Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

by Diane Glancy

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as “trouble causers,” arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.
Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane Glancy’s work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S. government would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners’ predicament.
   

136 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2014

About the author

(Helen) Diane Glancy is a Cherokee poet, author and playwright.

Glancy was born in 1941 in Kansas City, Missouri. She received her Bachelor of Arts (English literature) from the University of Missouri in 1964, then later continued her education at the University of Central Oklahoma, earning her a Masters degree in English in 1983. In 1988, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

Glancy is an English professor and began teaching in 1989 at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, teaching Native American literature and creative writing courses. Glancy's literary works have been recognized and highlighted at Michigan State University in their Michigan Writers Series.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Maria £ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very short, very powerful, very postmodern

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diane Glancy is an intuitive researcher and writer of history, and a talented storyteller. I appreciated the way she combined academic writing with traditional narrative tradition, sometimes sliding from one into the other, or weaving them together. It was also interesting to read something which was both a history of the education and "civilizing" of the Native American prisoners held at Ft. Marion/Castillo de San Marcos and a memoir of a modern Native American scholar and her own experiences in the educational system.

[MJ]

Added to TBR after learning about it on Mr, You, and Books: http://mdbrady.wordpress.com/2014/09/...