomed by most Anglo school officials. In 1906, one El Paso superintendent commented, “Teachers who teach children of foreign parentage should not convey instructions in any other than English language. . . . This is law and logic” (qtd. in Garcia, Desert Immigrants 119). Teacher Clyde Walton Hill corroborated this statement when he wrote in the Texas School Journal that the student should strive to be an “efficient user of the English language” because this language is the “sole instrument for reaching and influencing his fellowmen about him” (9).15 The enforcement of English was not the only form of Americanization in Texas schools, as the entire practice of education was seen as a way to Americanize students and to build in them an allegiance to both Texas and the United States. In his 1901 speech to the State Teacher’s Association, University of Texas president William Prather extended this call to his audience:

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Teach the children of Texas from the primary grades in your public schools to your University, to honor and love the flag of their State, because it represents the government which has given them education as an inheritance. . . . [T]o our public schools we must largely look in the future for that stalwart and vitalizing American sentiment which shall not only withstand, but shall quickly transform and assimilate the uninstructed foreign population now flocking to our shores. . . . [I]t is pre-eminently the business of State schools to guard with jealous care the ideals that gave her birth, and by which her sovereign power is regulated and perpetuated. (6)

To follow Prather’s call and “transform and assimilate” Mexican students, Texas teachers were expected to offer a course of study that enforced American patriotism and civic pride.16 Educator E. G. Littlejohn discusses such a pedagogical plan in his 1906 essay “The Scope and Method of Texas History”—an essay that actually argues against the normative teaching of history. Here, Littlejohn makes the point that teachers teach history “to give the child such knowledge as shall tend to make him a good citizen . . . to develop the patriotic emotions and train the civic virtues.” But this patriotic instruction, argues Littlejohn, asks students not only to love their country but “to [hate] or at least not love the country of other people” (13). “Here in Texas,” he continues, “what is it but the hatred of Mexico, her laws, her customs, and her people that our children have been fed upon since the fateful day of San Jacinto” (14). Littlejohn’s assessment shows that the process of Americanization could be used to compel Mexican students, in particular, not only to adopt American ideals, practices, and customs but also to reject and even “hate” the ideals, practices, and customs of their own native country. Thus, through educational practices that centered on segregation, domestic and manual education, and Americanization, Texas schools and their teachers offered Mexican students a specific kind of rhetorical education. By segregating Mexican students from Anglo students and giving them the most deplorable of educational services, the Texas school system advanced the idea that Mexican students did not deserve to interact with their Anglo counterparts or be part of an adequate learning environment. By offering Mexican students only domestic and manual skills, Texas school officials and teachers implied that Mexican students did not need to learn how to participate in Texas civic life and mandated instead that these students learn only how to serve the Anglo community. Finally, by enforcing a pedagogical project rooted in Americanization, these school officials and teachers refused Mexican students any connection to Mexico. Students were taught that they

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should “pledge allegiance” to the United States and find their “rightful” place in the nation’s cultural, economic, and civic structure.

Teaching in Laredo, Contributing to La Crónica Given this educational context, it becomes clear that the role of the Mexican woman shifted inside the Texas border. If this woman decided to become a teacher in a city such as Laredo, she confronted a dominant educational system that promoted the Anglo female teacher as the Americanizing force whose work was to convert Mexican students into American citizens. If the Mexican was to teach at all, she was expected to become American herself and invert her traditional role: she was to teach American customs and culture, and she was to refuse her students any kind of Mexican cultural instruction and stamp out all traces of the Spanish language. According to La Crónica, many Mexican teachers resisted such Americanizing mandates and used their position to promote cultural survival. As just one example, in the article that praises Vivia Molina and Filiberta Reyna for traveling to San Antonio to earn their teaching credentials, the paper goes on to make this claim about these teachers and their work: With true pleasure la crónica delivers this kind of information, because it is always a sincere and great satisfaction for us to recognize the advancement of our Mexican female youth; with them we will have consideration, respect, prosperity, and influence, here on the Texas border, the only spot where there are vast plains left in Texas that in another time belonged to our ancestors. (“Intellectual Advancement” 1)

It is clear that La Crónica interpreted the Mexican woman’s choice to become a teacher as an opportunity to define herself as a positive cultural influence during a time of political, educational, and economic disenfranchisement. As the pages of La Crónica record, many of these Mexican women took this opportunity and extended their influence not only by becoming teachers but also by running the escuelitas that the press often advertised. María Jesús de León’s private academy, La Luz, was just one of many sites of cultural resistance in the Laredo community. Because these schools did not fall under the auspices of the public school system, Mexican teachers like Jesús de León could educate their students without the prejudice and discrimination perpetuated in state-run institutions. In his text “Let All of Them Take Heed,” Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. cites three main purposes for these private schools: “(a) to maintain a Mexican spirit by imparting Mexican ideas and ideals, (b) to uphold these ideals by imparting knowledge of Mexican national traditions and history, and (c) to arouse racial pride in the youth” (10). Thus, when the Mexican woman chose to open such a school or even

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to teach in one, she was often electing to take on a new and different kind of cultural task. Through her work in the escuelita, her traditional role became a political stance, and her cultural teachings became a form of resistance to dominant educational discourses that focused on Americanization. The Mexican female teacher in the classroom was not alone in her resistance to the discriminatory work of the Texas public school system. In addition to promoting and congratulating the work of these female teachers in their private schools, La Crónica also acted in concert with them to fight dominant educational practices on a different scale. As José Limón writes in “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911,” when the Idar family began their press in 1910, they immediately initiated a “campaign of journalistic resistance” that pinpointed education as a significant part of the discriminatory practices aimed at Mexicans living in Texas (86). The Idars carried out this campaign, using two major strategies to counter the prejudice found in Texas schools.17 First, the Idars positioned the press as a political agent by creating a space for its contributors to articulate educational arguments concerning problems with Texas schools. For instance, La Crónica writers consistently called on Texas school officials to live up to the educational promises of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which were to secure for people of Mexican descent born in the United States the right to education without discrimination. La Crónica writers also extended this argument by demanding the same basic and nonprejudicial educational opportunities for all Mexican people, regardless of when they arrived on Texas soil. Clemente Idar illustrates the newspaper’s position in terms of the treaty and its educational promise to all the Mexican people of Texas: A complete clarification of the facts will prove on the one hand that we, the Mexicans born in this country, even though we have American citizenship, do not fully enjoy the privileges and guarantees that the Federal Constitution offers. On the other hand, it will prove that those individuals who are fully Mexican have also been denied privileges and prerogatives that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between Mexico and the U.S. mutually conceded. This results in the fact that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans are in the same situation. . . . We simply reclaim a right. Japanese, Irish, Scottish, English, Italians and other races that immigrate to this country in such a great number do not meet with any obstacles to attend public schools in any state of the American Republic. Why do the Mexican and the Mexican-American meet with these problems? . . . Did they [American educators] already forget the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo? (“Both” 1)

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La Crónica of Laredo, Texas, April 1914. Newspaper Collection (di-03307), The Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

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One of La Crónica’s most basic roles, then, was to fight for an education without “obstacles” for Mexican people born in the United States as well as those who had emigrated from Mexico because both groups were in “the same situation.” The “obstacles” La Crónica writers protested were, of course, the segregation of Mexican students, the poor conditions of the schools, the discriminatory treatment Mexican students received, and the Americanizing educational tactics that taught students to relinquish ties to Mexico. To protest such practices, the newspaper frequently displayed letters written by frustrated parents complaining of teachers who have “little interest in [their] students” (R. Cantú 1) and prominently outlined the paper’s position concerning school segregation. Clemente Idar again offers this statement that reflects La Crónica’s educational stance: we energetically protest all types of separation in the sacred temples of knowledge, since when we are separated we learn to reciprocally despise each other; united, we would deeply know the soul and the heart of our two neighboring races, and in not many years we would strengthen our friendly and commercial relations by the strongest, most solid and most sincere bonds. (“Exclusion” 1)

As Idar expresses, the writers of La Crónica used two major claims to ground their challenges to segregation. First, they believed that by integrating Anglo and Mexican students, a less hostile relationship between the communities could develop and, as a consequence, a less prejudicial attitude toward Mexicans could emerge. Second, they asserted that nonsegregated schools could enable Mexican students to learn and understand Anglo practices and the English language. While La Crónica contributors articulated these arguments, they also made it clear that they did not advocate an integrated education that continued to situate Mexican students in the lower echelons of society. In “The New American School,” for instance, one La Crónica writer “acclaims” a teacher named Professor Reynolds, who “opened a new institution for instruction in the salon of the Social Club of Laredo, where he will teach all the topics regarding elementary and higher American education.” The writer of this article praises Reynolds not because he will teach Mexican students “American” ways but because he “will prepare Mexican children with instruction in English so they can compete with the American children in the fields of work and intelligence” (2). As the writings of Idar, Peña, and Villegas will show, the kind of education Reynolds offered his students was of great value to the Mexican people of Laredo because it enabled students to communicate and compete with the Anglo community in Texas.

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The Mexican community did not place all of its educational hope in the desegregation of public schools, however. As one La Crónica writer explains, the newspaper’s “objective and point of reference in its work” was “the instruction, the liberty, and the dignification of the Mexican race wherever this may be” (“La Crónica’s Second Year” 6). Thus, the second major educational function of the press was to provide an alternative pedagogical space where contributors could offer readers an education they either could not find or could not afford, for even though the private schools such as La Luz seemed to offer Mexican students a culturally rich education, these schools did charge their students for enrollment. Given the economic difficulties many Mexicans faced during this period, La Crónica contributors constructed the newspaper as an alternative, and less expensive, site for education. The article “To Instruct Is an Unavoidable Obligation” clarifies the role of the newspaper in its readers’ lives: It is then an obligation of everyone, in particular of the Mexicans of Texas, to instruct themselves, since it is not possible for them to get good and cheap books because here in Texas the books in Spanish are scarce and excessively expensive. Mexicans of Texas must at least subscribe to newspapers that, besides carrying practical instruction to the home, lack all fanaticism and all that is retrogressive. The newspapers show the road to progress, promoting a dignified enterprise that tends to honor and elevate people to the heights where the men of other races are found so that the Mexican people will be worthy of equal consideration and respect. (2)

As this passage indicates, La Crónica is defined as a new kind of “school” that would lead its readers down the “road of progress.” With the newspaper positioned in this way, it would only make sense that the contributors to the publication saw themselves as more than writers. These contributors were also teachers who envisioned their readers as students they could “elevate” to a place where they are “worthy of equal consideration and respect.” The teacher-student relationship that La Crónica advanced and the educational environment that it cultivated elucidates the publication’s focus on education as a communal effort, one in which the educated, upper-class members of the community (such as La Crónica contributors) were responsible for teaching their less-educated, working-class counterparts. It is important to note here that although the teacher-contributors to La Crónica may have positioned themselves above those who were not yet “worthy” of “consideration and respect,” this educated contingent did not align their message with prejudicial sentiments found in publications like Lighton’s “The Greaser.” Instead, La Crónica’s educational work can be read as a reaction to such attacks. Through a number of articles, the newspaper refused

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the stereotype of Mexican ignorance and incivility by arguing that the social, economic, and educational situation many Mexicans faced trapped them in a working-class status and disabled them from achieving the cultural and intellectual heights they were otherwise capable of attaining. “To Instruct Is an Unavoidable Obligation” makes this argument by pointing out that the uneducated Mexican “is offered a job in only the things that are hard and rough, but those who know how to write, although they may not know how to do it well, obtain positions such as foremen, butlers, etc. and the most educated ones obtain positions as bookkeepers, or clerks, or they run businesses by their own account.” The writer continues: “Are these ones better than the others? No. The intelligence is the same in general; but education has made some more useful than others” (2). This writer makes it clear that Mexican laborers are not innately inferior or less cultured; they simply lack the opportunities and the education to succeed. The work of the newspaper, then, was one of communal responsibility and advancement. Similar to the maxim embraced by black club women in the late nineteenth century, “Lift as We Climb,” the Mexican writers of La Crónica frequently deployed the motto “Por La Raza, Para La Raza” (By the Race, For the Race) to reinforce the newspaper’s mission of uplift supported only by those within the Mexican community.18 Articles in La Crónica such as “The Mexicans in Texas” called readers to work toward this kind of communal reliance, claiming that “the duty of all Mexicans in this country is to raise themselves up.” If readers are not able to “rise by [their] own efforts, then [they] should contribute to the lifting up of [their] brothers of the race, who, once raised, will perhaps give [those below] a generous hand and elevate [them]” (2). Idar, Peña, and Villegas were three contributors who engaged in the work of “raising up” the readers of La Crónica by joining in the press’s educational effort. These teachers invigorated the major pedagogical arguments and practices found in the newspaper by specifically addressing issues of language acquisition, civic duty and engagement, Mexican and Anglo cultural literacies, and assimilationist educational practices. By making these contributions to the press, they also spoke from and with the collective of female teachers who politicized their gendered role as a means to refuse the pedagogical program of Americanization.

Rhetorical Education for Cultural Citizenship When Idar, Peña, and Villegas published their educational articles in La Crónica, they aligned themselves with the contingent of Mexican female teachers who rejected Americanization practices while also resisting the role of the “American” teacher. But as editors and contributors to the press,

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these three women moved from the classroom to the newspaper page and leveraged their ethos as teachers to articulate important pedagogical arguments and practices concerning how Mexican people should learn to participate in their civic and cultural community. Their contributions to La Crónica are significant in that their words offer a glimpse into the pedagogical discussions and classroom practices that many Mexican teachers may have been advancing during this time. Moreover, their words signal how these three teachers and others like them attempted to redefine their particular form of “women’s work” as distinctly political and subversive by challenging the prejudicial and assimilationist educational initiatives of the Texas public school. Idar, Peña, and Villegas made their particular challenges to the dominant educational program by arguing for and offering a rhetorical education that reinforced their readers’ culture and language and that taught them how to participate in their Laredo community without surrendering their Mexican identity. Although these women were in many ways carrying out their traditional role of perpetuating Mexican language and culture, they were in no way simply importing a Mexican education into a Laredo, Texas, context. Instead, their contributions to La Crónica are marked by a nuanced negotiation in which these women considered how their readers could retain and reshape their connections to Mexico while also contributing to (and changing) their cultural and civic situation inside the United States. The educational articles that Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed reframe the terms of civic and communal engagement and call into question the skills, languages, and practices necessary for participation. As these three teachers educated their readers toward a kind of participation not offered in Texas public schools, they composed a rhetorical education for cultural citizenship.

Learning Cervantes, Juárez, and Ingles Jovita Idar, writing under the pseudonym A. V. Negra, focuses her arguments directly on Mexican educational opportunities in Texas and asserts the exact kinds of negotiations she believes the Mexican community should make. The rhetorical education that Idar advocates in “The Mexican Children in Texas” and “The Conservation of Nationalism” reflects a complex understanding of the connections between language, culture, and power as she constructs a pragmatic plan for the education of Mexican students that relies heavily on their community. In “The Mexican Children in Texas,” Idar sets out her educational agenda by first lamenting the language education that a number of Mexican teachers had decided to promote: “With deep grief, we have seen Mexican teachers teach English to the children of our

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race, without taking into account at all the mother tongue, that everyday is forgotten, and that everyday is suffering corruptions and changes that actually hurts the ear of any Mexican however eloquent he may be in the language of Cervantes” (1). Here, Idar identifies the direct link between language learning and Mexican identity and rejects any kind of educational program that promotes English adoption at the expense of the Spanish language. By disregarding the “mother tongue,” Idar reports, teachers are Americanizing their students and disconnecting them from those in their community who value and use “the language of Cervantes.” Her solution to this problem, however, is not simply to suggest that teachers should discontinue English instruction. Idar makes sure to point out that she does believe students should learn English, but they should learn it for a specific purpose. Idar, speaking for La Crónica and writing in the first-person plural pronoun we, clarifies the newspaper’s position in this way: [W]e do not at all mean that our children should not be taught the language of the land that they live in, since it is the means that will enable them to communicate directly with their neighbors, and that will equip them to appreciate their rights. What we simply meant to say was that we ought not disregard the [Spanish] language, because it is the official stamp of the race and of the people. (“Conservation” 1)

Much like the writer of “The New American School” who praises the English teaching of Professor Reynolds, Idar takes this opportunity to argue that English should have a role in Mexican students’ curriculum: it should be taught for use value. She goes on to explain that “it is a good thing that they are taught [English]; just as arithmetic and grammar are useful to them, it is useful to teach English to those that live among those who speak English” (1). Throughout this article, Idar links language instruction to issues of civic engagement, prefiguring, in many ways, twenty-first-century arguments for bicultural education. By arguing that Mexican students should learn English for specific civic purposes, Idar anticipates Donaldo Macedo’s claim that “it is through the full appropriation of the standard English language that linguistic minority students find themselves linguistically empowered to engage in various sectors of the wider society” (272). Like Macedo, Idar calls for English instruction so that Mexican students will be able “to communicate with their neighbors” and “to appreciate their rights.” This kind of appreciation, Idar assesses, allows Mexican students to empower the communities in which they live by being able to enter into state and national conversations. In these articles, Idar calls for a rhetorical education that

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negotiates Mexican and Anglo worlds and carves out the role English instruction should play in Mexican students’ education and, later, their civic participation. Idar continues this negotiation when she turns her attention to the subjects Mexican students learn in school. In “The Conservation of Nationalism,” she implicitly confronts educational imperatives of Americanization by pointing out that the subjects students learn are inextricably connected to the worldview they adopt and the cultural identity they subscribe to. Immediately after she argues that students should learn English for its use value and learn Spanish because “it is the official stamp” of the Mexican people, she makes this insightful point: We are all shaped by our atmosphere: we love the things that we have seen in our infancy and we believe in what was infused into our spirit since the first years of our lives. Therefore, if in the American schools that our children attend they are taught the biography of Washington and not that of Hidalgo and if instead of the glories of Juárez they are taught the glories of Lincoln, no matter how noble and just these glories are, the Mexican child will never know the glories of his country, he will not love it, and will look with indifference at his father’s countrymen. (“Conservation” 1)

In this passage, Idar extends her previous argument concerning Spanishlanguage instruction by explaining that just as the language students use links them to a particular culture and tradition, so too does the subject matter students learn in school. In deploying this argument, Idar clarifies the point that Rosaura Sánchez makes in “Mapping the Spanish Language.” Sánchez writes that “culture is a construct, a discursive construction of the history, social practices, traditions, and identity of a collectivity” (82). In agreement with Sánchez, Idar understands the instability of culture as she points out the ways cultural identity and cultural interests can change as a result of education. Idar’s objective is to open up the possibilities for Mexican people in Texas by revealing the power of education—power that Mexican people can claim and use as a force for cultural and communal cohesion; for just as education can make students “look with indifference” at their history and culture, it can also connect them to their heritage and their community. Idar prompts her readers to understand that even though her formulation of rhetorical education asks Mexican students to learn English as a means to appreciate their rights, it also requires that they continue to speak the language of Cervantes and learn the glories of Juárez so they might build a new kind of cultural citizenship on Texas soil. For Idar, the Spanish language and

