Discussant: Dr. David Martinez, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

John Joseph Mathews' Talking to the Moon and the Big Moon Peyote Movement Among the Osage

This paper examines John Joseph Mathews’ 1945 book Talking to the Moon in relation to the Osage adoption of Big Moon Peyotism from Caddo visionary John Wilson. Based on Mathews’ ten-year sojourn on his Oklahoma allotment, Talking to the Moon, a naturalist text in the Walden tradition, dramatizes the “clash of civilizations” between Osage and Western ways of knowing. Even as it laments the passing of the golden era Osage warriors, Mathews’ text performs a new cultural syncretism evident both in the 1930s with the advent of sophisticated Native cosmopolitans like Mathews himself and the emergence of the Peyote movement, which Osage money and lawyers managed to get legalized as the Native American Church. Tensions in Mathews’ work regarding the Peyote movement are discussed as a possible limitation to the value of his work within the Native American intellectual tradition.

Tol Foster
University of Wisconsin-Madison
tafoster@wisc.edu

Educated for the Margin: Native American Writers of the Allotment Period Addressing Indian Education Policies

This paper discusses how American Indian writers of the allotment period functioned as cross-cultural communicators and as such discussed some of the grievances of their peoples. During this period, the Indians and their cultures were largely seen as vanishing and their only chance of survival was total assimilation. One of the policies to achieve this end was that of educating Indian children in boarding schools away from their peoples. These children often did not return home to their families for years at a time. Once they did return, many found that the education they had received did not serve them well in their native communities but in most cases was also not enough to be accepted in white society. These Indians then found themselves caught between the cultures. Some of the authors of the time had gone through this type of experience themselves and used their writings to criticize the policy. Zitkala-Sa, for example, did this quite openly in her political and autobiographical writings. However, other authors, such as Mourning Dove, used fiction to voice their misgivings about these policies. This paper looks at the strategies these authors used to convey their grievances to their non-native audience.

Dagmar Frerking
Purdue Univ.
dagmar@purdue.edu

"Filial Duty and Affection Overweighed All My Prejudices": Familial Influence and Assimilation in the Work of Eastman and Zitkala-Sa

In his autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization, Charles Eastman states that he allowed his white father to introduce him to Anglo-American culture because "filial duty and affection overweighed all my prejudices" (9). The filial duty that Eastman felt for his father became a powerful force for his assimilation. In contrast to Eastman, contemporary writer Zitkala-Sa was discouraged from becoming assimilated by her mother. Zitkala-Sa's assimilation was marked by illness and despair at being unable to fit into either community. Unlike Eastman, she was unable to reconcile her duty to her mother with her white education and her aspiration to become a writer. For both Eastman and Zitkala-Sa, assimilation is portrayed as paternal and masculine in nature, while resistance is portrayed as maternal and feminine. As a result, assimilation and acculturation became a greater problem for Zitkala-Sa, who described herself as "neither a wild Indian nor a tame one" ("School Days" 69). This paper considers the impact of maternal anti-assimilation discourse in Zitkala-Sa's autobiographical writing in contrast to the effect of paternal pro-assimilation discourse in Eastman's work.

Jennifer McGovern
The University of Iowa
jennifer-mcgovern@uiowa.edu