American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Introduction The Blanket Around Her Maybe it is her birth which she holds close to herself or her death which is just as inseparable and the white wind that encircles her is a part just as the blue sky hanging in turquoise from her neck oh woman remember who you are woman it is the whole earth -Jot Harjo Laguna novelist Leslie Silko begins Ceremony with one word-"Sunrise." The word is simple, yet it encompasses an entire body of culture and thought which revolves around the concepts of birth, regeneration, cyclicity and the union of masculine and feminine elements. Many American Indian world views speak of balanced "opposite" forces which combine as a dynamic whole to form the universe. One may extend the metaphor of ”sunrise” further in reference to the contemporary “rebirth” of American Indian cultures, perhaps best illustrated in the growing body of literature by American Indian writers. Kenneth Lincoln makes such an analogy in his comprehensive analysis of American Indian literature, Native American Renaissance. Interestingly, Lincoln correlates the dynamics of this movement to gender as he writes, ”Native Americans are writing prolifically, particularly the women, who correlate feminist, nativist, and artistic commitments in a compelling rebirth.”

The Revolutionary War and its aftermath brought ruin to the Indians of the upper Susquehanna Valley. The majority allied themselves with the British, infuriating local colonists who mostly sided with the Continental Army. General John Sullivan’s campaign of 1779 devastated the Susquehanna Indians’ towns, as well as the communities of Indians living farther north and west throughout Iroquoia. At the end of the war these Valley Indians were displaced, impoverished, and ignored; they lived at the edges of the new republic but could not enjoy the benefits of citizenship. While recent studies of the Revolutionary period have described crucial decades in the nation’s past, historians still have not examined the influence of the Anglo-American crisis on Indians in sufficient depth. Barbara Graymont’s The Iroquois in The American Revolution traces the experiences of the Six Nations but treats primarily the political and military aspects of these Indians’ lives. Anthony F. C. Wallace’s The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, while putting the Revolutionary period into a broader historical and cultural context, focuses almost exclusively on the Senecas. But this westernmost tribe in Iroquoia managed to retain at least a portion of its land in the post-Revolutionary period, thereby distinguishing the tribe’s history from that of many Indians who were completely displaced from their territory, The Indians who inhabited the upper Susquehanna Valley, many of whom were not members of the Six Nations tribes, have received insufficient attention from scholars. Even Barry Kent‘s recent analysis, Susquehanna ’s Indians, contains little on the Revolutionary period, primarily analyzing the earlier Indian occupation of the region.

Founded in 1851 at Park Hill, in the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee Female Seminary and its counterpart, the Cherokee Male Seminary, reflected the tribe’s commitment to formal education and acculturation. The female school originally was staffed by graduates of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, and the educational philosophy of the seminary reflected the influence of that New England institution. Students were instructed in a broad spectrum of nineteenth-century curriculae and imbued with ethical and moral values championed by their teachers. Until Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, the Cherokee National Council consistently provided tribal money for the schools’ improvement. Young Cherokee women who graduated from the school later became doctors, ranchers, and politicians. One-third of the 160 graduates became educators-many of whom returned to the seminary to teach. From the time of its opening, the seminary was deemed an academic and cultural success by parents, Indian agents, and school board officials who visited the school’s classes and social events. Viewing the meticulously dressed, articulate, and well-mannered young “Cherokee Rosebuds, ” visitors were duly impressed by their conscientious efforts to appear neat and refined. Each day the students fastidiously cleaned (upon penalty of demerits) the areas most often open to inspection-the kitchen, parlor, and classrooms, Teachers wearing white gloves also examined the private rooms of the students. The scrubbed floors, polished banisters, manicured lawns, and formal flower beds all reflected the institution‘s dedication to order and cleanliness, primary virtues of late nineteenth-century American life.