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Mexican culture must play a major role in Mexican students’ education as they learn to become participants in their Mexican and American world. Idar uses the latter half of her article “The Mexican Children in Texas” to map out exactly how such an education could be implemented: Since our [Mexican] government is not able to send able professors who, being paid by the government, would instruct its expatriated children and since in the American schools not even Mexican teachers (with many honorable exceptions) want to teach the national language to our children, we have to take on the duty that we, the parents of the Mexican children in Texas, must unite to pay for the expenses that a school requires. In almost every town in the Southern part of Texas and even on the border there are enough Mexicans to afford the expenses that such a school would require, and the only thing lacking is for us to unite in all these different places and to understand the enormous significance of the business that we are dealing with. (1)

Here, Idar reasserts La Crónica’s promise of community uplift by asking Mexican people across Texas to enact their cultural citizenship and unite as a community to challenge assimilationist educational practices. She points out to her readers that their duties as cultural citizens must include raising the money needed not only to build private schools but also to hire the “young, virile teachers, full of energy, and of profound knowledge, and with little concern about money [who] come out of the Normal Schools of Monterrey, Saltillo, and many other places” (1). Even though escuelitas like La Luz and teachers from Mexican normal schools are an expense, Idar argues, if members of the community join together, their collective contributions could have a significant effect on cultural and educational opportunities for Mexican students living on the border. In making this point, Idar extends her educational ideal concerning the subjects students learn and the language they speak by placing precedence on the teachers and administrators of the schools Mexican students attend. Idar’s emphasis reflects an awareness of the need for school officials to understand, in Darder’s words, “the daily lived experiences of the group and the historicity of social forces that work to shape and shift how its members interact in the world” (“Creating” 344). Schools for Mexican students controlled by Mexican communities and staffed by Mexican teachers, argues Idar, enable Mexican people to shape in powerful ways the education their children receive and the national and cultural citizens they become. Idar ultimately uses her two articles, “The Mexican Children in Texas” and “The Conservation of Nationalism,” to argue that members of the Mexican community in Laredo can retain their cultural ties by funding

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those private schools that teach students the language of Cervantes and the glories of Juárez. When Idar reprints Sra. O. P. Reid’s “How the Mexican Children Learn English” from her bilingual newspaper El Estudiante in La Crónica, she extends her ideas on how Mexican students might learn English as a means to “appreciate their rights” and “communicate directly with their neighbors.” As La Crónica reports, Idar’s El Estudiante was “a bilingual weekly magazine . . . dedicated exclusively to school interests and issues” (“El Estudiante” 1).19 The sheer existence of this publication signals Idar’s dedicated investment in educational issues on the border and, most interestingly, her attempt to initiate a cross-cultural pedagogical conversation between both English- and Spanish-speaking writers and readers. By publishing this article in her newspaper and then by reprinting it in La Crónica, Idar shows her support for English-language instruction deployed not by a member of her Mexican community but by an Anglo teacher working in Laredo’s public schools. La Crónica introduces this article, its teacher, and her pedagogy with the comment, “We publish the following essay, originally published in EL ESTUDIANTE, and written by one of the American teachers who has always shown interest in the advancement of Mexican children [because] we believe it will be interesting for our readers and the parents of the families whose children attend the public schools of the city” (Reid 4). By reprinting “How the Mexican Children Learn English,” Idar offers her La Crónica readers the words and teaching of Sra. O. P. Reid. Reid’s excerpt describes a pedagogy that not only combines the uses of both English and Spanish languages but also honors and respects Mexican students. Reid writes: I teach 85 Mexican children using the Libro Primario. In my class, we translate every word in all the lessons. We read these lessons as if they were in Spanish. The students go to the blackboard, I read the lesson in Spanish, and without letting them look in their books, I require them to write the lesson in English. . . . All of the Mexican children receive this preparation, beginning in the first year of teaching and until the second grade, so that when they reach third grade they can already work in English with little or no help from the teacher. (4)

Although a lesson such as this is not steeped in the Spanish language or Mexican culture, Reid’s entry in El Estudiante reveals an Anglo public schoolteacher who knows Spanish well enough to speak it to her students—a quality absent in many Anglo teachers during that period. As Colmen Stein Jr. explains, and as Americanization programs prescribed, most Anglo educators of Mexican students concentrated their attention on “acculturation measures,” which mainly included “Anglicizing the [student’s] first or last

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name, forbidding the speaking of Spanish on the school grounds, and [using] a curriculum that put Mexico and [Mexicans] in a bad light” (191). Almost more important than her language instruction is Reid’s appreciation for and her investment in her students’ educational success. Reid’s final message in this excerpt celebrates the intellectual abilities of her students and implicitly rejects the prevailing stereotypes that depicted Mexicans as unintelligent and shiftless: To teach Mexican children numbers is a delight for the teacher. They learn effortlessly, so much so that it seems their ability is hereditary. During the last Teacher’s Conference, in one of my reports I said that I had passed 32 children who understood the Libro Primario in English and Spanish and who knew four fundamental Arithmetic rules as well as the multiplication tables. (4)

Reid’s positive depiction of her Mexican students here rejects the stereotype of these children as low achievers and proves that Mexican educational advancement is possible. In so doing, Reid makes the implicit argument that these students can and should be seen as valuable civic and communal participants. When Idar highlights Reid’s work in this way, she draws attention to a vital aspect of rhetorical education: the act of believing and explicitly stating that students have the ability to be intelligent and capable contributors to the community. Through republishing Reid’s contribution to El Estudiante, Idar offers an example of language instruction that neither denigrates nor Americanizes Mexican students. Reid’s pedagogical practices support the strengths of Mexican students and their language. Such practices resonate with bell hooks’s concerns for Standardized English instruction, in which she argues that it “is not the English language that hurts me, but it’s what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines” (168). To Idar, a vital part of rhetorical education for cultural citizenship should include English instruction. But like hooks, Idar believes it is the instruction that accompanies English—what teachers do with the language—that must be a central concern. Given what she argues for in “The Mexican Children in Texas” and “The Conservation of Nationalism,” Idar would reject English instruction that functions to cordon off cultural connections to Mexico. As Idar implicitly suggests in her reprinting of Reid’s pedagogy and as she explicitly states in her own article, English instruction must be deployed in a bilingual context and in a spirit in which the teacher believes that her students could mobilize this language as a means to create lines of communication with their English-speaking neighbors and to act as leaders inside their cultural community.

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A Mexican Civics Lesson Marta Peña’s contributions to La Crónica enter into similar conversations as Idar’s but invoke a different educational purpose and argument. 20 Instead of speaking to her readers about the form and function of education in Laredo, Peña uses the newspaper as an alternative site for instruction. Writing under the column heading “Sections for Mexican Children,” Peña gives her young La Crónica readers educational opportunities outside the classroom by instructing them through at least seven essays entitled “Ideas on Civic Instruction.” These sections, many of which appeared on the first page of the newspaper, were “written especially for La Crónica” and had two major pedagogical purposes: to educate young readers about Mexican civic life and citizenship and to inspire them to lead and advance their cultural community in Texas. Most explicitly, Peña’s essays connect readers to Mexico by teaching Mexican civic duty. She explains the purpose of her educational articles to her readers in the first installment of “Ideas on Civic Instruction”: “It is to you, studious Mexican children, my little compatriots, that I dedicate a series of informal lectures on civic instruction and constitutional rights that you will be able to understand. I beg you to pay close attention because these subjects will be of the utmost importance to you” (sec. 1, 1). By teaching her readers about “the political and administrative organization of the Republic, officially named the United States of Mexico, formed by 27 Federal Entities, a Federal district and three Political Territories,” Peña offers her readers a textbook example of civic education. She uses each of her entries to explain to her readers the work of the Mexican government and the rights and duties of a Mexican citizen. When Peña establishes this educational agenda, she connects readers to a Mexican civic identity and therefore counterbalances any kind of “melting pot” pedagogy that aimed to cut all ties to non-American nationalities and ways of life.21 Given the specificity and practicality of the information Peña provides her readers, it may seem as if she offers readers a civic education they can only take advantage of inside the borders of Mexico. However, in the first installment of “Ideas on Civic Instruction,” Peña constructs a way for her readers to understand how their claims to Mexican citizenship can transcend the Rio Grande by teaching (or reminding) them that the family is the first and foremost form of Mexican government. Peña writes: The family is the first society formed by father, mother, children and other members related to them, but all live in the same house. The government of the family is exercised by the parents. They are the ones that legislate by their own rules in order to obtain a good way of life to provide their

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children with food, clothing, education, and in general all the minuscule cares necessary to provide them with the development of culture and progress. The parents equally execute their rules or they make them be followed. . . . [They] also correct infractions, punishing adequately those who do not follow the rules. First, the parents make rules in their families, and they establish the Legislative branch in the home. Second, by making sure their rules are followed and that they are in effect, they are establishing the Executive branch. Third, by punishing infractions, they establish the Judicial branch. (sec. 1, 1)

By defining the family as the first society, the first government, and the first institution to which her readers must pledge their loyalty, Peña constructs a way for them to envision the workings of the Mexican government inside the Texas border. It is through their families that readers may realize and exercise their Mexican citizenship. In this instance, Peña moves away from what one might see as a customary lesson in civic education and urges her readers to understand that the family is the primary political and cultural force—a force that can reconfigure Mexican civic traditions in Texas. Peña’s stress on the work that the family must do shifts the power differential from Anglo to Mexican communities and reinforces the long-held belief in the importance of the Mexican family as the “most fundamental institution” and “the most resistant barrier to American assimilation” (García, “Chicana” 322). This particular lesson reduces the impact of the Americanization process occurring in Texas public schools by emphasizing the important role of the family and, even more particularly, the role of the mother. As guardian of the home and the family, the mother must provide her children with “all the minuscule cares” for the “development of culture and progress.” Through this lecture, then, Peña teaches her readers how they might reconceive their citizenship—their cultural citizenship—in Texas. As Richard Flores notes, a critical aspect of cultural citizenship occurs when members of the group “experience a sense of unity and cohesion that leads to a renewed sense of identity” (144). Peña offers her readers this sense of unity and cohesion by instructing them to recognize the family as a key site through which they can reshape their civic and cultural connections to Mexico. Lectures on the Mexican constitution, citizens’ rights, general laws, elections, and taxes make up the majority of Peña’s contributions to La Crónica. Peppered throughout these basic lessons on citizenship, however, are short discourses on the importance of education, the pride Peña has in her readers, and the civic and communal role she expects them to play. These three aspects of her pedagogical program fall more directly under the heading of

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rhetorical education. Although, of course, the objectives of rhetorical and civic education do overlap, as both discuss the role and duty of the citizen, the differences between them can be discerned by understanding that civic education often centers on learning and understanding the rules of citizenship and the workings of the government, while rhetorical education prepares (or fails to prepare) the student to participate in and contribute to this civic structure. The rhetorical education for cultural citizenship that Peña advocates positions her readers to embrace ideas of civic agency by first underscoring the role education should play in their lives. She articulates the significance of her readers’ education in the second installment of her “Ideas on Civic Instruction”: Be constant and self-sacrificing in your studies, my dear children: do not go astray; continue to nourish your mind with knowledge; always be observant in life; pay attention to your elders and to the never-ending pursuit of Science. Love your teachers as if they were your second parents; take advantage of great books for they are the immortal legacies of wise men, philosophers, and writers; focus your attention and enthusiasm on school for it is the alma mater of Progress, the inextinguishable temple of light that squanders away darkness, ignorance, and evil. (sec. 2, 2)

Although one goal of Peña’s educational essays may be to counter assimilationist tactics in Texas schools, this pedagogical moment makes it clear that she does not at all discount formal education. Instead, Peña strongly advises her readers to take full advantage of every educational opportunity and to see intellectual study as a form of nourishment—nourishment that will sustain and strengthen her readers as they take up the cultural role she sets out for them. Peña inspires her readers to see the education that both she and the school provide them as a necessary step toward participation and leadership, and she communicates this important message to her readers in her inaugural lesson: “Dear Children: You are the future of our country, the citizens of tomorrow; a beautiful promise that, through instruction, will be crystallized forever” (“Ideas” sec. 1, 1). When Peña makes this causal connection between education and leadership, she creates a stance against negative Mexican stereotypes similar to Sra. Reid’s. Just as Reid questioned claims of low intelligence by accentuating the academic achievements of her students, Peña challenges negative depictions of the Mexican as lazy or politically disinterested by confidently calling her readers to become intellectual leaders and integral contributors to Mexican cultural survival. Peña continues to articulate these hopes for her readers in her fourth installment:

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I wish, dear children, that a sense for civic duty will become an innate part of you when you become of legal age because it is through this innateness that your sense of patriotism and love for republican-democratic institutions and for liberty will become stronger! Community involvement is a precious virtue, since, in addition to giving you a sense of complete knowledge of your rights, it stands for dignity, wholeness, and well-deserved patriotic fervor. (“Ideas” sec. 4, 1)

Here, Peña inspires her readers to take up leadership positions in their community, but her goal for this leadership is not simply for them to maintain the status quo. Instead, she calls her readers to act as agents and move their community forward. “Forward,” she writes. “Always move forward! Always Advance!” (“Ideas” sec. 2, 2). By encouraging her readers to realize their own agency, Peña introduces them to a key component of cultural citizenship. As William Flores and Rina Benmayor explain, “Agency is critical to the concept of cultural citizenship: it reflects the active role of Latinos and other groups in claiming their rights” (“Constructing” 13). It is when members of a cultural community act as agents and claim their rights or defend their beliefs that they realize the ways cultural citizenship allows for “the potential of opposition, of restructuring and reordering society” (15). The rhetorical education for cultural citizenship that Peña advances in “Ideas on Civic Education” prompts her readers to understand themselves as social agents who can and should claim their cultural citizenship and reorder society.

Cultural Education of the Fronterizos In her three articles “The Mexican Evolution,” “The Mona Lisa,” and “The Advancement of Mexicans in Texas,” Leonor Villegas de Magnón joins Idar and Peña as she too wrestles with the kind of education their Laredo community should embrace and promote. With authority, Villegas speaks to her readers about cultural literacy and language use, and if these readers did not recognize this well-known Laredo activist already, La Crónica made certain they would attend to and respect her words. The press introduces Villegas and her work to its readers in this way: The columns of our newspaper are adorned with articles written by the distinguished and reputable woman from Laredo whose name [Villegas] serves as an epigraph to these lines. I hope that other women of our cultured Laredo will come to know her ideas and imitate this honorable woman. This is why we offer to her the humble columns of this newspaper. (“Sra. Leonor Villegas” 1)

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Although such an introduction may seem to depict the perfect picture of Mexican womanhood, Villegas’s readers would soon realize that the woman they were to emulate was quite different from her demure and politically disinterested stereotype. Outside the pages of La Crónica, Villegas was known as an activist in the Mexican Revolution and a nurse who, with Jovita Idar, started the Mexican White Cross (Lomas xxiv). In addition to these accomplishments, Villegas was also formally educated as a teacher. She attended the Ursuline Convent in San Antonio from 1882 to 1885, transferred to Austin’s Academy of the Holy Cross in 1889, and earned her education degree at Mount St. Ursula’s in New York in 1895, graduating with honors (Lomas xxi). In Laredo, Villegas opened one of the first bilingual kindergartens in the city, and as a teacher there, she made no distinction between her educational and political agendas. She writes in her autobiography, The Rebel, that she opened her school in a “hall that her brother had used during the political campaigns,” and once school began, her “young pupils soon became involved in the Revolution” when she transformed her classroom into a hospital for wounded soldiers (95). Given Villegas’s history, it would not take long for La Crónica readers to learn that this activist, nurse, and teacher would continue to bring politics into the classroom, albeit the classroom on the newspaper page, when she praised the revolutionary Mexican leader Francisco Madero in her article “Mexican Evolution.” Villegas’s readers would not have been encountering a new line of conversation when they read about Madero in La Crónica. The newspaper closely followed the war that was literally being waged mere miles from the Laredo town center. Villegas moves past the basic war report, however, when she takes up her role as teacher and instructs her readers as to how they might “read” this political figure. She writes, “We have to recognize in [Madero] an elevated understanding, a sincere enthusiasm, and an unselfish intellect. He tries to convince through reason and arguments, in this way placing the Mexican people at the same level as other civilized nations.” Villegas goes on to interpret Madero for her readers: Madero treats us as rational beings, as it is required by a civilized nation, since the idea of honor and patriotism inspired by the machete and the gun will only cause treacherous vengeances and horrible murders, but the idea of loyalty and respect to the government inspired by reason and guided by our conscience will make us fulfill our obligations as good citizens since the ideas must be powerfully decided by reason. (“Mexican Evolution” 1)

In both of these instances, Villegas commends Madero not just because he has an “elevated understanding” and “a sincere enthusiasm” but because he

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Leonor Villegas de Magnón (left) and friend (Aracelito García) with White Cross flag, 1914. Webb County Heritage Foundation, Laredo, Texas.

places Mexico and its people on a par with other “civilized” nations. Such a move teaches her readers to recognize yet another resource that would enable them to combat the growing conception of the “Mexican problem” that was emerging and reemerging in the American consciousness through essays such as “The Greaser” and poems like “Tomales.” By praising the way Madero “treats [Mexican people] as rational beings, as it is required by a civilized nation,” Villegas educates her readers about a political figure who will help them counteract the prejudices they face on a national and international scale.

