Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816520135 ISBN 13: 9780816520138

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2001

Synopsis

Sometimes the losses of childhood can be recovered only in the flight of the dragonfly.

Native American children have long been subject to removal from their homes for placement in residential schools and, more recently, in foster or adoptive homes. The governments of both the United States and Canada, having reduced Native nations to the legal status of dependent children, historically have asserted a surrogate parentalism over Native children themselves.

Children of the Dragonfly is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Through autobiography and interviews, fiction and traditional tales, official transcripts and poetry, these voices— Seneca, Cherokee, Mohawk, Navajo, and many others— weave powerful accounts of struggle and loss into a moving testimony to perseverance and survival. Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood.

Included are works of contemporary authors Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, and others; classic writers Zitkala-Sa and E. Pauline Johnson; and contributions from twenty important new writers as well. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing through involuntary sterilization.

CONTENTS
Part 1. Traditional Stories and Lives
Severt Young Bear (Lakota) and R. D. Theisz, To Say "Child"
Zitkala-Sa (Yankton Sioux), The Toad and the Boy
Delia Oshogay (Chippewa), Oshkikwe's Baby
Michele Dean Stock (Seneca), The Seven Dancers
Mary Ulmer Chiltoskey (Cherokee), Goldilocks Thereafter
Marietta Brady (Navajo), Two Stories
Part 2. Boarding and Residential Schools
Embe (Marianna Burgess), from Stiya: or, a Carlisle Indian Girl at Home
Black Bear (Blackfeet), Who Am I?
E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), As It Was in the Beginning
Lee Maracle (Stoh:lo), Black Robes
Gordon D. Henry, Jr. (White Earth Chippewa), The Prisoner of Haiku
Luci Tapahonso (Navajo), The Snakeman
Joy Harjo (Muskogee), The Woman Who Fell from the Sky
Part 3. Child Welfare and Health Services
Problems That American Indian Families Face in Raising Their Children, United States Senate, April 8 and 9, 1974
Mary TallMountain (Athabaskan), Five Poems
Virginia Woolfclan, Missing Sister
Lela Northcross Wakely (Potawatomi/Kickapoo), Indian Health
Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from Indian Killer
Milton Lee (Cheyenne River Sioux) and Jamie Lee, The Search for Indian
Part 4. Children of the Dragonfly
Peter Cuch (Ute), I Wonder What the Car Looked Like
S. L. Wilde (Anishnaabe), A Letter to My Grandmother
Eric Gansworth (Onondaga), It Goes Something Like This
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee/Choctaw/Creek), Breeds and Outlaws
Phil Young (Cherokee) and Robert Bensen, Wetumka
Lawrence Sampson (Delaware/Eastern Band Cherokee), The Long Road Home
Beverley McKiver (Ojibway), When the Heron Speaks
Joyce carlEtta Mandrake (White Earth Chippewa), Memory Lane Is the Next Street Over
Alan Michelson (Mohawk), Lost Tribe
Patricia Aqiimuk Paul (Inupiaq), The Connection
Terry Trevor (Cherokee/Delaware/Seneca), Pushing up the Sky
Annalee Lucia Bensen (Mohegan/Cherokee), Two Dragonfly Dream Songs

About this title

About the Author

Robert Bensen is coeditor of Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions: A Celebration of Contemporary Six Nations Arts and has authored numerous essays on Native literature and child custody. He is Professor of English and Director of Writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where he also teaches American Indian law and literature.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

excerpt from the INTRODUCTION
It is said that history is written by the conquerors, literature by the survivors. In the forms of autobiography and essay, fiction and poetry, testimony and interview, the many voices in Children of the Dragonfly tell the collective story of struggle and survival in the area where all cultures are most vulnerable: childhood.
In widespread Native cultural traditions, children are consistently figured as those who hold the future, their protection as the greatest imperative, and their loss as the greatest of losses. The childhood of Native people has been the site of a long and vital struggle between the Native Nations on the one hand, and the United States and Canada on the other. Native childhood has been subject to U.S. and Canadian policies of assimilation first through education, and more recently through health and child welfare services. Both federal systems reduced Native nations from original sovereignty to the legal status of dependent children, then assumed parental rights over the children themselves. That is one version of North American history.
Yet from those who face such assertions of power, quite another discourse emerges from counter-assertion, a multivocal, endless re-creation of integrity and identity. The stories in Children of the Dragonfly enact a complex process of survival, adaptation, and renewal, one that is painful and powerful and poignantly humorous, as swift and unstoppable as Dragonfly in flight, as persistent as the thrum of its wingbeat.
1. Children of the Dragonfly
In the Zuni story "The Origin of the Dragonfly and of the Corn-Priests" Dragonfly flies between the present world and the spirit world, carrying the prayers of a hungry boy and girl to the Corn Sisters (Cushing 55-124). He is a very old spirit in the body of a new toy, the children's creation and their helper, their means of restoring the way of life that had been taken from them. Yet what was restored and recovered was changed in the process, and the children, as the story goes, lead them all.
The children's people had offended the Corn Sisters, wasting rich harvests by turning the crops into weapons for a food-fight. The spirit sisters brought a famine that drove the people to another village, where they worked in servitude for food. In their haste and selfishness, the people leave the two children behind in the abandoned village.
To amuse his sister and console her loneliness, the boy makes a toy insect out of corn leaves. The girl in desperation asks the creature to fly away and bring them corn. The boy's love and the girl's prayer bring a powerful spirit to be embodied in the creature. He carries their story to the Corn Sisters, who remember them with fresh stores of food and a field full of corn. The people return to find the children, their pueblo and way of life abundantly restored, and the children selected to lead them in a new devotion to the source of their lives and sustenance, the Corn Sisters. The children, through Dragonfly, bring the spirit and present world together again in growth and harmony.
Children of the Dragonfly takes this story as the pattern for the lives recounted in the collection. Through the storyteller's faithfulness, the writer's devotion, and the poet's playful invention comes a very old way of being in new forms of identity. The desire for connection is sometimes most powerfully expressed in its severance, and the search thereafter becomes the source of art and expression. Dragonfly may well live in the writing itself.
"It was when we began to create with this new language that we named it ours, made it usefully tough and beautiful," wrote Joy Harjo in Reinventing the Enemy's Language; "We've transformed these enemy languages" (22-4). The transformation of English into an Indian language is "pretty scary sometimes," according to Simon J. Ortiz in his introduction to Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, "because it means letting one's mind go willfully [. . .] into the Western cultural and intellectual context" (xvi). Ortiz puts misgivings aside because of the great many topics that need to be addressed, and he implies that what language the writer speaks is secondary to what the writer speaks for, from which comes, Ortiz says, his own "Native voice" (xviii). The individual Native writing her personal story, according to Gloria Bird, can help "decolonize" Native America (29). Autobiography (as distinct from the traditional oral communal storytelling) can be testimony to the individual's "processing of the complexities of inheritance [...] in the aftermath of colonization" (Ortiz 29). The writer's "hardest work is tracing back through generations the aspects of colonization that have directly affected our lives, to identify those instances in which we have internalized what we are taught about ourselves in schools and in history books all our invisible lives [...]" (30).
Children of the Dragonfly gathers written autobiography, oral testimony and storytelling, as well as fiction and poetry, from Native people on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, for whom childhood has been conflicted by the larger struggle for cultural survival. The writers in this book will tell their stories within that struggle, but first let us trace through history colonial aspects of Indian education and child welfare, and other areas of Indian policy as they affected Indian childhood.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0816520135
• ISBN 13: 9780816520138
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 299
• Editor: Bensen Robert