Learning from the "white-chests": schoolroom discipline and rewriting history in Francis LaFlesche's The Middle Five

The emergence of the school story in nineteenth-century America reflected the nation’s interest in the power of education to produce social reform. Drawing on Darwinian theories of environmental conditioning, schools became... [ view full abstract ]

The emergence of the school story in nineteenth-century America reflected the nation’s interest in the power of education to produce social reform. Drawing on Darwinian theories of environmental conditioning, schools became climates which aimed to produce model citizens. The schoolroom worked through issues of power, authority and knowledge, as exemplified by the school story trope of the wise teacher. In this trope, the child comes to understand that the strict teacher has been acting in the child’s best interest all along. The child’s gratitude rewrites history, turning a painful memory of punishment into a positive developmental milestone.This fraught narrative, which suggests that a desired future can erase the pain of the past, becomes particularly complex when viewed through the lens of settler colonialism. This paper takes up Francis LaFlesche’s The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe (1900), in order to examine how LaFlesche exposes the political and racial underpinnings of discipline and knowledge production within the schoolroom.

LaFlesche’s memoir, which recounts his childhood at a Nebraska Indian mission school in the 1860s, challenges the logic of power and knowledge within the Western schoolroom. This paper will read several key scenes of schoolroom discipline to demonstrate how LaFlesche defamiliarizes the norms of settler culture and educational theory. In so doing, this paper poses several key questions about the teleology of development: what is occluded when the child’s insights are dismissed as immature? And what is the relationship of pain, anger, and gratitude to the (re)writing of history?