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Villegas seemingly shifts educational gears when she publishes her article “The Mona Lisa” and turns her readers’ attention to Western art and culture. In this particular article, Villegas teaches her readers about the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci by first informing them that “this piece of art is an oil painting of ‘La Madonna Lisa,’ wife of a merchant from Florence. The artist Leonardo da Vinci, well known and of vast reputation, completed this artwork in four years.” She then explains to her readers why this painting is so widely acclaimed and compelling, noting that the popularity of the piece is due to “La Madonna Lisa’s mysterious smile [that] has captivated the world”—a smile “so maddening and irresistible, that no one, man or woman, who has seen the painting even one time, is able to forget her” (3). Villegas’s pedagogical practice here seems to signal her desire for readers to obtain a legitimate kind of cultural literacy that would legitimize their Laredo community in terms of Anglo-centered priorities.22 Villegas’s project becomes much more complicated when “Mona Lisa” is read alongside “Mexican Evolution,” however. By contributing both of these articles, Villegas deploys a bicultural pedagogy that disrupts the acculturation process happening in Texas public schools, a process that always worked from an “either/or” educational and cultural agenda and ultimately required students to choose Anglo-American ways of life. Villegas’s bicultural pedagogy differs from such a practice because she negotiates a “both/ and” practice that enables her readers to learn about Madero and the Mona Lisa without the discrimination they would encounter in public school. By teaching readers about both of these cultural figures, Villegas opens up a space for readers to see that a pedagogical project does not always require a choice between cultural literacies, but that such a project can expand ideas about what members of a cultural community need to know. Villegas places Madero and the Mona Lisa in conversation and implicitly argues that her readers’ cultural heritage is just as important as the cultural capital that knowledge about the Mona Lisa confers. In essence, Villegas teaches her readers that they and their culture belong, which, as Flores and Benmayor point out, is a defining element of cultural citizenship. These scholars argue that cultural citizenship “refers to the right to be different . . . with respect to the norms of the dominant national community, without compromising one’s right to belong” (“Constructing” 11). Villegas educates her readers to this right when she expands the realm of their cultural literacy and situates both Madero and the Mona Lisa as integral parts of their education. Although Villegas negotiates a cultural literacy that brings cultures together in “Mexican Evolution” and “The Mona Lisa,” she draws a linguistic boundary line between Anglo and Mexican worlds in “The Advancement of Mexicans in Texas.” In this article, she refuses any kind of linguistic fusion

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and advises readers against contaminating the Spanish language with English. Villegas begins her argument by calling readers’ attention to a “certain condition that currently exists in Texas,” which, she laments, is the mixing of the Spanish language with English words. She writes, “Frequently we hear conversations that begin in Spanish and are carried out in English and then finished in Spanish.” She defines this linguistic practice as a “horrible potpourri . . . that seems to be a chronic illness of the ‘fronterizos’” (4). When Villegas argues against the formulation of a Spanish-English dialect, she refuses what Anzaldúa would call a “border tongue,” a language that La Crónica readers might “connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves—a language with terms that are neither español ni ingles, but both . . . a forked tongue, a variation of two languages” (77). Through her refusal, Villegas discounts any notion of a border tongue and advances the kind of argument that Anzaldúa targets when she writes, “Deslenguadas. Somos los del español deficiente. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mestizaje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguistically somos huérfanos—we speak a foreign tongue” (80).23 From Anzaldúa’s perspective, it would seem that Villegas fails to recognize the revolutionary possibilities inherent in a border tongue and, therefore, condones a discursive oppression and “tradition of silence” (81) aimed at those who speak “with tongues of fire.” Even though Villegas seems to enforce this “tradition of silence,” her words illustrate the importance of the Spanish language for Mexican people at the turn of the twentieth century. To Villegas, language is linked crucially to identity. When English is infused into Spanish, she sees it not only as a degradation of the language but also as a degradation of the Mexican people living on the border. She makes this point when she poses the question, “Is it that our own language is not beautiful enough to hold a satisfactory conversation?” She then censures her readers: “With what pride we commit these errors, as if it makes us more valuable!” Here, especially, Villegas asks her readers to understand the ways that Mexican people devalue themselves and their language when they use English instead of their “mother tongue.” It is both the value of and the link between language and community that she is trying to preserve in this article. She poignantly highlights her concerns when she defines her readers’ language as a vital source of cultural belonging and, of course, cultural citizenship: “We must avoid this abuse of the language that predominates now. . . . The voice of the people is the infallible authority that should be heard to make itself clear and distinct” (“Advancement” 4).

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Although Villegas’s message concerning the “clear and distinct” use of the Spanish language may run contrary to twenty-first-century arguments for linguistic diversity, her work reveals, in Jaime Mejía’s words, a “certain stage in the development of how educational and cultural concerns of Mexicans in Texas were being dealt with by Mexican elites” (email interview, 3 Nov. 2002). Her three articles illustrate what was at stake for the Mexican people of Texas in the early twentieth century. Villegas makes it clear that even though she sees it as useful for her La Crónica readers to expand their cultural literacy and gain other forms of cultural knowledge, she does not want their linguistic tradition to alter. The rhetorical education she offers specifically addresses what it means for those in her community to participate as cultural citizens, and her pedagogy holds fast to the idea that Spanish is the key to cultural survival. Villegas will not negotiate language: for her, it is a primary way for Mexican people to continue as a collective community in Texas. As she explains, it is “the voice of the people”—the vehicle through which her community members can identify with one another. Almost one-hundred years later, Villegas’s work offers insight both to the connections Mexican people have made between language and identity and to their attempts to negotiate only those cultural elements they were willing to change.24

Claiming Cultural Citizenship as Woman’s Work The pedagogical arguments that Idar, Peña, and Villegas invoked throughout the pages of La Crónica created a rhetorical education for cultural citizenship, one that prepared their readers to participate in and to change both their Mexican cultural and their Texas civic communities. When these teachers defined successful pedagogical programs, reformulated civic duties, and asserted their cultural knowledge and language, they taught their readers to envision themselves as active agents who should resist assimilation by thinking of their language and culture as key elements in their Mexican cultural survival. As these teachers composed their pedagogical arguments, however, they also rewrote their own gendered role. Women’s Work on the Border Idar, Peña, and Villegas believed their readers could and should become leaders in their community and enact change in their world. As they articulated this argument concerning their readers, their words also offer insight to how these women claimed a new space for themselves as Mexican female teachers. Indeed, these three women each took up their traditional role by choosing to teach the next generation about Mexican culture. But because they were living and teaching inside the Texas border, they encountered a political and pedagogical situation that prompted them to revolutionize

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this role by creating arguments that resisted the Anglo world that was methodically attempting to eliminate their language and culture. Idar, Peña, and Villegas refused the idea that they should become “Americanizers” who would ask students to pledge allegiance to both the American flag and the English language. As they made this refusal, these teachers also recognized they could not simply perpetuate Mexican traditions or enforce American ones, so they remade their traditional role into one that was both political and complex, and they spoke from this new position to articulate bicultural arguments about community survival. Through their words in La Crónica, Idar, Peña, and Villegas reconfigured the role of the Mexican female teacher into a cultural and civic leader who had both the right and the ethos to speak out on behalf of her Mexican community in Texas. As we consider how Idar, Peña, and Villegas recomposed their roles, it is important to remember that these three women were probably not alone in their struggle. We gain insight on the work of the teachers in this chapter because of the records available to us. Two years of La Crónica, 1910 and 1911, and one issue from 1914 are all that remain of this newspaper, and there seems to be little other evidence of teaching practices or pedagogical arguments that these or any other teachers may have made during this time. Therefore, we can see that Idar, Peña, and Villegas have left an invaluable record through their contributions to La Crónica, but we cannot and should not assume they were the only teachers who took up this pedagogical endeavor. Since the press already engaged in debates over educational discrimination and published the writings of Idar, Peña, and Villegas, it would most likely only mention, advertise, or highlight those female teachers whose work was consistent with a specific pedagogical and political agenda. Given this assumption, teachers mentioned in La Crónica such as Hortensia Peña Barrera, María Rentería, Margarita L. Gomez, María Jesús de León, Teodora Vizcazya, Berta Barbosa, Isabel Reyna, Maria Santoy, Vivia Molina, and Filiberta Reyna were most likely articulating pedagogical arguments and practices similar to those of the three teachers in this chapter. Although, as Idar’s contributions make clear, not every Mexican teacher teaching in Laredo was offering an education that La Crónica would support, it seems safe to assume that there was a critical mass of politicized Mexican female teachers working in Laredo during this time. When Idar, Peña, and Villegas as well as the other teachers of their day spoke out for themselves and their community, they stood in the face of an entrenched history that has defined the Mexican woman as submissive, passive, and politically inactive.25 As Norma Cantú writes, Mexican women living in the United States, many of whom would later call themselves Chicanas, have consistently been deemed “followers, not leaders or thinkers”; they

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are rarely seen as “positive forces—leaders, workers—for change” (8–9).26 Although the mainstream historical record and public memory have not remembered the Mexican woman or the Chicana in this way, Idar, Peña, and Villegas join the many women who have attempted to revise such debilitating definitions by taking on leadership roles inside their communities. In From out of the Shadows, Vicki Ruiz makes this point clear when she writes that “as farm hands, cannery workers, miners’ wives, mutualista members, club women, civil rights advocates, and politicians, Mexican women have taken direct action for themselves and others” (73).27 This history of Idar, Peña, and Villegas as radical and resistant teachers bolsters and resonates with the revolutionary work of these other women to create a specific kind of exigency for further study. Just as Idar, Peña, and Villegas were not alone in their work in the city of Laredo, they were also, most likely, not alone in their journalistic endeavors. It is important to note that La Crónica was not the only Spanish-language newspaper functioning at this period. In their bibliographic study of the Mexican American press, Herminio Rios and Guadelupe Castillo found there were more than 372 Mexican American newspapers published in the U.S. Southwest before 1940 (Cortés 248).28 Such numbers suggest that other contributors to presses like La Crónica might have also used their publications as alternative sites of education. Thus, if scholars of rhetoric and composition continue to excavate and translate such work, we might discover that Idar, Peña, and Villegas are not anomalous or special examples of female teachers during this time. Instead, we might find that these three politicized teachers are part of a long and deep tradition of Mexican women (and men) educating and arguing for cultural citizenship. This potentially large group of female teachers working not only in the classroom but also through other Spanish-language newspapers would ultimately and importantly trouble the mainstream public memory of Mexican involvement in education. As Guadalupe San Miguel Jr. records, there is an enduring “myth of Mexican indifference toward public education,” a myth that promotes the idea that “Mexican Americans have not really cared for education or else they have failed to appreciate its importance and benefit to their community in particular and to the society at large” (xvi). The “women’s work” of Idar, Peña, Villegas, and possibly many other Mexican female teachers during this period, challenge such a myth and call into question any perception of a historical Mexican “indifference” to education. To ensure that this myth does not continue in rhetoric and composition especially, scholars and teachers in the field should listen carefully to the arguments of Idar, Peña, and Villegas and continue to investigate how

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others like them might have waged similar educational battles concerning Americanization, rhetorical education, and cultural citizenship.

Claiming Cultural Citizenship Each of the teachers in this chapter created pedagogical arguments that sought to intervene in dominant educational practice by offering readers a rhetorical education that invigorated rather than diminished their potential for participation. More specifically, the pedagogical practices Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed interrogated basic questions about the language skills and civic knowledge their readers needed to engage their world. And all three teachers worked from these interrogations with the aim to activate their readers’ civic potential by positioning them as necessary leaders who could direct and safeguard their cultural community. As their work makes such interventions, it also reveals a number of assumptions, complexities, and possibilities inherent in the pedagogical endeavor of rhetorical education. First, the teachings of Idar, Peña, and Villegas underscore the idea that a Burkean form of identification lies at the heart of every iteration of rhetorical education. As Kenneth Burke writes in A Rhetoric of Motives, “A is not identical with his colleague B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. . . . In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself” (20–21). Traditional rhetorical pedagogies often instruct the student to identify with both the audience and a specific civic identity by deploying a national language and common knowledge. For instance, the writer of Rhetorica ad Herennium instructed in the first century b.c.e. that taste was a major feature of an orator’s style because taste “makes each and every topic seem to be expressed with purity and perspicuity” (252). To achieve effective compositions, the writer continues, the speaker should identify with his audience’s Roman tastes, especially their linguistic preferences, by creating speeches that use “correct Latinity and Clarity” (252). Almost eighteen hundred years later, George Campbell continued to argue that a correct style should adhere to a kind of “correct Latinity.” Campbell specifically stated that rhetors should prefer a style predicated on “national use,” arguing that all provincial idioms must “vail to the [national] English idiom, and scruple not to acknowledge its superiority over their own” (266). And finally, as twenty-first-century scholars such as A. Suresh Canagarajah, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Paul Matsuda, and John Trimbur have asserted, writing and rhetorical instruction in the U.S. university has consistently defined the use of and instruction in English as a sign of national allegiance. Horner and Trimbur specifically argue

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that from its onset, the composition course has imposed a “unidirectional monolingual language policy” that maintains English as the only relevant language in the curriculum and that in turn implicitly identifies Americans as English-speakers only (607). Not surprisingly, this “unidirectional monolingual language policy” has particular implications for the student’s civic identity. In Horner’s words, students are taught to “compos[e] in and only in an English that has a fixed standard . . . [and] are told they must learn to produce [English] to participate fully in the civic life of the nation (as full citizens)” (570). Just as rhetors have been taught to identify themselves with their audience and the nation through a specific kind of language use, they have also learned that the deployment of cultural or civic knowledge enables them to identify with and persuade their audiences. Aristotle, of course, argued that the art of rhetoric is not based on capital T truth but is instead founded on ideas of relative “truths”; rhetors therefore use persuasive strategies such as the enthymeme by building logical arguments from the cultural and civic knowledge the audience already has. In the twentieth century, Patricia Bizzell makes a similar argument for cultural and civic knowledge as a key component in students’ rhetorical training, arguing that such knowledge “is crucial not only to persuading an academic audience to take one’s arguments more seriously, but also to finding common ground on which to base action for the common good in broader public discourse” (45). The pedagogical practices of Idar, Peña, and Villegas complicate these centuries-old discussions concerning instruction in national language use and civic and cultural knowledge by drawing attention to the choices this instruction often asks students to make. These teachers opposed dominant forms of rhetorical education that required students to learn a language and culture that only identified them with a U.S. citizenship. To contest this dominant pedagogy, Idar, Peña, and Villegas asked their Mexican community to renegotiate the terms of their identifications and create a new kind of citizenship for themselves, one that refused to ask them either to reject their claims to Mexican culture or disavow their U.S. citizenship. These women, then, created a rhetorical education centered on ideas of biculturalism, which as Victor Villanueva reminds us, reflects “the tensions within, which are caused by being unable to deny the old or the new” (39). The negotiations Idar, Peña, and Villegas asked their readers to make reveal how a rhetorical education has the unique capacity not just to instruct students in dominant language and cultural practices. A rhetorical education can, instead, connect students to both the old and the new by enabling them to revise their modes of participation given both their civic and cultural identifications.

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Thus, Idar, Peña, and Villegas highlight the civic and cultural identifications inherent in rhetorical education by calling for language and cultural practices that would help their readers negotiate the “tensions within.” As they made their bicultural pedagogical arguments, however, these women’s teachings also accentuated the possibility for rhetorical education to function as an alternative place for community building, a site where members of a community can identify with one another as a means to resist and reshape dominant discourses and pedagogies. Idar, Peña, and Villegas created their rhetorical education as one that was specific to their Mexican community in Texas: they could not replicate a traditional Mexican education, and they refused to promote a purely Americanized pedagogical program. The program they articulated was one that asked readers to see language and cultural knowledge as a source of empowerment that would enable them to identify with one another and create a new kind of community for themselves. Idar, Peña, and Villegas map out the ways a rhetorical education can enable students to contribute to and participate not just in a national citizenship but a cultural citizenship, one that, in the words of Blanca Silvestrini, should provide members with “a sense of belonging to a community, a feeling of entitlement, the energy to face everyday adversities, and a rationale for resistance to a larger world in which members of a minority group feel like aliens in spite of being citizens” (43). The teachers in this study highlight the capacity for rhetorical education to work toward this function: a rhetorical education can move students to participate in larger civic discussions, but it can also position them to make connections inside a cultural community. Finally, when we consider how Idar, Peña, and Villegas reconfigure rhetorical education, it is imperative to remember the most basic aspect of these teachers’ work. Through their La Crónica contributions, they consistently taught their readers that they could and should participate; their instruction was always linked to their readers’ abilities to change the world in which they lived. Such a basic but pivotal function of rhetorical education is one that Diana Cárdenas both embodies and promotes in her own narrative about her teaching. In “Creating an Identity,” Cárdenas writes that a vital part of her and every educator’s pedagogy should be insistence on the possibility of students’ participation: Teachers need to find ways to connect with their students—the eloquent ones, the assertive ones and the reserved ones, the ones who are confident in their abilities and the ones who feel isolated because they do not have the mastery of the English language. They need to demonstrate an investment in and commitment to the successful engagement of all their

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students, establish patterns of personal potential, and promote society transformation. (125)

Cárdenas’s words echo the pedagogical message sent by Idar, Peña, and Villegas one hundred years ago, as these four teachers make explicit a pivotal but often overlooked aspect of rhetorical education. As educators initiate and sustain an education in invention heuristics, audience analyses, arrangement techniques, or stylistic suggestions, they must first believe that their students have the potential to enact change in their worlds, and they must articulate this belief to them.

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5

New Visions, New Traditions The Female Teacher and Rhetorical Education in the Twenty-First Century Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations it sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change. —Robin D. G. Kelley, “Finding the Strength to Love and Dream,” 2002

R

obin D. G. Kelley’s message in the June 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education speaks directly to the pedagogical arguments made by Lydia Maria Child, Zitkala-Ša, Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, and Leonor Villegas de Magnón, as well as the project of this final chapter. It is clear that the five teachers in this study did not change the world or even drastically alter educational policy in 1865, 1900, or 1911. Child’s text did not revolutionize civic participation for her black readers in the post–Civil War era. Zitkala-Ša’s essays did not close down Carlisle or effectively challenge what it meant to “civilize” the Indian. And the messages the teachers of La Crónica sent did not enable their readers to create a cultural citizenship that was recognized and respected across the United States, in Texas, or even inside the city of Laredo. One could say that these women and the rhetorical educations they proposed were failures. But if Kelley’s point above is taken seriously, the “visions and dreams” of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas should energize the work of teachers and scholars in rhetoric and composition today. As I have argued in the preceding chapters, the individual practices these teachers invoked not only refigure historical perceptions of the docile and 165

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apolitical female teacher but also connect with and revise traditional understandings of rhetorical education. The project of this final chapter is to take a step back and view these teachers’ arguments together to see how they might enrich contemporary discussions in rhetoric and composition. As I close this study, my objective is to listen to the ways Child, ZitkalaŠa, Idar, Peña, and Villegas speak in unison to scholars and teachers today. More particularly, my aim is to show how their work extends historical and historiographic discussions concerning feminist rhetoric and rhetorical education; complicates and revises the feminized figure of the turn-ofthe-twentieth-century teacher as well as the work of today’s rhetoric and composition instructor; and offers new ways for scholars and teachers to envision a rhetorical education for the twenty-first century. Thus, the goal of this final chapter is to discuss how this study as a whole contributes to scholarly conversations that intersect with, but differ from, those engaged in previous chapters. In making this move, I do not advocate that scholars and teachers simply adopt the work of the women examined here. Instead, these educators’ individual and collective struggles should inspire us to rethink a variety of disciplinary practices, as they should prompt us, in Kelley’s words, to “tap the well of our collective imaginations” (B8) and build on these “alternative visions and dreams” when we “continue to struggle for change” (B7).

Remembering the Female Teacher This study contributes to feminist histories of rhetoric by examining how five women resisted the prescribed gendered and cultural duties of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century teacher. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 illustrate how dominant discourses of education created and re-created definitions of the teacher’s work by calling on women like Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas to be soldiers who went south to continue the Northern fight, or members of yet another army who were sent out to “kill the Indian but save the man,” or Americanizers who transformed their Mexican students into true “Americans.” From the American Missionary to the Texas School Journal, these discourses dictated that teachers of black, Indian, and Mexican students were not to create new knowledge, let alone speak back to educational systems. Such teachers were expected only to reproduce the approved pedagogical message. The women in this study contested these dominant expectations by creating and deploying arguments that revised the mandates of educational discourse. Through their politicized pedagogies, these teachers reframed the definition and work of the teacher, and their place in rhetorical history rests in the ways they argued, as both rhetors and teachers, for educational practices that would enable their students

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both to enter American society and to change it strategically. In examining the ways Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas redefined their work, a number of compelling commentaries emerge concerning feminist rhetorical history and historiography as well as the past and present-day figure of the teacher.

