"Examines Indian boarding school narratives and their impact on the Native literary tradition from 1879 to the present"
Indian boarding schools were the lynchpins of a federally sponsored system of forced assimilation. These schools, located off-reservation, took Native children from their families and tribes for years at a time in an effort to kill their tribal cultures, languages, and religions. In "Learning to Write Indian, " Amelia V. Katanski investigates the impact of the Indian boarding school experience on the American Indian literary tradition through an examination of turn-of-the-century student essays and autobiographies as well as contemporary plays, novels, and poetry.
Many recent books have focused on the Indian boarding school experience. Among these "Learning to Write Indian " is unique in that it looks at writings about the schools as literature, rather than as mere historical evidence."