Content area
Full Text
In early 1900, Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, invited Zitkala-Sa to travel as a violin soloist with the Carlisle Indian School Band on their tour of the northeastern United States. He also asked her to recite a scene from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's narrative poem, The Song of Hiawatha. It is not surprising that Pratt would select Zifkala-Sa to play the violin, for her classical training at the New England Conservatory of Music (1899-1901) fit well with the band's repertoire, which included selections from Il Trovatore and Lohengrin ("What the Papers Say"). Furthermore, Pratt would have been well aware that the Hiawatha recitation would appeal to his target authence: European Americans who, across the country, were eagerly attending cultural performances by Native Americans, under the mistaken assumption that indigenous people would soon disappear from the American landscape (Trachtenberg xxiii). But the timing of Pratt's invitation was peculiar. Zitkala-Sa had just defied the assimilationist ideology of Carlisle, where she had taught music from mid-1897 to the end of 1898, by publishing controversial pieces in the Atlantic Monthly, sketches that venerated indigenous ways of life on the one hand and criticized European American approaches to educating Native American children on the other.1 And Pratt had responded by publishing an anonymously written review of her work in a Carlisle newspaper, The Red Man, which accused her of providing a "misleading" portrayal of Indian schools ("School Days of an Indian Girl" 8). If Pratt felt that Zitkala-Sa represented a threat to his educational mission, why did he give her such a prominent position on the tour?
My curiosity about Zitkala-Sa's participation in the Carlisle tour led to my discovery of a letter Pratt wrote to a colleague on 30 March 1900, in which he explained his reason for inviting Zifkala-Sa. He wanted to gain control over her and put a stop to her criticism: "I believe in capturing her and keeping her on our side" (Pratt Papers; emphasis added). Reading Pratt's letter, I came to understand Zitkala-Sa's performance with the Carlisle Indian School Band as a captivity tale waiting to be told.
THE SCENE OF CAPTIVITY: BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, 1900
It was from Boston that Pratt lured Zitkala-Sa, yet her impressive résumé in that...