Writing the Teacher into Feminist Rhetorical History As I situate these women inside histories of feminist rhetoric, it is important to highlight the methodological procedures that enabled this recovery. This study began by valuing five women who remained in their traditional role and entered the “Adamless Eden” of the teaching profession (Bardeen 18). These women did not break from their feminized sphere to find their place on the podium, pulpit, or platform. They did, however, compose rhetorically significant arguments by using the means available to them to address the educational concerns they had as teachers. This historiographic move should prompt feminist scholars to reflect on their decisions concerning who and what contributes to rhetorical study. Through this historiographic practice, then, I second the argument Carol Mattingly makes when she posits that feminist scholars might limit their recovery of rhetorical activity by only valuing certain types of women and certain kinds of subject matters. Mattingly specifically calls attention to the ways scholars might dismiss nineteenth-century women who spoke out on seemingly “conservative” topics such as religion or temperance because of our own twenty-first-century prejudices concerning the importance of these issues (“Telling”). Building on Mattingly’s assessment, my work here should first ask feminist scholars to question the kinds of teachers we recover. Although it is indeed important to learn more about teachers like Gertrude Buck who worked at the university level, this research points to the need for more studies of women who taught outside the academy, in lower levels of schooling, and at nontraditional educational sites, such as freedmen’s and Indians’ schools, as well as escuelitas. In addition, this study also provides a foundation for investigations of women who not only taught in the classroom but, like Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas, also made public arguments about education—arguments that addressed issues at all levels of schooling and in various arenas of pedagogical exigency and interest. Furthermore, in asking scholars to reconsider rationales for identifying and then situating women inside the rhetorical tradition, this research especially calls for reflection on the ways we define and remember female teachers and their educational work. I would like to cite one historiographic example that becomes particularly instructive given the rhetorical and pedagogical interventions of the women

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in this study. In “Consciousness Raising,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell lucidly details the variety of ways women have been excluded from rhetorical history and points to “false characterization” as one of these barriers (48–50). Campbell writes that “false characterization” often occurs when historians refuse to acknowledge women’s rhetorical significance by dismissing their theoretical work as pedagogy—“it’s not rhetorical theory, its pedagogy” (50). I agree with Campbell that we must not misconstrue women’s theoretical contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but this study makes me hesitate to rectify such “false characterization” by possibly erasing or discounting the pedagogical element from rhetorical theory. The work of Child, ZitkalaŠa, Idar, Peña, and Villegas problematizes feminist counterarguments that would posit “it’s not really pedagogy, it’s theory.” Although feminist scholars should certainly excavate and celebrate women’s contributions to rhetorical theory, the teachers in this study encourage scholars both to question the dichotomous, hierarchical, and gendered relationship in which theory is valued over pedagogy as well as any motivation to rewrite and remember women’s pedagogy as theory.

Traces of a Stream My research indicates that African American women’s resistance to sociopolitical barriers has been considerable and that, although their achievements may have been devalued, they have not been thoroughly neutralized or contained. From the beginning of their opportunities to learn, African American women have engaged consistently and valiantly in acts of literacy that have yielded remarkable rewards for themselves and for others. . . . Periodically, their talents have flowed past the barriers, reconstituted themselves, and become noticeable “traces of a stream.” —Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream

In this study I have examined Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as activist teachers and connected them to each other as educators who engaged in resistant pedagogical practices. By interrogating the dominant picture of the female teacher and then by placing each teacher in the context of her time, this study exposed why the rhetorical and pedagogical significance of the female teacher has been ignored while also examining how each teacher here addressed and negotiated her specific circumstance to make her voice heard. Seen together, these women’s pedagogical arguments complicate understandings of who the nineteenth-century teacher was and resonate with Royster’s reflection above. Just as Royster’s research recovered a plethora of African American female writers whose “accomplishments” signal “noticeable ‘traces of a stream,’” Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas constitute a pedagogical collective, one that has been

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written over and dismissed, but one that provides valuable insight on the ways turn-of-the-twentieth-century women made traditional “women’s work” revolutionary. This examination of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas certainly identifies each of them as a trace of a certain “pedagogical” stream. However, in the conclusions to each chapter, this study also works to question the collectives these women are members of by highlighting how they might also be seen as parts of or entryways into other kinds of pedagogical and political efforts. In chapter 2, for example, I suggest that Child’s work might be linked to possible pedagogical resistances of white freedmen’s teachers such as Sarah Jane Foster, Maria S. Waterbury, Sarah Chase, Lucy Chase, and Julia Routledge. In addition, I also disrupt the idea that even though the dominant picture of the freedmen’s teacher was a Northern white woman, black women, in great numbers, participated in this profession and most likely composed pedagogies and arguments well worth investigating. In chapter 3, I connect Zitkala-Ša’s writings not only to other nineteenth-century educational programs such as the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females but also to the radical work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native women such as those involved in WARN. Finally, in chapter 4, I suggest that the educational articles written by Idar, Peña, and Villegas might be representative of other female teachers working on the border as well as those publishing in other Spanish-language newspapers. By placing Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas in these differing collectives, I certainly do not diminish their work as teachers. Instead, I hope to show how these women’s pedagogical arguments connect to, work alongside, and invigorate activist endeavors outside academic settings—settings that feminist scholars might engage for historiographic recovery. The interventions of the women in this study, though certainly pedagogical, can also be seen as traces of other streams and should prompt us, especially in the case of Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas, to investigate further the ways that Native women and Chicanas have, in various situations, advocated for their cultural communities. This act, then, of defining Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas not only as resistant teachers but also as parts of other collectives or traces of other streams should broaden our understanding of their significance and reframe how we understand the implications of their pedagogical resistance.

The White Woman in the Classroom As this study encourages feminist scholars to reflect on their historiographic approaches to women and their work, it also sketches a more complicated picture of the seemingly uncomplicated female teacher. Obviously, this

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examination reveals the ways Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas challenged the depiction of the innocuous and unthinking schoolmarm by politicizing their pedagogical role. At the same time, this study also reveals how dominant discourses of education implied and enforced specific kinds of white “Americanness” when they described who the female teacher should be. When looking at the specificity of each of these teachers’ experiences, it becomes clear that concerns about race and culture infused decisions concerning the kind of woman who would teach the nation. In chapter 2, for example, white female teachers like Child were the preferred educators for freedmen, and if black men or women attempted to become teachers, freedmen’s societies often demanded that they be “made” like their Northern, white counterparts. When Zitkala-Ša entered Carlisle, a different distinction was made concerning the female teacher’s requirements. Here, the presence of the Indian woman in the classroom was a sign of her “civilizedness” because, it was argued, she could only enter if she had forgotten her grandmother’s ways. Idar, Peña, and Villegas negotiated yet another iteration of this gendered and cultural situation. Defined by their community as cultural conduits, these women were positioned as the first line of defense against the Anglo female teacher who aimed to Americanize the children of their communities. Thus, the teachers in this study were not just dealing with gendered constraints when they took on their feminine and feminized roles; they were also confronting a specific set of racial and cultural expectations. It is imperative to note that one of the ways these women politicized their position was by implicitly challenging the expectation of whiteness in the figure of the female teacher. Such a vantage point on the racial and cultural assumptions that Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas faced enables feminist scholars to continue to complicate any easy understandings of “the woman’s” or even “the teacher’s” experience. Their work provides a moment for us to think about how culture and race are imprinted onto every aspect of the educational experience, including the figure of the teacher. Given such an understanding, this study questions any and all historical and present-day assumptions of the teacher as a white woman who carries with her the values and beliefs of dominant American society.

The Feminized Teacher in the Twenty-First Century Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas certainly help us to reconsider the racial and cultural expectations of the female teacher. If we push these connections between past and present-day practices even further, their pedagogical and gendered resistance also encourages us to rethink the feminized work of the rhetoric and composition instructor today. It is not hard

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to make the parallel between teaching at the turn of the twentieth century and rhetoric and composition instruction at the turn of the twenty-first. Like teachers at the turn of the twentieth century, the writing instructor today is often constructed as the “mythologized mother” who is characterized by qualities of “self-sacrifice, dedication, caring, and enormous capacities for untheorized attention to detail” (Miller 46). Similarly, those in rhetoric and composition also face a pedagogical situation comparable to that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Susan Miller has described, although the field is certainly considered “low status,” it also carries out the “civilizing work” of the university (42). Through writing instruction, feminized teachers cultivate their students’ “worthiness, moral probity, and fitness” (44), and their classroom is the site where these teachers are to “verify [their students’] social and moral conditions” (45). This study cannot begin to address the material reality of rhetoric and composition instruction, which is defined as a “service course” and which “welcomes the work of women while marginalizing them as part-time faculty, lecturers and adjuncts” (Schell 552). It can, however, provide an instructive example of feminized teachers who would not be eclipsed by the work set out for them. By situating Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as exemplars, today’s instructors can see themselves as a part of a tradition that resists the expectation that they perform a certain kind of “civilizing work” in their classrooms. Their pedagogical practice can instead be invigorated by five women who refused to enforce those dominant forms of social and civic behavior that sustained asymmetrical power relations. By linking themselves to the women in this study, teachers today might see how, in Susan Jarratt’s words, “changed practices in the future are underwritten by changed visions of the past” (“New Dispositions” 66). In making this connection, teachers of rhetoric and composition might build on the practices of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas to create pedagogies and possibilities for students that enable them to live Isocrates’s active life and engage critically in the world without sacrificing cultural or linguistic ties. If teachers and scholars today did change their practices in such a way, they would certainly begin to compose a new rhetorical education for the twenty-first century.

Rhetorical Education in the Twenty-First Century Each of the main chapters of this study examines how Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas composed pedagogical practices that extend past and present-day conversations concerning rhetorical education. More particularly, these teachers’ arguments stimulate contemporary conversations by interrogating such concepts as decorum, invention, delivery, identifica-

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tion, listening, civic duty, social etiquette, bodily behavior, rhetorical sovereignty, and cultural citizenship. As the teachers in this study engage these specific conversations, their work also raises large-scale questions about the historiographic recovery of rhetorical education as well as the scope, possibilities, and problems inherent in this pedagogical endeavor. Such historical and theoretical insights should guide our work as we compose our own iterations of rhetorical education for the twenty-first century.

Redefining a History and Historiography As I reflect on the historiographic process that enabled this research, I see that the range and complexity of archival resources, pedagogical practices, and historical figures that historians might identify as part of rhetorical education directly depends on how they understand what a rhetorical education is. If they look for sites, people, and pedagogical materials in which rhetorical principles were taught or times when traditional ideas coined by esteemed rhetoricians were repeated, they will most likely find certain kinds of students and teachers—these often, of course, being enfranchised, white, and male. But if historians begin with a broad definition of rhetorical education, a much different story can be told. In this study, I define rhetorical education as any pedagogical program that develops in students a communal and civic identity and articulates for them the rhetorical strategies and language practices as well as bodily and social behaviors that make possible their participation in communal and civic affairs. Using this definition as a guide for recovery and analysis, the historiographic impetus can move far beyond Quintilian’s educational treatise or Blair’s lectures because rhetorical education would not simply mean that students learn ancient precepts or contemporary theories. Instead, this definition mandates that rhetorical education could be any instruction in language practice, rhetorical strategy, or social and bodily behavior that prepares students to enter public discussion. The key idea is that this instruction offers students those discursive and behavioral practices that set out for them how they might participate in communal and civic life. In working with this definition as I researched and wrote this book, I was not compelled to position Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as descendants of Aristotle or Quintilian or to compare their ideas with Campbell’s or Blair’s. Instead, I located these women at the margins of traditional knowledge about and histories of rhetorical education, understanding that their work certainly speaks back to, but does not connect back to or rely on, ancient rhetorical principles or figures. Such a location is beneficial because it enables their work to challenge a number of central assumptions inherent in traditional rhetorical pedagogy. By investigating the voices of women who

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work at the edges of what we might deem the tradition of rhetorical education, this study opens up possibilities for historiographic recovery in that it reframes the questions scholars might generate to initiate their research. Thus, the methodological questions scholars use to approach potential sites of rhetorical education should not have to be, How have people learned from Cicero, Blair, or Burke? Or, how have pedagogies revolved around the term rhetoric and its theories? Instead, scholars might broaden the scope of their inquiry and attempt to understand this pedagogical practice in its most complex sense by asking, How have people learned to participate in civic, communal, and cultural discussions? How have teachers and students responded to modes and skills for participation designated for them? How have they invented different strategies for participation? What did these strategies (dis)enable? If we begin historiographic recovery with questions such as these, we would be able to identify figures who would not previously have made a blip on our rhetorical radars, and we would instead invigorate the tradition of rhetorical education with the distinctive strategies, inventive techniques, and rhetorical departures that people outside the canon have used to teach and learn about communal and civic participation. Here, we would not only acknowledge that, in Thomas Miller and Joseph G. Jones’s words, “rhetoric looks different for those who have looked up at and not down from pulpits, lecterns, and bars”; but we would also begin to understand how various groups and individuals proposed alternative forms of rhetorical education that enabled their students to challenge or circumvent the cultural practices and participatory discourses advanced in more traditional arenas of rhetorical instruction (435). Such a methodological and definitional disconnection from ancient and canonical principles should push scholars to recognize that just as “rhetoric was born into a context of need,” so too was rhetorical education (Scenters-Zapico and Cos 61). In seeing that this pedagogical practice is directly linked to participation, communal life, and civic ac/ discord—instead of rhetorical lineage—scholars should take up a stance that destabilizes traditional disciplinary boundaries and historiographic approaches and allows for new people, places, and practices to complicate conventional knowledge about rhetorical education.

Histories of Rhetorical Education in the United States As mentioned in the first chapter of this study, scholars such as David Gold, Susan Kates, Nan Johnson, Stephen Schneider, Shirley Wilson Logan, Susan Romano, Jacqueline Bacon, and Glen McClish have challenged the idea that the only way to study rhetorical education is to look to the American university, and, more particularly, the Ivy League university, to understand

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how white, enfranchised men taught and learned rhetoric and writing. This book joins with that scholarship by testing the dominant narrative of rhetorical education in three ways. First, it examines pedagogies intended for freedmen’s and Indian schools as well those composed for a Spanishlanguage newspaper situated on the border of Texas and Mexico. Second, it focuses on female teachers working outside the university context. Third, it centers on rhetorical pedagogies for black, Indian, and Mexican students. However, as much as this study draws attention away from elite universities, it also reflects back on their practices and enables us to place rhetoric and writing instruction deployed at these institutions in a larger context. The most significant way this study reflects back on the university is through its focus on language instruction. The work of Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas in particular complicates what has seemed to be the easy acceptance of and expectation for English language use inside the U.S. university. As John Trimbur writes in “Linguistic Memory and the Politics of U.S. English,” “English has become the unquestioned medium of instruction and the vernacular of modernity, identified with science, technology, and the professions” (583). Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition by Trimbur, Anis Bawarshi, A. Suresh Canagarajah, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Matsuda has questioned the seeming inevitability of English instruction in the university. Horner and Trimbur specifically recover a history of composition that chronicles a “unidirectional monolingual language policy” that “warranted [English instruction] as inevitable, not because English was the only living language available in North America but because the use of spoken and written English forms what Benedict Anderson has called an ‘imagined community’ and a sense of nationhood” (607). These scholars record that due to the fall of the classical languages in university education and the rise of the composition course, which centered on reading and writing in English, modern languages such as Spanish, French, and German were relegated to a minor role in advanced study: these languages were “assigned their limited spheres of influence, [and] territorialized as national literatures in the separate departments, where students encountered them as texts to be read, not living languages to be written or spoken” (602). It was through this process of placing the English language at the center of the university curriculum and dismissing French, Spanish, and German to “foreign” language departments that the composition course contributed (and contributes) to what Horner and Trimbur cite as “the chain of reifications . . . that purifies the social identity of U.S. Americans as English speakers, privileges the use of the language as written English, and then

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charts the pedagogical and curricular development of language as one that points inexorably toward mastery of written English” (607). This examination of the writings of Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas seconds the efforts of these scholars by shedding light on how the university’s newly established “English-only” language policy was working in concert with other dominant educational discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. It is imperative to note that at the same moment these women were arguing against the pedagogical eradication of their cultural languages and calling for bilingual education, the typical American university was forming its own monolingual language policy. Such a juxtaposition reveals the way the university composition course worked alongside Americanization programs to define U.S. Americans as English speakers and to privilege the use of the English language. Seeing how these histories inflect one another, the teachings of Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas gain significance because their work offers a broader context in which to understand the development of English instruction in the university. In so doing, their pedagogical resistance calls on scholars to continue to question the assumption of English by recovering how historical figures inside and outside the university have tried to break this chain of reifications and redefine the monolingual language policy promoted in various educational institutions. By learning how discussions about English have been (and continue to be) framed in Indian schools, Americanization programs, composition courses, and English-only initiatives, scholars can persist in challenging the idea that the presence and practice of English is both natural and inevitable. Moreover, such an investigation should make it clear that historical and present-day discussions about language learning in various educational contexts have not just focused on English only.

