Forever Changed: Boarding School Narratives of American Indian Identity in the U.S. and Canada
This essay examines personal narratives to identify experiences at boarding schools. These collective experiences forged new American Indian identities due to a white educational system forced upon these Indian students. While stories remain part of tradition, they convey that Indian youth had changed permanently. An Ojibwa man, Ted Mato, who attended an Indian school, explained about the system established to educate American Indian students. He stated, "...the government set up an extensive system of boarding schools to bleach the red out of Indian children, to make us into white people. American Indians are forever changed." 1 As this Native man so eloquently stated, the intent of the Western educational system was to purposefully eliminate the cultural identity of American Indian people. But as the narratives will show, the students were not passive recipients of the process. One purpose of this paper is to give voice to the American Indian people who survived the Western educational system. The Native perspective of this cultural assault and the ensuing opposition to this aggression, as well as the existence and tenacity of this people, as demonstrated by the narratives of the participants, form the significance of this paper.
The Rise of Indian Americans’ Identity in Zitkala Sa’s “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”
Abstract The present paper scrutinizes the seismic shifts of the Indians' identity during the twentieth century. It tends to outline the Indians' collapsing image at the end of the century, taking Zitkala Sa's "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" and Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" as sample stories to represent such shifts. Both Sa and Lahiri embody different aspects of the Indians’ identity in which the sense of originality, culture and spirituality changes. The paper dwells on the changes of these aspects from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century due to several factors such as World War I, World War II, and many other social and political developments during this century. The main argument, thus, is that the writings of the Natives transfer to depict their transitional period. To prove this argument, the researchers analyze the Natives’ distinctive identity, inspecting four distinguished components, originality, culture, spirituality, and struggle in Zitkala Sa’s story. The paper moves to contradict the Natives distinguished identity at the end of the twentieth century, taking Lahiri’s story as a sample for application. It ends by tracing the transitional break of the earlier identity’s components, emphasizing the aspects of imitation, destruction, and shallowness. These aspects make up the main thread of the Indians’ changing identity at the end of the century. By adopting this frame, the researchers consider the Indians’ identity to be one of the most important constitutive norms that changes and adjusts itself to suit many drastic developments that took place throughout the century.
The Millennial of Castile (1943): the historical culture of Spanish Fascism
Abstract The creation of new symbols and historical myths were common practices of nationalist politics, especially in Fascist regimes. In 1943 the Franco regime organized the most impressive historical commemoration celebrated in post-war Spain: the Milenario of Castile. With its heterogeneous mixture of history and spectacle, the Milenario of Castile was by far the greatest historical commemoration promoted by the State during the 1940s. Taking the commemoration of the Milenario as a case study, this article examines the historical culture of Spanish Fascism, as well as the attempts of the Falangist intellectual elite to impose a concrete national narrative in post-war Spain. At the same time, the article analyses the historical discourses and aesthetics displayed throughout the commemoration, underlining its Fascist character, and consequently the transnational dimension of the Fascist politics of the past. Finally, the article reflects on the scope and limits of the process of Fascistisation in Franco's dictatorship, especially in its commemorative culture.