A Heuristic for Rhetorical Education Today One premise of this research is that we can look to the past to reconsider present-day understandings of rhetorical education. This study assumes that we can and should see history as a heuristic through which we can invent new ways of seeing rhetorical education because historical studies such as this provide a kind of distance—a kind of Burkean “perspective by incongruity”—that gives us the space to see our work differently (Permanence lv). As mentioned in the first chapter of this text, the purpose in recovering the practices of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas is not to set out specific pedagogies that we might adopt and employ in our classrooms. Instead, the work of these women should encourage us to reflect on and question the way we compose our own forms of rhetorical education. Such

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reflections should motivate us to ask the following questions: What kind of rhetorical education do we promote? What does our iteration of rhetorical education ask students to do? What kind of participation do we envision for our students? How does our pedagogy affect and invigorate their communal, cultural, and national citizenships? What civic and cultural imperatives does it imply and support? What possibilities does it open up or close down for students? To answer these questions, we might draw from and be guided by six broad-based understandings of rhetorical education extrapolated from this analysis. The most explicit commentary the teachers in this study make about rhetorical education is that this form of instruction is both cultural and political. Through their pedagogical work, these teachers exposed how rhetorical education is always a form of politicized acculturation because it teaches students how to communicate inside a culture. Each of the teachers examined here showed that when dominant discourses enforced ideas about civic behavior, language practices, or available rhetorical strategies, they were not simply holding up an objective ideal but were positioning students inside civic society in ways that often compromised both their cultural claims and political agency. Instead of asking their students to make these sacrifices so they could participate as the kind of Americans that society defined for them, the teachers in this study called for a negotiation between their students’ culture and the civic structure, and they created arguments that centered on changing dominant culture so their students could participate inside it. These teachers’ challenges to dominant forms of rhetorical education both substantiate and add dimension to Renato Rosaldo’s argument that “the claims of citizenship are reinforced or subverted by cultural assumptions and practices” (35). The pedagogical arguments of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas revealed the ways rhetorical education for civic participation reinforced a particular set of cultural assumptions while subverting others, as their challenges illustrated the complex tensions between the cultural requirements of civic participation and the political imperatives of their students’ cultures. Given such an assessment about the connections among culture, politics, and rhetorical education, it is important to acknowledge how dominant forms of rhetorical education are often linked to cultures of whiteness. The pedagogical resistance of the teachers in this study did more than describe how dominant educational discourses defined and rejected what was black, red, and brown. Their work also highlighted the ways that powerful iterations of rhetorical education promoted the idea that the only viable form of civic and social involvement was to “act white” (Fordham and Ogbu 177). Through their contests over rhetorical education, these teachers exposed the

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ways that white language practices and social behaviors are often positioned as both the ideal and the norm—a standard against which nonwhite students are measured. Therefore, the resistance these teachers made to dominant forms of rhetorical education exemplifies and extends Timothy Barnett’s point that “whiteness maintains power ultimately by reserving for itself the privilege of recognizing, defining, and denying difference on its own terms and to its own advantage” (10). The pedagogical practices of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas reveal more than the power that dominant iterations of rhetorical education maintain when they define black students as dangerous and unintelligent, Indian students as savage and uncivil, and Mexican students as lazy, backward, and unpatriotic; they also underscore the privilege that rhetorical education can confer when it links proper rhetorical skills and behaviors with what is both white and powerful. The pedagogies of these five teachers make clear a third point: rhetorical education is always situated and contextual. Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas show how the practices and priorities of rhetorical education shifted and were reshaped in relation to the power relations of their specific sociopolitical moments. Each of the teachers in this study responded to the contexts of their time and place as well as the needs of their students by designating a particular set of pedagogical practices as vital to their students’ civic and cultural futures. For instance, Child taught her readers to disrupt the religious and civic discourses of the AMA and ATS; ZitkalaŠa challenged Carlisle’s attempt to create the civilized, English-speaking individual; and Idar, Peña, and Villegas concentrated on the cultural and linguistic claims for their readers living on the border of Texas and Mexico. Thus, each teacher made use of her pedagogical dexterity. She did not simply repeat accepted practices but worked instead to read her situation and her students’ needs and then respond accordingly. In making these moves, each of these teachers demonstrated that rhetorical education is always contingent on the educational, social, and political climate. Rhetorical education is itself rhetorical. It changes with the demands and interests of the community, and it shifts as definitions of civic duty, cultural practice, communal participation, and citizenship shift. The pedagogical practices of the teachers examined here also illustrate both the limited and expansive repertoire of skills that can constitute a rhetorical education. This study analyzed the ability of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas to resist debilitating forms of rhetorical education while also articulating new skills, behaviors, and practices. Their moves to critique and invent demonstrate their dedication to investigating how specific elements of rhetorical education affected their students. When these women intervened in dominant forms of rhetorical education, they critically

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engaged in a conversation concerning what a rhetorical education should do and which rhetorical strategies and skills their students needed. These teachers enriched their own pedagogical repertoire by reflecting on the means of persuasion that should be available to their students but were not. Their work makes it clear that the expansive or limiting nature of rhetorical education is dependent upon the teacher’s willingness to analyze and invent her own form of rhetorical education by considering the kinds of histories (public, cultural, or personal) that students can(not) draw from to engage in cultural and civic discussions; the commonplaces they can(not) use; the social and bodily behaviors they can(not) adopt and perform; the ways they can(not) define, classify, and divide; the questions they can(not) ask; and the (in)appropriate arguments they can(not) deploy. The fifth aspect of rhetorical education that this study of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas underscores is the idea that rhetorical education is not just an instructional priority deployed for participation in civic and national discourses. Chapters 3 and 4 especially emphasize the ways rhetorical education functions in cultural communities to designate those behaviors, skills, and language practices that enable a community to maintain coherence and stability. For example, Zitkala-Ša informed her readers of the practices and behaviors that regulated participation in her Indian community, while Idar, Peña, and Villegas identified those cultural skills that continued to remain important inside their Laredo community, regardless of Anglo demands and Americanizing missions. These two chapters in particular stress the various ways rhetorical education is employed to facilitate participation in both aspects of Isocrates’s definition of this pedagogical practice. That is, these teachers make it clear that rhetorical education should prepare students to “govern wisely both their own households and the commonwealth” (53). The final tenet of rhetorical education that these teachers emphasize circles back to the first pages of this study and is implied in each of the points above: rhetorical education, like rhetoric itself, can work toward competing ends. Because rhetorical education sets out the practices that enable participation in certain cultural and civic communities, it excludes as it includes—as it offers certain practices and behaviors, it implicitly refuses others. The arguments of the five teachers examined here all revealed the ways dominant discourses of education excluded or diffused the civic agency of their students, and each teacher, in turn, argued for better forms of rhetorical education that would not only enable her students to gain access to powerful civic discussions but also change the cultural and political rules for what access, participation, and civic and cultural engagement meant.

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These six understandings of rhetorical education should guide the work of teachers and scholars today as we continue to refigure rhetorical education in the twenty-first century. Each of the components of rhetorical education outlined above should prompt us to be on guard against stifling forms of rhetorical education and to search for those rhetorical skills and practices that open up rather than close down participatory possibilities for students. Using the work of Child, Zitkala-Ša, Idar, Peña, and Villegas as a heuristic should help those of us who teach to reflect on our own pedagogical dexterity and to consider how our iterations of rhetorical education might better position students to build on their cultural and linguistic backgrounds to become politicized participants in a world they contribute to and create. Because the teachers in this study offer such a rich and complex understanding of rhetorical education—one that pushes educators to reflect, revise, and create—it is my hope that their work and others like it do not remain on the margins of tradition. Instead, by placing such pedagogies and practices at the center of our institutional memory and pedagogical practice, we might not only reframe our understandings of rhetorical education’s past but also begin to compose new visions and dreams for our own and our students’ communal, cultural, and civic futures.

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Notes Works Cited Index

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Notes 1. The Profession of a Woman: Female Teachers, Marginalized Students, and Rhetorical Education 1. For more information on women’s transition to the classroom, see Jon Teasford, “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780,” History of Education Quarterly 10.3 (1970): 287–307; Joel Perlmann, Silvana Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy among New England Women, 1730–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37.2 (1997): 125–39; and Geraldine J. Clifford, “‘Lady Teachers’ and Politics in the United States, 1850–1930,” Teachers: The Culture and Politics of Work, ed. Martin Lawn and Gerald Grace (London: Falmer, 1987), 3–30. For more information concerning the changes in the educational scene that enabled women’s presence in the classroom, see Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper, 1980); Jessica Enoch, “A Woman’s Place Is in the School: Rhetorics of Gendered Space in Nineteenth-Century America,” College English 70.3 (2008): 275–95; and Suggs. 2. Although I use twenty-first-century terminology to refer to these students in the book’s title, throughout the text I will use the terms black to identify Child’s students, Indian to identify Zitkala-Ša’s, and Mexican to identify Idar’s, Peña’s, and Villegas’s, respectively. These defining terms are consistent with the ways in which these students and their teachers were identified in their time periods. 3. As Robert J. Connors, Lisa Ede, and Andrea Lunsford describe, a “rhetorical revival” had begun “in earnest” by the 1963 Conference on College Composition and Communication. At the conference, Edward Corbett, Wayne Booth, and Francis Christiansen presented on topics that combined concerns of rhetoric with those of composition—topics that would soon “transform the teaching of writing” (10). 4. Although Child and Zitkala-Ša could be considered relatively well-known nineteenth-century figures, they are not remembered for their pedagogical work. Twenty-first-century scholars investigate Child’s literary texts such as Hobomok (1824) or her antislavery tracts, most significant among them An 183


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184 Notes to Pages 18–33

Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Today’s readers can also find Zitkala-Ša’s work in both the Heath and Norton anthologies of American literature. 5. Karen A. Foss, Sonja K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin include a chapter on Gloria Anzaldúa in their text Feminist Rhetorical Theories (London: Sage, 1999). Lisa A. Flores discusses the rhetorical work of Anzaldúa, Jo Carillo, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga in her essay “Creating Discursive Space through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 142–56. On historicizing Chicana feminism, see Jessica Enoch, “Para la Mujer: Defining a Chicana Feminist Rhetoric at the Turn of the Century,” College English 67.1 (2004): 20–37, and “Survival Stories: Writing Chicana Sterilization into Feminist Rhetorical History and Historiography,” Rhetorical Society Quarterly 35.3 (2005): 5–30. 6. Lomas is speaking specifically about Mexican women like Idar, Peña, and Villegas who were involved in Spanish-language presses during the early 1900s. 7. I borrow the phrase “teaching other people’s children” from the title of Delpit’s article. 8. See Paula Allen, “Symbol and Structure in Native American Literature: Some Basic Considerations,” CCC 24.3 (1973): 267–70; Elizabeth Cook, “Propulsives in Native American Literature,” CCC 24.3 (1973): 271–74; William Bevis, “American Indian Verse Translations,” CCC 35.6 (1974): 693–703; and Marjorie Murphy, “Silence, the Word, and Indian Rhetoric,” CCC 21.5 (1970): 356–63. 9. In addition to the scholars discussed here, Joyce Rain Anderson, Ellen Cushman, John Miles, and Whitney Myers are also researching and writing on Native American issues and concerns. 10. Will Kymlicka, Wayne Norman, Nick Stevenson, Bryan Turner, and Morris Young also discuss and define cultural citizenship. For further reading on this topic, see Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Nick Stevenson, “Culture and Citizenship: An Introduction,” Culture and Citizenship, ed. Nick Stevenson (London: Sage, 2001), 1–10; Bryan Turner, “Outline of a General Theory of Cultural Citizenship,” Stevenson 11–32; and Morris Young, Minor/Revisions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004). 11. In composition studies, resistance is often linked with student resistance rather than teacher resistance (as it is in this study). For further reading on the kinds of resistance discussed in the field, see Andrea Greenbaum, ed., Insurrections: Approaches to Resistance in Composition Studies (Albany: SUNY P, 2001). 2. Revising Rhetorical Education: Lydia Maria Child and The Freedmen’s Book 1. Williams provides a thick description of the work of black freedmen’s teachers during this period. Her research reveals that in many areas of the South black teachers outnumbered white teachers. Moreover, she notes that most of


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Notes to Pages 35–48 185

these black teachers were not from the North who came south to teach. Williams assesses that “the majority by far were local people, often self-educated during slavery or immediately afterward” (98). 2. The function of the bureau did not at all displace Northern aid societies already working for education in the South. Instead, it functioned as a support mechanism that, in the words of Commissioner O. H. Howard, aimed to “systematize and facilitate” the work of these societies (qtd. in Cimbala 105). It comes as no surprise that the bureau’s ideals were very much aligned with those of the missionary societies, especially the AMA, and that the AMA’s prominence as the “leading Northern contributor to black education in Georgia” had much to do with its relationship to the Freedmen’s Bureau. Cimbala notes that Edmund A. Ware, a superintendent for the Freedmen’s Bureau, was “one of the AMA’s own,” with Ware once stating that “‘the interests of the A.M.A. are [the same as the bureau’s] interests’” (123). In essence, then, the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau did not stray from the ideological motivations of the missionary societies, especially the AMA. 3. The Freedman lesson “Negro” also reveals the ATS’s basic expectation of who the teacher would be. In this lesson, a young black boy goes to his teacher crying that a “fel-low called me a ne-gro.” The teacher responds to her student by saying that he should not worry, “It means black. . . . It is no more mak-ing fun, than for you to call me the white la-dy” (16). 4. In addition to establishing more formal religious institutions before the war, African Americans also participated in less organized, but highly important, religious practice during the antebellum period. As C. Eric Lincoln describes in “The Racial Factor in the Shaping of Religion in America,” during the antebellum period there existed an “invisible institution” that “met in the swamps and the bayous, and which joined all black believers in a common experience at a single level of human and spiritual recognition” (164). See also Dwight N. Hopkins, “Slave Theology in the ‘Invisible Institution,’” West and Glaude 790–830. 5. This emphasis on religion is again apparent in the AMA’s 1849 constitution, Articles II and III: Article II: The object of this society shall be to send the Gospel of the Lord to those portions of our own and other countries which are destitute of it, or which present open and urgent fields of effort. Article III: Any person of evangelical sentiments, who professes faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who is not a slaveholder, or in the practice of other immoralities, and who contributes to the funds, may become a member of the society. (American Missionary Mar. 1867, 48) 6. Unless otherwise noted, all passages from the ATS were taken from its monthly publication, the Freedman. 7. During this period, Child wrote three historical novels: Hobomok (1824); The Rebels; or, Boston before the Revolution (1825); and The First Settlers of


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New England (1828). She also published a number of biographies: Biographical Sketches of Great and Good Men (1828); The Biographies of Madame de Staël, and Madame Roland (1832); The Biographies of Lady Russell, and Madame Guyon (1832); and Good Wives (1833). 8. The Appeal was not Child’s first foray into abolitionist literature. She published her first antislavery story, “The St. Domingo Orphans,” in 1830. The Appeal was, however, the text that caught the nation’s attention. 9. In 1883, John Whittier writes that it was “quite impossible for any one of the present generation to imagine the popular surprise and indignation which the [Appeal] called forth, or how entirely its author cut herself off from the favor and sympathy of a large number of those who previously delighted to do her honor” (ix). The condemnation Child received for the Appeal was by no means a surprise to her, however. In fact, it was something she was very much expecting, as she writes in her preface to the Appeal: “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure; I do not fear them” (qtd. in Whittier ix). 10. Her other antislavery texts include The Oasis (1834); Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery (1835); Anti-Slavery Catechism (1836); The Evils of Slavery and the Cures of Slavery (1836); Memoir of Benjamin Lay (1842); American AntiSlavery Almanac (1843); Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (1853); Correspondence between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason of Virginia (1860); The Right Way and the Safe Way (1862); The Patriarchal Institution (1860); and The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act (1860). 11. Although her participation in the antislavery cause was for the most part consistent, Child did take a brief hiatus from antislavery involvement from 1845 to 1850, due in large part to arguments inside abolitionist camps. She recalls this time, writing, “I recognized [abolition] as a forward step when the work passed into politics, because the desired end must necessarily come through that process; but thenceforth the meetings lost their zest for me. The character of the reform seemed changed, like the Christianity of the Apostles after Constantine and his courtiers undertook to make it a world-religion” (“The Liberator and Its Work” 1). 12. Similarly, Child responds to John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry in this way: “Recent events have renewed my youth and strength. I am full of electricity; and any pro-slavery hand that touches me receives a torpedo shock” (Selected Letters 339). 13. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, the Savannah Educational Association (SEA) was formed by a group of black clergymen in Georgia and “provided for the funding of elementary schools through voluntary subscriptions” (J. Jones 73). Although Jacqueline Jones records that officials of the Freedmen’s Bureau were at first pleasantly “astonished” by the work of the SEA, their “euphoria . . . soon faded” when “Savannah blacks adamantly insisted on opposing . . . efforts to involve whites in either the teaching or administering of their schools” (73–74). Freedmen’s Bureau officials responded to this opposition by accusing


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SEA board members of being “barely literate,” with one AMA official calling the SEA a “‘radically defective organization’” (74). 14. Victoria Earle Matthews is the first out of the three to assert this claim for black education in her speech “The Value of Race Literature” (1895). Woodson writes on the subject in The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933). Du Bois makes this argument throughout his career, but it is the focus of his speech “The Field and Function of the Negro College” (1933). 15. Child did not reject religion altogether; rather, she defines her own religious beliefs in this letter: “Most devoutly do I believe in the pervasive and ever-guiding Spirit of God” (Selected Letters 277). Even though Child held such religious convictions, she did “not believe [the spirit of God] was ever shut up within the covers of any book, or that it ever can be. Portions of it, or rather breathings of it, are present in many books” (278). This discomfort regarding interpretations of the Bible and religion was something Child experienced throughout her life, but her interest in this topic peaked in the years surrounding the publication of The Freedmen’s Book. Child’s threevolume opus The Progress of Religious Ideals (1855) and her Aspirations of the World (1878) reflect her desire to understand the religions of the world by not looking through the lens of Christian prejudices. Child writes in her preface to Progress that she “was offended by the manner in which Christian writers usually describe other religions; for I observed that they habitually covered apparent contradictions and absurdities, in Jewish or Christian writings, . . . while the records of all other religions were unscrupulously analyzed” (qtd. in Karcher, First Woman 375). 16. In Traces of a Stream, Royster borrows this term from Deirdre David’s Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy: Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Elliott (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987). 17. This information concerning the work of black women as teachers comes from Logan’s With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women; “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women; and “‘To Get an Education and Teach My People’: Rhetoric for Social Change.” 18. In “To Get an Education,” Logan looks outside traditional sites of rhetorical education to examine how this pedagogical practice functioned inside the black community. Specifically, she describes the rhetorical training that figures such as Sojourner Truth and Maria Stewart claimed for themselves. This methodological approach reveals how these rhetors fine-tuned their rhetorical skills through schooling, lyceums, rhetorical texts, and literary societies. Jacqueline Bacon and Glen McClish study rhetorical education practiced in black literary societies in “Reinventing the Master’s Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education.” David Gold examines the rhetorical education that Melvin B. Tolson composed for his black students at Wiley College from 1920–1940 in “‘Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock’: The Integrated Rhetoric of Melvin B. Tolson.”


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3. Resisting Scripts: Zitkala-Ša and the Carlisle Indian School 1. As Spack concludes in chapter 5 of America’s Second Tongue, titled “Transforming Women: Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories,” Zitkala-Ša’s essays might not be entirely true to life. Spack explains that the writer “blurs the lines between fact and fiction,” insofar as the events described in the essays do not exactly match her life (152). Spack argues (and I agree) that even if portions of Zitkala-Ša’s essays are fictionalized, it “is not because what she has to say is not true but precisely because it is true” (153). 2. My use of Carlisle in this chapter signifies the forces that drove the educational imperatives at the Carlisle Indian School, the most influential of these forces being Carlisle’s founder, Colonel Richard Pratt. 3. My argument about Zitkala-Ša’s essays problematizes the thin descriptions of her work found in anthologies like the Norton and the Heath and adds a new perspective to the increasing scholarship on Zitkala-Ša. See Susan Bernardin, “The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Narratives,” Western American Literature 32.2 (Fall 1997): 212–38; Cari Carpenter, “Detecting Indianness: Gertrude Bonnin’s Investigation of Native American Identity,” Wicazo Sa Review 20.1 (Spring 2005): 139–59; Ron Carpenter, “Zitkala-Ša and Bicultural Subjectivity,” Studies in American Indian Literature 16.4 (Fall 2004): 1–28; Martha Cutter, “Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Writings: The Problems of a Canonical Search for Language and Identity,” MELUS 19.1 (Spring 1994): 31–44; Dexter Fisher, “Zitkala-Sa: The Evolution of a Writer,” American Indian Quarterly 5 (1979): 229–38; P. Jane Hafen, ed., Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, by Zitkala-Ša (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001); P. Jane Hafen, “Gertrude Simmons Bonnin: For the Indian Cause,” Sifter: Native American Women’s Lives, ed. Theda Purdue (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 127–40, “A Cultural Duet: Zitkala-Ša and The Sun Dance Opera,” Great Plains Quarterly 18 (Spring 1998): 102–11, and “Zitkala-Ša: Sentimentality and Sovereignty, Wicazo Sa Review 12 (1997): 31–42; Margaret Austin Lukens, “Creating Cultural Spaces: The Pluralist Project of American Women Writers, 1843–1902 (Margaret Fuller, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Sa)” (diss. U of Colorado at Boulder, 1991); Jeanne Smith, “‘A Second Tongue’: The Trickster’s Voice in the Works of Zitkala-Ša,” Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature, ed. Elizabeth Ammons and Annette White-Parks (Hanover: UP of New England, 1994), 46–60; Sidonie Smith, “Cheesecake, Nymphs, and ‘We the People’: Un/ National Subjects about 1900,” Prose Studies 17.1 (1994): 120–40; Ruth Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women: Zitkala-Ša’s Revolutionary American Indian Stories,” Legacy 14.1 (1997): 25–42, “Transforming Women: Zitkala-Ša’s American Indian Stories,” and America’s Second Tongue 143–70; Ernest Stromberg, “Resistance and Mediation: The Rhetoric of Irony in Indian Boarding School Narratives by Francis La Flesche and Zitkala-Sa,” American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic, ed. Ernest Stromberg (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006), 95–109; and Dorothea Susag, “Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude


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Simmons Bonnin): A Power(full) Literary Voice,” Studies in American Indian Literature 5 (Winter 1993): 3–24. 4. Lyons defines a people as “a group of human beings united together by history, language, culture, or some combination therein—a community joined in union for a specific purpose: the surviving and flourishing of the people itself.” He goes on to explain, “It has always been from an understanding of themselves as a people that Indian groups have constructed themselves as a nation” (454). 5. Zitkala-Ša was born Gertrude Simmons; she adopted the name “ZitkalaŠa” later in life, after she left Carlisle and moved to Boston. While she was at Carlisle, the Indian Helper regularly reported the activities of “Miss Simmons” and other teachers: “On Tuesday, at the opening exercises of school, Miss Simmons sang in excellent voice ‘The Dove’ by Arciti, and was accompanied on the piano by Mrs. Sawyer and by James Wheelock, on his clarinet” (15 Oct. 1897, 2). 6. The New York Tribune article “A Plea for the Indians” commended Jackson’s book: “Helen Hunt Jackson has brought together in this volume many instances of gross injustice and cruelty practised toward the Indians by the United States” (6). The article goes on to summarize Jackson’s work: Less force and more kindness, less shooting and more teaching, will unquestionably advance the time of the [Indian problem’s] settlement. This is the lesson ‘H. H.’ wishes to inculcate, and if she succeeds in doing it by holding up to the public eye a series of startling pictures of Indian wrongs, drawn from a century of American history, we ought not find fault with her method, while admiring as we must, her motive. (7) 7. The following list of publications gives a sense of the conversation surrounding Indians and Indian education during this period: “How Shall the American Savage Be Civilized?,” Atlantic Monthly Nov. 1882: 596–607; “Proper Training and the Future of the Indian,” Forum Feb. 1895: 622–29; “Self-Teaching and the Indian Schools,” Educational Review Jan. 1891: 57–59; “Indian Education at Carlisle,” New England Magazine Apr. 1895: 224–39; “The Wild Indian,” Atlantic Monthly Jan. 1899: 20–29; “Indians on the Reservation,” Atlantic Monthly Feb. 1899: 255–67; “Making Good Indians,” Harper’s Weekly 31 Oct. 1908: 12–13; “Indian School Blunder,” Independent 9 Feb. 1905: 333; “The Indian Schools,” Independent 12 Apr. 1906: 883–84; “Indians as Wards,” Independent 13 Feb. 1908: 380–81. 8. Adams writes that this “war” was “more a series of skirmishes than an outright war” and that “the conflict was precipitated by the refusal of the Southern Plains Indians to accept the terms of the recent treaties confining them to reservation life” (37). 9. Pratt writes in Battlefield and the Classroom that the prisoners began their industrial work by preparing St. Augustine sea beans for sale as souve-


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nirs. They went on to work as laborers on local farms, on the railroads, and in various industries. 10. For examples of such practices, see Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1949 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998); Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893–1920 (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1996); Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light; Sally J. McBeth, Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-Central Oklahoma American Indians (Washington, D.C.: UP of America, 1983); Scott Riney, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898–1933. (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1999); Margaret Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination since 1928, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1977); Clifford Trafzer et al., eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2006). 11. In his 1895 essay, Super writes of Carlisle’s role as both model and promoter of Indian education: During the whole period of its existence the Carlisle school has served as the “Department of Publicity” in Indian school work. It has done this by its admirable location, by its superior advantages, by its publications, and by the public presentation of its students in great national demonstrations, such as the Constitutional Centennial in New York in 1887 and at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892 and 1893, as well as on many other conspicuous occasions, thus enlightening the people at large on the general questions of the merits and results of Indian education. In fact, the authorities of this school have always invited close scrutiny into its methods and results, knowing that the opposition to it could only result from ignorance and prejudice. (235) 12. In Battlefield and the Classroom, Pratt repeatedly refers to funding that Carlisle garnered from its supporters. For instance, he discusses the “large aid and sympathy received from various distinguished members of the Society of Friends” (314) and recalls that “[early] in the history of the school, the voluntary contributions flowing in became so material that I told Mr. Teller, the Secretary of the Interior, that I had better have help in the responsibility for the money and its use” (323). 13. Such instructions were not just intended for current Carlisle students. Once they left the school, students were expected to subscribe to and save these publications to continue the learning (and assimilation) process begun at Carlisle. An example of how these publications were to function is seen in another of Carlisle’s publications, Stiya. It is the story of a young Indian woman who returns home from Carlisle and struggles to retain what she has learned from the school. When faced with the “barbarity” of her parents’ home, Stiya turns to Carlisle’s publications as a source of comfort. Stiya writes, “After putting on a stick or two of wood, I went to my trunk and took out all my Indian Helpers, which I had kept so carefully between two pasteboard box covers.


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At school, every week when done reading the paper I put it in my trunk. ‘I thought I’d be glad to have you in my home,’ said I, talking to them as though they were a person. ‘And now I am glad’” (108). As a side note, Stiya was also published serially in fall 1889 issues of the Indian Helper, under the title “How an Indian Girl Might Tell Her Story if She Had the Chance.” Barbara Landis, head archivist at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pa., has assessed that Stiya was most probably written by the editor of Carlisle’s newspapers, Marianna Burgess. 14. The actual voice behind the Man-on-the-bandstand is difficult to discern. Although the man on the bandstand was “meant to evoke the watchful gaze of Pratt,” the editor and writer of a large proportion of “Man-on-the-bandstand” columns was Burgess, whose ideals followed in lock-step with Pratt’s educational plan (Bell 66). 15. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations from Carlisle’s publications will be taken from issues of the Indian Helper. 16. The Lake Mohonk Conference was held yearly from 1883 to 1913 for leaders in Indian reform to discuss the progress and needs of the Indian people. 17. Valerie Sherer Mathes comments on the way in which many “friends” of the Indians, especially the women of the Women’s National Indian Association, infantilized the Indian people: The women of the WNIA often saw Indians as child-like, existing within a heathenistic culture that needed to be properly cleansed and replaced by superior American culture. These decent God-fearing women saw little value in the Indian way of life—an attitude held by many nineteenth-century reformers working with non-whites and immigrants—and believed sincerely that it needed to be replaced for the good of the Indian. (2) 18. Lomawaima’s “Domesticity in the Federal Indian Schools” and They Called It Prairie Light provide thorough examinations of female education in Indian schools. Both texts investigate “the underlying federal agenda” of domestic education as one that “train[ed] Indian girls in subservience and submission to authority” (“Domesticity” 229). 19. An unidentified illness prevented Zitkala-Ša from graduating from Earlham (Hafen xvii). 20. Zitkala-Ša includes a description of this contest in the second installment of her autobiographical essays, and it is important to note that not everyone in the audience was impressed by her performance. She writes that while she was giving this speech, members of the audience held up a banner with the word squaw on it. Zitkala-Ša recalls that upon seeing the sign, “barbarian rudeness embittered me. While we waited for the verdict of the judges, I gleamed fiercely upon the throngs of palefaces.” When the judges announced her as winner of the contest, she writes that “the evil spirit laughed within me when the white flag dropped out of sight, and the hands which furled it hung limp in defeat” (“School Days” 194).


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21. The Atlantic Monthly also published her essay “Why I’m a Pagan” in December 1902. Her short stories “The Trial Path” and “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” were published in Harper’s Magazine’s March and October 1901 issues. Everybody’s Magazine published her short story “A Warrior’s Daughter” in 1902. In 1921, Zitkala-Ša published these works together as a collection entitled American Indian Stories. 22. Zitkala-Ša’s letters at this time evidence her attitude concerning her break up with Montezuma. She writes, “I do not want to demoralize you! I had no thoughts of limiting your ambition. Perhaps the Indians are not human enough for you to waste your skill upon! Stay in Chicago! Do!” (Letter to Montezuma, Mar. 1901). 23. Government reports from the Office of Indian Affairs (1898) and the Superintendent of Indian Schools (1901) positioned English instruction as a vital part of Indian education. Commissioner of Indian Affairs W. A. Jones set out an overt English-only policy in “Rules for the Indian School Service” (1898): “All instruction shall be in the English language. Pupils shall be required to converse with employees and each other in English” (25). Superintendent Estelle Reel not only reinforced this policy but also explained the effects of this learning on the student: “The aim of the course is to give the Indian child a knowledge of the English language, and to equip him with the ability to become self-supporting as speedily as possible” (5). 24. For a closer study of writing instruction in Indian schools, see Deborah A. Miranda, “‘A String of Textbooks’: Artifacts of Composition in Indian Boarding Schools,” Journal of Teaching Writing 16.2 (2000): 213–32. 25. These comments concerning Zitkala-Ša’s work were followed by the reprinting of two sections from her essay “School Days of an Indian Girl” titled “The Cutting of My Long Hair” and “Iron Routine” (Red Man Feb. 1900). I assume that the inclusion of these sections was meant to prove how “sadly misleading” her essays were. 4. Claiming Cultural Citizenship: Jovita Idar, Marta Peña, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and La Crónica 1. Unless otherwise noted, all of the articles and excerpts from La Crónica were translated by Jessica Enoch, Malena Florin, Lisa Lawson, and Raquel Moran Tellez. 2. Throughout this chapter, I follow the early twentieth-century convention of referring to these women as “Mexican.” They are consistently referred to as such in La Crónica, and other contributors such as Maria Rentería, Sara Estela Ramírez, and Astrea self-identify as Mexican women in their own work. I also use the term Mexican to describe the students of Mexican descent and readers of La Crónica living in Texas during this time. Again, I choose this term because, throughout La Crónica, the writers use it to define themselves, their readers, and the students in their communities. 3. In her introduction to Villegas’s autobiography, The Rebel, Clara Lomas


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explains that from 1898 through 1914, Jovita Idar wrote “under the pseudonym A.V. Negra (which translates phonetically to ‘Black Bird’).” Lomas goes on to write that “after her father’s death Idar worked for several periodicals in southern Texas—El Eco de Golfo (the Gulf’s Echo) in Corpus Christi; La Luz (the Light) in San Benito; La Prensa (the Press) in San Antonio—and in 1916, with the assistance of her brothers, she founded the daily Evolución (Evolution). In the 1940s she co-edited El Heraldo Cristiano (the Christian Herald) in San Antonio” (xv). Jovita Idar did sign her own name to La Crónica articles titled “The Eternal Problem” (15 Sept. 1910, 6); “In Memory of My Father” (memorial issue) (18 Apr. 1914, 2); and “In Memory of My Unforgettable Friend” (27 Aug. 1910, 3). 4. In this chapter, I designate the empowered Anglo-American population as “Anglo” instead of “white.” I have made this choice because of the controversy that surrounded (and surrounds) the designation of “white” inside Mexican/ Chicano/a communities. As George A. Martinez notes in his essay “The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican Americans and Whiteness,” an 1897 Texas court decision (In re Rodriquez) held that “Mexicans were white within the meaning of naturalization laws” because “the United States had entered into certain treaties with Mexico [and under] these circumstances that court concluded that Mexicans were entitled to become citizens” (326). It was “through the give and take of treaty making,” Martinez notes, that “Mexicans became ‘white’” (327). Martinez goes on to cite numerous court cases in which “the legal recognition of Mexican Americans as white failed to provide them with the benefits usually associated with whiteness” (347). In addition, the judicial designation worked against this community “by refusing to allow Mexican Americans to define themselves so as to resist oppression” (333). Thus, by designating the white, Anglo-American population as “Anglo” and the Mexican population in Texas as “Mexican,” we can better discern the power differentials as well as each community’s imperatives concerning language, culture, and schooling. 5. As Mexican women extended their prescribed roles during this period, they also invested themselves in what twenty-first-century readers would call feminist ideals. Although Mexican women continued to maintain their role in the home and family as purveyors of culture and tradition, they also became interested in women’s working conditions and educational opportunities. Pablos writes that the First Workers’ Congress in 1876 emphasized the need to “improve conditions for working women, to a large degree because of concern about the double workday and the consequent neglect of children” (80). And in the 1904 publication La Mujer Mexicana (the Mexican Woman), María Sandoval de Zarco wrote about the “physical, intellectual, and moral improvement of women” (qtd. in Pablos 81). In addition, many of the women who entered the classroom were also deeply involved in the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM, or Mexican Liberal Party), a political party that touted feminist ideals. The leader of the PLM, Ricardo Magón, published his feminist revolutionary tract “A La Mujer” (“To Woman”) in the Mexican newspaper Regeneracíon on 24 September 1910.


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This text did perpetuate traditional understandings of the Mexican woman’s “duty,” but it also called on women to be a political force that provided the support for the men in their families as they engaged in this new political struggle. The Mexican woman was to “encourage him when he vacillates” (160) and to “demand that [her] brothers, fathers, sons, and friends pick up the gun” and to “spit in the faces of those who do not pick up a weapon in rebellion” (162). 6. Mendoza writes that this group of people is often called the “Migrant Generation,” which “characterizes [Mexican immigrants] as a group whose primary intentions were to live and work outside the turbulent political and social climate of the Mexican Revolution.” He notes that many historians record that the “political sentiments” of these people “were negligible to nonexistent; their chief concern was to survive, not to actively participate in political life” (105). Such constructions of Mexican people are challenged by the pedagogical and political activism of the women in this study. 7. Another 1910 Laredo Weekly Times article titled “Many Laborers Arrive” makes a similar point: “The emigration from Mexico into this country is increasing in leaps and bounds and the next immigration report promises to break all previous records in this department at this port. The majority of the immigrants are laborers and they are daily swarming across the border in search of work in the states” (3). 8. As the following quotation from La Crónica indicates, a number of men of Mexican descent occupied powerful positions in Laredo. [Our] county magistrate, Mr. Jose M. Rodriguez; our Sheriff, Mr. Amador Sanchez; our county attorney, Mr. Juan V. Benavides; our police and our Sheriff Deputies are all of Mexican origin. Our D.A. Juan A. Vall was born in H. Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and he is linked to Mexico by strong bonds, and he is very dear to President Diaz, with whom he has maintained a cordial relationship since they were born, and this relationship was already cultivated by his father with our distinguished District Magistrate Mr. J. F. Mullally, who is also identified with Mexicans because his wife comes from a very honorable Mexican family. In a word: there is not one public servant that does not feel deep love for the Mexican element. (“Our Work” 3) Even though Laredo’s city government officials might have felt “a deep love for the Mexican element,” La Crónica reported consistent discriminatory practices occurring in the city and across the state. 9. Although I focus attention on Mexican education in Texas, the entire Southwest engaged in a variety of discriminatory practices when it came to Mexican involvement in public schools. 10. At the time Harris was speaking, there were forty-six states in the Union. Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state in November 1907. 11. It is important to note that when Mexican students were segregated from Anglo students, Mexican students did not attend the schools for black


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students. Instead there was a “tripartite” system of segregation where Anglo, black, and Mexican students attended different schools. For more information on segregation in Texas schools, see Guadalupe San Miguel Jr., “From a Dual to a Tri-Partite School System,” Integrated Education 17.5–6 (1980): 27–38. For insight into ways that white educators reflected on this racial situation and the differences between Anglo, black, and Mexican people, see Max Sylvanus Handman, “The Mexican Immigrant in Texas,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work 53 (1920): 332–39. 12. For more information on the Americanization movement in the United States, see Archdeacon; Robert A. Carlson, The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987); Henry Pratt Fairchild, The Melting Pot Mistake (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926); Edward George Hartmann, The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (New York: Columbia UP, 1948); and Frank Van Nuys, Americanizing the West: Race, Immigrants, and Citizenship, 1890–1930 (Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 2002). For primary resources that engage this discussion of immigration, assimilation, and Americanization, see Grace Abbott, “Adjustment—Not Restriction,” Survey 7 Jan. 1911: 527–29; Jane Addams, “Autobiographical Notes upon Twenty Years at Hull House,” American Magazine Sept. 1910: 638–48; Edward L. Godkin, “The Harm of Immigration,” Nation 19 Jan. 1893: 42–43; Henry P. Fairchild, “Foreign-Americans,” Nation 28 Dec. 1911: 626–27; Jeremiah Jenks, “The Urgent Immigration Problem,” World’s Work May 1911: 14368–74; Ernest Poole, “A Mixing Bowl for Nations,” Everybody’s Magazine Oct. 1910: 554–64; Day Allen Wiley, “Americans in the Making,” Putnam’s Monthly and the Reader Jan. 1909: 456–63. 13. Many who were interested in ideas of assimilation and national identity were invigorated by Israel Zangwill’s 1909 play The Melting Pot, which as Bogardus summarizes, “described the United States as a gigantic melting pot wherein the traditions and ideals of all races were being melted into one set of principles, namely, Americanism” (17). Zangwill was not, however, the first to use the metaphor. For an examination of how the melting pot metaphor was deployed prior to Zangwill’s play, see Richard Conant Harper, The Course of the Melting Pot Idea to 1910 (New York: Arno, 1980). 14. George J. Sanchez writes of the specific ways in which Americanization programs focused attention on Mexican women. See “‘Go After the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929,” Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 284–97. 15. L. H. Hubbard also preached the importance of English-language instruction, maintaining that “if [the student] can express himself orally or in writing in good English on the topics of interest to him—then we have done our full duty to him, and have done our full duty to ourselves” (13). 16. An examination of the educational journals published out of Texas, such as the Texas School Journal and the Bulletin of the University of Texas (which also published the Texas History Teacher’s Bulletin), reveals a steadfast focus


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on Anglo-American students and their educational materials and course objectives. These journals, which rarely if ever discuss ways to accommodate the language and cultural backgrounds of their Mexican students, frequently published articles concerning the English language and U.S. history, civic life, and cultural traditions. A survey of the Texas School Journal from 1905 and 1906, the Bulletin of the University of Texas from 1911 to 1914, as well as the Proceedings of the Conference for Education in Texas during the years 1907, 1909, 1910, and 1912 revealed not one article or panel discussion that addressed Mexican students’ education. A number of essays addressed issues in the rural schools in Texas that a large contingent of Mexicans attended, but none of the articles directly discussed Mexican students. The articles concerning rural schools do, however, detail the enormous disparity between the funding allocations to city and rural schools. Eby writes, “in the cities and towns the schools measured up well with the rest in the nation; those in the country were among the poorest.” He continues to explicate the discrepancy, highlighting the difference between the schools in 1900: “scholastic population in cities and towns was 157,681; in the rural districts, 571, 536. For each scholastic in the rural districts $4.97 was expended for education; for each child in the towns, $8.35. The average length of term in the one case was 98 days; and in the other was 162” (216). 17. La Crónica performed a number of other functions for the Mexican people of Texas besides that of arguing for and advancing Mexican educational opportunities. Limón explains that one of the major issues for La Crónica was the “pattern of officially tolerated lynchings of Texas-Mexicans.” Writing specifically about La Crónica’s investigations of the lynchings of Antonio Rodriguez and Antonio Gómez, he notes that the newspaper defined the lynchings as “barbaric [acts] and denounced the inaction of the local authorities” (88). In addition, the publication also spoke out against the “general climate of racial discrimination particularly in central Texas where signs such as ‘No lots sold to Mexicans’ and ‘No Mexicans admitted’ were prevalent” (89). Finally, as Limón emphasizes in his essay, the newspaper also sponsored the first Mexican congress in Texas, El Primer Congreso Mexicanista. This meeting, held 14–22 Sept. 1911 in Laredo, focused on a number of pressing concerns, including school discrimination and Spanish-language instruction (91). 18. See chapter 7 of Logan’s “We Are Coming” titled “‘Can Women Do This Work?’: The Discourse of Racial Uplift,” for a more detailed discussion of the National Association of Colored Women’s motto “Lift as We Climb.” Logan’s discussion of the motto and the ideas of racial uplift of the period have interesting resonances with the efforts of La Crónica writers. Logan notes: While the term “uplift” carried with it the assumption that those being lifted occupied inferior positions and that they needed to be elevated to a more socially acceptable level, these [speeches on racial uplift] acknowledge inferiority only as a direct consequence of slavery, not as an innate and indelible trait. To remove this taint of an inferior and


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“downtrodden” race, black intellectuals agreed for improvement in the material conditions of black people. (153) 19. I was not able to obtain El Estudiante to assess the publication or its success in the community. The only available information regarding the publication is found in La Crónica, which announced the arrival of El Estudiante on 19 Oct. 1911 in this way: “Jovita Idar has begun a small and pleasant bilingual weekly magazine titled ‘El Estudiante’ which is dedicated exclusively to school interests and issues. The people who will contribute to this magazine will be students from official schools and students from private schools of this city and the neighboring city of North Laredo. We wish for the great success of ‘El Estudiante’” (“El Estudiante” 1). In addition, following La Crónica’s 26 Oct. 1911 republication of Sra. O. P. Reid’s essay is this note: “As you can see in the above letter from the respectable teacher of the Mexican children Sra. Reid, El Estudiante has had very good approval due to its sacred mission, because it is the first newspaper of its kind in Texas and because it has been so joyfully received by so many teachers as well as students. The approval has been such that the newspaper will double its length next issue” (Reid 4). 20. I was not able to obtain any biographical information on Marta Peña. As with many of the teachers whose pedagogy is discussed in La Crónica, the newspaper seems to be the only resource that records her life and work. 21. Peña’s sections certainly speak to the complicated civic and cultural situation that Mexicans living in Laredo faced. Many Mexicans already lived permanently in Texas or planned to remain in the region after emigration, and Peña’s instruction on cultural citizenship spoke to these readers. However, many people living in Laredo did plan to return to Mexico after the Revolution. Peña may have been using these educational installments to continue this contingent’s civic education while they lived temporarily on the northern side of the border. 22. Other La Crónica writers contributed to this apparent “legitimizing” effort by teaching readers about Western cultural traditions through such articles as “George Washington: The First President of the United States of America,” trans. Lisa Lawson and Raquel Moran Tellez (19 Feb. 1910): 2; “Thomas Alva Edison,” trans. Jessica Enoch and Lisa Lawson (17 Dec. 1910): 2; “The Heroic Symphony of Beethoven,” trans. Jessica Enoch and Lisa Lawson (4 June 1910): 1; and “The Words of Victor Hugo,” trans. Jessica Enoch and Lisa Lawson (25 June 1910): 5. 23. Anzaludúa’s quotation translates into English as follows: Foul-mouthed. We are those speaking a deficient Spanish. We are your linguistic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic crossbreed, the subject of your mockery. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguistically we are orphans—we speak a foreign tongue. (80)


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24. Much of this final argument concerning Villegas was generated through a conversation with Jaime Mejía. 25. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo writers such as Stephen Crane, Carleton Beals, and Ruth Allen produced a number of lasting prejudicial assessments of the Mexican woman. In his 1896 essay “The Main Streets of this City,” Crane writes of a “quality lacking” in the eyes of Mexican women. These eyes, Crane appraises, “cannot regard you with sudden intelligence, comprehension, sympathy. . . . [Mexican women] take life easily, dreamily. They remind me of kittens asleep in the sunshine” (qtd. in Katz 67). Beals makes an even more derogatory estimation of Mexican women in his 1921 North American Review essay, writing that the Mexican woman “prides herself on her submissiveness and subjection. . . . She has no independence and no importance, except to serve as man’s slave and minister to his desires” (139). Finally, Allen repeats the stereotypical claims articulated by Crane and Beals when she evaluates Mexican women’s involvement in the early twentieth-century women’s movement: The Mexican woman has been taught as her guide to follow the vow of the Moabitess, “Where thou goest, I will go.” Up and down the road she follows the men in her family. . . . The modern Woman’s Movement and demands for economic independence have left her untouched. Uncomplainingly, she labors in the field for months at a time and receives as reward from the head of the family some gee-gaw from the five and ten store, or, at best, a new dress. The supremacy of the male is seldom disputed. (qtd. in Ruiz 14–15) Through texts such as these, Anglo writers produced definitions of Mexican women as obedient, servile, and passive that persisted throughout the twentieth century and continue to endure into the twenty-first. 26. Alma A. Garcia cites the beginning of the Chicana feminist movement in the 1970s, arguing that it developed out of the Chicano movement and distinguished itself from Chicano social activism and intellectual work because these male-dominated arenas failed to consider the specific forces that influenced the lives of Chicanas. See Garcia, “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse,” Gender and Society 3.2 (1989): 217–38; and Denise A. Segura and Beatriz M. Pesquera, “Chicana Feminisms: Their Political Context and Contemporary Expressions,” Latino Studies Reader, ed. Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (London: Blackwell P, 1998), 193–205. 27. The arguments of Idar, Peña, and Villegas also connect with a burgeoning feminist discussion inside the pages of La Crónica. For a more detailed discussion of this feminist conversation, see Jessica Enoch, “Para La Mujer: Defining a Chicana Feminist Rhetoric at the Turn of the Century,” College English 67.1 (2004): 20–37. 28. For more information concerning the Spanish-language press in the Southwest, see Félix Gutíerrez, “Spanish Language Media in America: Background, Resources, History,” Journalism History 4.2 (1977): 34–67; Laura


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Gutiérrez-Witt, “Cultural Continuity in the Face of Change: Hispanic Printers in Texas,” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Erlinda GonzalesBerry and Chuck Tatum, vol. 2 (Houston: Arte Público, 1996), 260–78; Nicolás Kanellos, “A Socio-Historic Study of the Hispanic Newspapers in the United States,” Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Ramón Gutíerrez and Genaro Padilla, vol. 1 (Arte Público, 1993), 107–28; Clara Lomas, “The Articulation of Gender in the Borderlands,” Gutíerrez and Padilla 293–308; A. Gabriel Meléndez, So All Is Not Lost: The Poetics of Print in Nueveomexicano Communities, 1884–1958 (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1997); and América Rodriguez, “U.S. Spanish Language Newspapers, 1848–1970,” Making Latino News: Race, Language, Class (London: Sage, 1999), 13–25.


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Index abnegación, 126 abolitionist literature, 49–50, 56, 67–69, 186n. 9 Adams, David Wallace, 77, 80, 189n. 8 Advanced Lessons in Everyday English (Bolenius), 135–36 “Advancement of Mexicans in Texas, The” (Villegas), 122, 153, 156–57 African Americans. See blacks agency, 153 “A La Mujer” (“To Woman”; Magón), 193–94n. 5 alliance building, 119–20 American Freedmen’s Union Commission, 41 American Indian Magazine, 94 American Indians. See Indian education; Indians “American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in Contemporary North America” (Jaimes and Halsey), 114–15 Americanization movement, 133–38, 175; Mexican resistance to, 151, 157–61; and Mexican students in Texas, 135–38 Americanizing the West (Van Nuys), 135 American Missionary, 34, 38–40, 55; on religion, 42–43 American Missionary Association (AMA), 31, 34–35, 68, 185n. 2; requirements for black teachers by, 55 American Tract Society (ATS), 31–32, 68; educational materials of, 25, 35, 40, 43–46, 52

America’s Second Tongue (Spack), 86, 188n. 1 Anderson, Benedict, 174 Anglo, as term, 193n. 4 Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Montejano), 128–29 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 157, 197n. 23 Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Child), 49, 67–68, 186n. 9 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (Walker), 33 Aristotle, 5, 70 Art of Public Speaking (Lucas), 116 assimilation: Americanization movement, 133–38, 151, 157–61, 175; biculturalism as disruption of, 156; Indian education, civilizing rhetoric, 74–77, 79, 84, 96–98; Mexican education, 132–38 Atlantic Monthly: Carlisle’s response to Zitkala-Ša, 110–12; “Greaser” essay, 129, 155; Zitkala-Ša’s essays, 4, 20, 21, 73–74, 90, 95–108 Bacon, Jacqueline, 9, 10 Bales, O. H., 87 Balester, Valerie, 23 banking model of education, 46 Banneker, Benjamin, 64 Bardeen, C. W., 2 Barnett, Timothy, 177 Battey, Mary S., 34, 40 Battlefield and the Classroom, The (Pratt), 77 Beecher, Catherine, 1, 2–3, 4 217

Enoch Index.indd 217

3/28/08 9:26:47 AM

218

Index

Benmayor, Rina, 22, 122, 153 bicultural and bilingual education, 22, 148–49 biculturalism, 123, 156, 162–63 bilingual newspapers, 197n. 19 Bizzell, Patricia, 162 blacks: churches of, 42; denied education, 33–34, 63; rhetorics and pedagogies of, 19–20; as scholars, 55–56; as term, 183n. 2 ; work outside academic settings, 10–11. See also freedmen’s education black women: “Lift as We Climb” metaphor, 38, 143, 196–97n. 18; rhetorical achievements of, 16–17. See also teachers, black Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 114 “Blowout 1910 Style” (De León), 131 Board of Indian Commissioners, 76 body: civilizing rhetoric and, 97–98; in rhetorical education, 115–17 body politic, 116–17 Boen, William, 58–59 Bogardus, Emory, 134 Bolenius, Emma Miller, 135–36 Bonnin, Raymond, 94 border tongues, 157 Boswell, Helen Varick, 134 Bourdieu, Pierre, 24–25 Brown, Hallie Quinn, 69 Bryan, Samuel, 130 Buchanan, Lindal, 116, 117 Bulwer, John, 115–16 Burke, Kenneth, 161, 175 Campbell, George, 161–62 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 13, 15–16, 168 Cantú, Norma, 159–60 Cárdenas, Diana, 163–64 Carlisle Indian School, 4, 8, 21, 23; curriculum at, 79–80; education script of, 80–83; Indian teachers at, 85–89; military-style training at, 79, 84; periodicals of, 25, 73, 75, 80–82, 190–91n. 13; response by, to Atlantic Monthly articles, 110–12 ; Stiya, 190–91n. 13; teacher-education program at, 88–89; “Two Sides of Institutional Life,” 111;


white patrons of, 108–9; white teachers at, 73–74, 78, 108; Zitkala-Ša’s Atlantic Monthly essays on, 73–74, 90, 95–108; Zitkala-Ša’s exposure of, 108–10. See also Indian education Cary, Elisabeth Luther, 112 Castillo, Guadelupe, 160 Century of Dishonor, A (Jackson), 75, 189n. 6 chain of reifications, 174–75 Chicana feminist movement, 198n. 26 Chicana rhetorics, 18, 22–23. See also Mexican education; Mexicans Chickasaw Nation, 114 Child, David Lee, 47, 50–51 Child, Lydia Maria, 3, 17, 30–32, 165, 169, 177; ambivalence in writings of, 57; as antislavery activist, 49–50, 186nn. 10–12; children’s literature and, 47–49; photograph of, 51; religious beliefs of, 56–60, 187n. 15; writing career of, 47– 49; Works: Anti-Slavery Catechism, 50; Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 49, 67–68, 186n. 9; Evenings in New England, 47; Frugal Housewife, 47, 49; Little Girl’s Own Book, 47; Mother’s Book, 47. See also Freedmen’s Book, The Chironomia; or, The Art of Manual Rhetoric, 116 Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Richardson), 42 Cicero, 5, 70, 116 citizenship, Mexican, 130, 139 civic duties, 3; disruptive questions and, 62–63; education of blacks for, 40–41; in Freedmen’s Book, 61–66; freedmen’s education and, 34, 39–40, 42; rhetorical examples and, 63–65 civic identity, 161–62 civic participation, 3, 28, 56; in Freedmen’s Book, 31, 72; Mexican education and, 150–53, 163–64 civilizing rhetoric: body, education of, 115–17; in Indian education, 74–77, 79, 84, 96–98; as violent form of cultural erasure, 96, 117–18

3/28/08 9:26:48 AM

Index

Civil War, 28, 33–34 classical rhetoric, 5–6, 71, 161–62, 172–73 Cobb, Amanda, 114 Comfort, Juanita Rodgers, 19, 71–72 conflict, times of, 28 “Consciousness Raising” (Campbell), 168 “Conservation of Nationalism, The” (Idar), 121, 122, 144–47, 149 Cooper, Anna Julia, 69 Coppin, Fanny Jackson, 68 Cos, Grant C., 173 counter public discourse, 71 Coward, John M., 75 “Creating an Identity” (Cárdenas), 163–64 critical pedagogy, 27 Crónica, La, 4, 10, 22–23, 121–24, 129, 165; “Beautiful School Party,” 125; Idar’s contributions to, 143–49; on lynchings of Mexicans, 196n. 17; on Mexican teachers, 138–43; on Mexican teachers in Texas, 124–27; “New American School,” 141, 145; Peña’s contributions to, 150–53; political role of, 139–43; “To Instruct Is an Unavoidable Obligation,” 142–43; Villegas’s contributions to, 153–58 Crowley, Sharon, 6, 8 cultural citizenship, 22, 122–23, 156; claiming of, 161–64; rhetorical education for, 143–58; as women’s work, 158–64 cultural education, 153–58 cultural learning centers, 118 cultural literacy, 156–57 Cutter, Martha, 104 Darder, Antonia, 147 Dawes Act (General Allotment Act), 76 decorum, 70–72 De León, Arnoldo, 131 Development of Education in Texas, The (Eby), 131 Dickerson, Roy, 136 discourse, definition of, 24 “Discourse, Delivered at the Dedication of the Seminary Hall” (Emerson), 1 domestic advice genre, 48 “Domestic City in the Federal Indian Schools” (Lomawaima), 87


219

dominant discourse, 4, 24–26, 132; challenged in Freedmen’s Book, 53–54 Douglass, Frederick, 53, 62–63 Dunn, Cora, 87 Dyke, Charles Bartlett, 84 Eby, Frederic, 131 education: banking model of, 46 ; as practice of freedom, 18–19; stability as goal of, 41–43. See also freedmen’s education; Indian education; Mexican education “Educational Duties of the Hour, The” (Greene), 34–35 educational journals, Texas, 195–96n. 16 “Education as an Element in Reconstruction” (Wickersham), 41 Education for Extinction (Adams), 77– 78 Emerson, Joseph, 1 English-only policies: empowerment strategies within, 145–46, 163; Indian education and, 79, 89, 101–5, 117–18, 192n. 23; Mexican education and, 136, 144–45, 148–49, 195n. 15; as sign of national allegiance, 161–62; Standardized English instruction, 149, 162; in university, 174–75; Zitkala-Ša on, 102–5, 117. See also languages escuelitas (private schools), 125, 138–39; Idar’s call for, 146–48; La Luz academy, 138, 142 Essentials of Americanization (Bogardus), 134 Estudiante, El, 122, 148–49, 197n. 19 “Ethiopia” (Harper), 59–61 exile, creation of, 106–8 Favella, J. W., 127 feminisms, as theoretical construct, 17 feminist histories of rhetoric, 12–15, 166– 67; women of color and, 16–18; writing the teacher into, 167–68 Fetterly, Judith, 26 Fleming, David, 6 Flores, Richard, 151 Flores, William V., 22, 122, 153, 156 Fort Marion Indian school, 77–78, 84

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220

Index

Foucault, Michel, 25, 83 Freedman (ATS), 25, 35–36, 37, 185n. 3; “Crosses,” 44–45; “Faithful Yanko,” 45–46; inaugural issue of, 40 Freedmen’s Aid Association, 52 Freedmen’s Book, The (Child), 4, 20, 23; “Advice from an Old Friend,” 61–62; “Beginning and Progress of Emancipation in the British West Indies,” 57–58; black teachers in, 54–56; civic duty in, 61–66; composition of, 50–53; dominant discourse challenged in, 53–54; freedmen’s teachers’ role in, 54–56; intellectual ancestry in, 64–65; “Meeting in the Swamp,” 30–31; as multivocal text, 30–31, 53, 72; religious truth in, 56–61; revising rhetorical education in, 70–72; rhetorical education in, 53–66; rhetorical strategies taught in, 53–54, 57, 62–63; table of contents, 54, 56–57, 72. See also Child, Lydia Maria Freedmen’s Bureau, 35, 185n. 2, 186–87n. 13 freedmen’s education, 4, 10; ATS educational materials, 40, 43–46, 52; challenges by teachers, 66–72 ; in civic duties, 34, 39–40, 42, 61–66; complicating of teacher’s role, 67–69, 169–70; debates, 33–35; educational materials, 35–37, 43–46; monitoring of teachers, 39–41; national stability as goal of, 41–43; percentage of white female teachers, 37–38; religion and, 40–43, 56–61; rhetorical education, 43–46, 53–66, 67–72; teachers’ role in, 54–56; teaching as women’s work, 35–41; work of teachers, 41–43. See also blacks Freedmen’s Primer, The (ATS), 40, 44 Freedmen’s Second Reader, The (ATS), 44 freedmen’s societies. See missionary societies Freedmen’s Third Reader, The (ATS), 44, 56–57 Freire, Paulo, 18–19, 46 “Friends of the Indians,” 75 From Out of the Shadows (Ruiz), 160 Garcia, Alma A., 198n. 26 Gates, Merrill, 84


Gee, James, 24, 44 “Gender and the ‘American Way of Life’” (McClymer), 134–35 General Allotment Act (Dawes Act), 76 gesture, 116 Gilyard, Keith, 63 Glenn, Cheryl, 8, 13, 14, 21, 57 Gold, David, 9, 10 Gonzalez, Gilbert, 129 Goodale, Elaine, 80 Gore, Jennifer, 27 “Greaser, The” (Lighton), 129, 155 Greene, Samuel, 33–34 Hafen, P. Jane, 94–95 Hailman, W. N., 84–85 Halloran, S. Michael, 6 Halsey, Theresa, 114–15 Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute, 78 Harjo, Joy, 104–5 Harper, Frances, 53, 57, 64; “Ethiopia,” 59–61 Harris, Theodore, 131 Hawhee, Debra, 116 Heilburn, Carolyn, 15 Henry, O., 129–30, 155 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 49 Highgate, Edmonia, 69 Hill, Clyde Walton, 136 historiography, 9–11, 72; feminist histories of rhetoric, 12–18, 166–67; histories of rhetorical education, 173–75; politicized practice of, 65–66; redefining, 172–73 “History and the Spaces Left” (Royster and Williams), 19 Horner, Bruce, 161–62, 174 Horton, George, 57, 64 “How the Mexican Children Learn English” (Reid), 148 Idar, Clemente, 139 Idar, Jovita (A. V. Negra), 4, 10, 22, 23, 165, 169, 177; call for funding for escuelitas, 146–48; as editor, 122; Works: “Conservation of Nationalism,” 121, 122, 144–47, 149; “Mexican Children in Texas,” 122, 144–49

3/28/08 9:26:49 AM

Index

Idar, Nicasio, 129 Idar family, 121–22, 139 “Ideas on Civic Instruction” (Peña), 150– 53 Iktomi (trickster) tales, 92 imagined communities, 174 immigration, 126–30, 194nn. 6, 7; stereotypes of Mexicans and, 129–30 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs), 50 Indian education, 10, 28; civilizing rhetoric and, 74–77, 79, 84, 96–98; Englishonly policies of, 79, 89, 101–5, 117–18, 192n. 23; exile, creation of, 106–8; Fort Marion Indian school, 77–78, 84; Indian teachers, 17–18, 74, 85–89; individualism, focus on, 74–75, 83, 105; manual training, 79, 81, 89; off-reservation boarding schools, 76–77, 80; resistance and reform strategies, 112–20; success, rhetoric of, 82, 83, 107, 111; tribal languages, eradication of, 74–75, 101–5; white female teachers, 73–74, 78, 84–85. See also Carlisle Indian School “Indian Education at Carlisle” (Super), 80 Indian Helper (Carlisle Indian School), 25, 74, 80–81, 89; condescending tone in, 97–98; “Don’t” articles in, 97; Man-onthe-band-stand, 82–83, 95, 191n. 14; on tribal languages, 101–2; on Zitkala-Ša, 90–92 Indian Industrial School. See Carlisle Indian School Indian Industrial School Carlisle, Pa., 88 Indians: cultural codes, 99–100; cultural learning centers, 118 ; land ownership, 76; native women’s organizations, 114–15; rhetorical sovereignty of, 21–22, 74–75, 96, 101, 110; rhetorics and pedagogies, 20–22; stereotypes of, 86–87, 113–15, 177; stereotypes of women, 86–87, 113–15; as term, 183n. 2; tribal languages, eradication of, 74–75, 101–5; tribally controlled education, 118–19 individualism, 83, 105 Information concerning the United States


221

Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pa., 88 Institutes of Oratory (Quintilian), 5, 71 intellectual ancestry, 64–65 interpretive frames, 26 Isocrates, 5, 8 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 75, 189n. 6 Jacobs, Harriet, 50 Jaimes, M. Annette, 114–15 Jarratt, Susan, 17, 171 Jesús de León, María, 138 Johnson, Nan, 6, 7, 9, 16 Jones, Jacqueline, 43, 55, 186n. 13. See also Royster, Jacqueline Jones Jones, Joseph G., 173 Juvenile Miscellany (magazine), 48 Kaminsky, Amy, 17 Karcher, Carolyn L., 49 Kates, Susan, 9, 10 Kelley, Robin D. G., 165, 166 Kells, Michelle Hall, 23 Kelly, Judge, 57 La Luz academy, 138, 142 land ownership, 76, 128–29 Laney, Lucy Craft, 68–69 languages: border tongues, 157; SpanishEnglish dialect, 157, 197n. 23; tribal, eradication of, 74–75, 101–5. See also English-only policies Laredo, “The Gateway to Mexico” (Favella), 127 Laredo Weekly Times, 127–28 Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights (Flores and Benmayor), 22 Leonardo da Vinci, 156 “Let All of Them Take Heed” (San Miguel), 138 Let’s Flip the Script (Gilyard), 63 liberatory pedagogy, 27 “Lift as We Climb” motto, 38, 143, 196– 97n. 18 Lighton, William, 129, 155 Límon, José, 139 Lincoln, C. Eric, 185n. 4

3/28/08 9:26:49 AM

222

Index

listening, rhetorical, 118–19 Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories (Cobb), 114 Littlejohn, E. G., 137 Logan, Shirley Wilson, 9, 10, 12, 17, 68, 69; “To Get an Education,” 187n. 18; “We Are Coming”: Nineteenth-Century African American Women, 16, 60, 196–97n. 18 Lomas, Clara, 18, 192–93n. 3 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, 79, 87, 191n. 18 Lorde, Audre, 62 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 55–66 Lucas, Stephen, 116 Lunsford, Andrea A., 13 Lyons, Scott, 17, 21–22, 74–75, 189n. 4 Macdeo, Donaldo, 145 Madero, Francisco, 128, 154–55 Magnón, Leonor Villegas de, 121 Magón, Ricardo, 194–95n. 5 Managing Literacy, Mothering America (Robbins), 48 Man Cannot Speak for Her (Campbell), 13, 15–16 manifest manners, 100–101 Mann, Horace, 1 Man-on-the-band-stand, 82–83, 95, 191n. 14 manual training: Indian education, 79, 81, 89; Mexican education, 132 “Mapping the Spanish Language” (Sánchez), 146 Martinez, George A., 193n. 4 Mathes, Valerie Sherer, 191n. 17 Matthews, Victoria Earle, 187n. 14 Mattingly, Carol, 16, 167 McClish, Glen, 10 McClymer, John, 134–35 Mejía, Jaime, 22–23, 158 melting pot metaphor, 133, 195n. 13 memory, 65–67 Mendoza, Louis, 128, 194n. 6 Mexican, as term, 192n. 2 Mexican American press, 160 “Mexican Children in Texas, The” (Idar), 122, 144–49 Mexican education, 4, 10, 25, 130–38 ;


Americanization, resistance to, 158–61; Americanization of students, 135–38; assimilation project of, 132–38; for civic identity, 150–53; for civic participation, 163–64; English-only policy of, 136, 144–45, 148–49, 195n. 13; escuelitas, 125, 138–39, 142; history lessons, 137; manual training, 132; rhetorical education, 137–38; rhetorical education for cultural citizenship, 143–58; segregated, 131–32, 136, 194–95n. 11; white female teachers, 134–35 “Mexican Evolution, The” (Villegas), 122, 153, 154–55 “Mexican Immigrants in the United States” (Bryan), 130 Mexican Revolution, 28, 128, 130, 194n. 6 Mexicans: family, importance of, 150–51; foreign-born, in Texas, 131; government positions held by, 129, 131, 194n. 8; landholders, 128–29; lynchings of, 196n. 17; stereotypes of, 127–30, 142, 152, 177; stereotypes of women, 123– 26, 159–60, 198n. 25; as term, 183n. 2; viewed as laborers only, 128, 194n. 7; whiteness debate, 193n. 4 Mexico: civic identity, 150–53; newspapers, 128; porfiriato, 126; sociopolitical position, 126, 128, 193–94n. 5; treaties with, 193n. 4 Miller, Susan, 171 Miller, Thomas, 173 missionary societies, 34–35, 55; monitoring of teachers, 39–41. See also American Missionary Association; American Tract Society Molina, Vivia, 124, 138 “Mona Lisa, The” (Villegas), 122, 153, 156 Montejano, David, 128–29 Montezuma, Carlos, 94, 95, 192n. 22 Montgomery, James, 57 Morrison, Toni, 66 Morse, Jedediah, 86–87 mother, 134, 151, 171; teacher as, 2, 14–15, 85 Motherteacher (Suggs), 14–15 multilingualism, 118–19 Munro, Petra, 26

3/28/08 9:26:50 AM

Index 223

National Anti-Slavery Standard, 50, 56, 69 National Association of Colored Women, 38 National Council of American Indians, 94 Negra, A. V. See Idar, Jovita New England Freedmen’s Aid Society, 39 New York Tribune, 75, 189n. 6 North American Review, 49 officialization, 24–25 Olcott, Jocelyn, 126 Orator (Cicero), 70 Pablos, Julia Tuñón, 126 Panopticon, 83 Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM), 193– 94n. 5 Patterson, Mary Jane, 68 pedagogical collective, 168–69 pedagogical theory, critical and multicultural, 18–24 Peña, Marta, 4, 10, 22, 23, 121, 165, 169, 177, 197n. 21; Works: “Ideas on Civic Instruction,” 150–53; “Sections for Mexican Children,” 122 penmanship, 44 people, as term, 189n. 4 Perrin, Homer, 3 Peyser, Nathan, 133 Philbrick, John D., 2 Phillips, Wendell, 41 Picotte, Susan La Flesche, 119 “Plea for the Indians, A” (New York Tribune), 189n. 6 Pough, Gwendolyn, 32, 71 Powell, Malea, 18, 21, 106, 119–20 power, negotiation of, 7, 20, 25, 176–77 Prather, William, 136–37 Pratt, Richard Henry, 74, 76–80, 108, 189– 90n. 9, 190n. 12; early plans for Carlisle, 78–79; on Indian teachers, 85–86 “Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911, El” (Limón), 139 Quintilian, 5, 71, 172 Ramos, Carmen, 125–26 Ratcliffe, Krista, 119


readers, as teachers, 55, 63 Red Man (Carlisle Indian School), 25, 73, 74, 80–81; critique of Zitkala-Ša in, 110–12; “Hunt for the South Side,” 110–12 Red River War of 1874, 77 Reel, Estelle, 85, 113, 115, 193n. 23 Reid, Sra. O. P., 148, 152 religion, freedmen’s education and, 40–43, 56–61 residential segregation, 132 resistance, 24–26 Reyna, Filiberta, 124, 138 rhetoric: classical, 5–6, 71, 161–62, 172–73; as term, 173 rhetorical education, 5–9, 28; biculturalism, 162–63; body, figure of, 115–17; as both cultural and political, 176; challenges by teachers, 66–72; civic identity and, 161–62; competing ends, 178; for cultural citizenship, 143–58; in cultural communities, 178; definitions, 5–6; first-person plural pronoun, 83, 95; in Freedmen’s Book, 53–66; freedmen’s education, 43–46, 53–66, 67–72; future of, 11–12; heuristic for, 175–79; histories of the United States, 173–75; invention of new forms, 7–8, 65–66; Mexican education and, 137–38; redefining history and historiography, 172–73; resistance and reform strategies, 112–20; revising, 70–72; as rhetorical, 177; rhetorical sovereignty and, 115–20; skills, repertoire of, 177–78; in twenty-first century, 171–79; as two-pronged, 31; white power maintained by, 176–77; writing history of, 9–11 rhetorical sovereignty, 21–22, 74–75, 96, 101, 110 ; rhetorical education and, 115–20 “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” (Lyons), 75 “Rhetoric and American Indians” (Stromberg), 119 rhetoric and composition instructors, 27; in twenty-first century, 170–71 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 5

3/28/08 9:26:51 AM

224

Index

Rhetoric of Motives, A (Burke), 161 “Rhetorics of Survivance” (Powell), 106 rhetors: civic identity and, 161–62; women’s role as, 13–15 Richards, Josephine, 87 Richardson, Elaine, 19 Richardson, Joe, 42 Riney, Scott, 76 Rios, Herminio, 160 Robbins, Sarah, 48 Rockow, Lewis, 134 Romano, Susan, 9, 10 Rosaldo, Renato, 122, 176 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 16, 17, 19, 69; on intellectual ancestry, 64–65; Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1871, 35, 38; Traces of a Stream, 26, 168. See also Jones, Jacqueline Ruiz, Vicki, 160 Sánchez, George, 130 Sánchez, Rosaura, 146 Sancho, Ignatius, 57 Sandoval de Zarco, María de, 193n. 5 San Miguel, Guadalupe, Jr., 138, 160 Santee School, 90 savage-civilized dualism, 96–98; challenges to, 98–101 Savannah Educational Association (SEA), 55, 186–87n. 13 saving, rhetoric of, 35, 37–39, 67, 100 Scenters-Zapico, John T., 173 Schell, Eileen, 171 Schneider, Stephen, 9, 10 scholarship, 9–10; position of scholar within text, 26–29 schoolmarm, 14 “Scope and Method of Texas History, The” (Littlejohn ), 137 silence, rhetorical, 57 silencing, 110–12, 157 Silvestrini, Blanca, 22, 122, 163 Simmons, Gertrude. See Zitkala-Ša social change, education for, 62–63 social codes, imposition of, 97–98 socializing values, 19 Society of American Indians, 94


Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1871 (Jones), 35, 38 “Some Suggestive Problems in the Americanization of Mexicans” (Dickerson), 136 sovereignty, rhetorical. See rhetorical sovereignty Spack, Ruth, 86, 101, 188n. 1 speech communication, 116–17 Stein, Colmen, Jr., 148–49 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 78 Stromberg, Ernest, 119 Suggs, Redding, 14–15 Super, O. B., 80 survivance, 21, 101 Swearingen, Jan, 6 Taketani, Etsuko, 48 Tappan, Lewis, 52 teachers: challenges to, 4–5, 67–69; civilizing role of, 2–3, 84, 171; expectations of, 166–67; feminist rhetorical history and, 12–15; feminized, in twenty-first century, 170–71; marginalized status of, 10–11; mothering associated with, 2, 14–15, 85; stereotypes of, 1–3, 14–15; teaching as women’s work, 1–2, 35–41. See also teachers, black; teachers, Indian; teachers, Mexican; teachers, white teachers, black, 55, 68–69, 169 teachers, Indian, 17–18, 74, 85–89 teachers, Mexican, 124–27; cultural citizenship and, 158–64; escuelitas, 125, 138–39, 142; in Laredo, 138–43; redefinition of role, 123–24 teachers, readers as, 55, 63 teachers, white: Americanization and, 134–35; complication of role, 67–69, 169–70; focus on, deflecting attention from black teachers, 68–69, 169; Indian education and, 73–74, 78, 84–85; Mexican education and, 134–35; Northern, 3, 17, 35, 37–39, 67; as “savers,” 35, 37–39, 67; teaching as women’s work, 35–41 Texas: Americanization of Mexican students, 135–38; annexation of, 128–29; educational journals, 25, 195–96n. 16;

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Index 225

English-only laws, 136; immigration to, from Mexico, 126–30, 194nn. 6, 7; Laredo, 127–30; lynchings of Mexicans, 196n. 17; Mexican education in, 130–38; Mexicans hold government positions, 129, 131, 194n. 8; Mexican landholders in, 128–29; Mexican women teachers in, 124–27; middle- to upper-class families, 129; segregation in education, 131–32, 136, 141, 194–95n. 11; state schools, 130–31 Texas Revolution of 1836, 128 Texas School Journal, 25 Theobald, Marjorie R., 14 theory, valued over pedagogy, 167–68 Tlaltelolco, 10 “Tomales” (Henry), 129, 155 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 130, 139 tribal languages, 74–75, 101–5 Trimbur, John, 161–62, 174 Van Nuys, Frank, 135 Villanueva, Victor, Jr., 23, 162 Villegas de Magnón, Leonor, 4, 10, 22, 23, 153–58, 165, 169, 177; Mexican politics, involvement in, 128, 154; Works: “Advancement of Mexicans in Texas,” 122, 153, 156–57; “Mexican Evolution,” 122, 153, 154–55; “Mona Lisa,” 122, 153, 156; Rebel, 154, 192–93n. 3 vir bonus, 5 vita activa, 5–6 Vizenor, Gerald, 21, 95, 100–101 Walker, David, 33 Walker, Jeffrey, 9 Walsh, Edwina, 14 Walzer, Art, 6 Weist, Katherine, 86 Wells, Ida B., 69 Wells, Susan, 16 “What Should College Education Be?” (Logan), 12 Wheatley, Phyllis, 57, 58–59; “Work of Providence,” 64 white behaviors, equated with savageness, 99–100


Whittier, John, 186n. 9 Wickersham, J. P., 41, 55 Williams, Fannie Barrier, 69 Williams, Heather Andrea, 33, 184–85n. 1 Williams, Jean C., 19 Williams, Peter, 54 Wilson, Henry, 61 Winnemuca, Sarah, 119 women: double bind, negotiation of, 67–68; nature of, teaching and, 1–2; as rhetors, 13–15; stereotypes of Indian, 86–87, 113–15; stereotypes of Mexican, 159–60, 198n. 25. See also teachers; teachers, black; teachers, Indian; teachers, Mexican Women in Mexico (Pablos), 126 Women of All Red Nations (WARN), 115 Women’s Civic Improvement League of El Paso, 132 women’s rhetoric, at turn of twentieth century, 15–16 Women’s Work for the Lowly (AMA), 36 Word Carrier (Santee School), 90 worthiness, rhetoric of, 61 Young, Phyllis, 115 Zitkala-Ša, 3, 4, 17–18, 23, 165, 169, 177; Atlantic Monthly essays by, 4, 20, 21, 73–74, 90, 95–108; challenges to savagecivilized dualism, 98–101; on Englishonly education, 102–5, 117; exposure of Carlisle Indian School, 108–10; as musician, 92–93; name change, 93–94, 189n. 5; paradoxical life of, 94–95; rhetorical prowess of, 90–91, 191n. 20; as teacher, 107–8; Works: “Achievements of the White and Red Races Compared,” 91; American Indian Stories, 192n. 21; “Blue and Gray,” 91; “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” 73, 95, 108; “Indian Teacher among Indians,” 73, 95, 107–10; Old Indian Legends, 92, 113–14; “School Days of an Indian Girl,” 73, 95, 103–4, 107, 108; “Side by Side,” 90–91

3/28/08 9:26:52 AM

Jessica Enoch is an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Her work has appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Prose.


3/28/08 9:26:52 AM

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