Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education

Diane Glancy

Nov 2014 · U of Nebraska Press

About this ebook

At the end of the Southern Plains Indian wars in 1875, the War Department shipped seventy-two Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, and Caddo prisoners from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. These most resistant Native people, referred to as Òtrouble causers,Ó arrived to curious, boisterous crowds eager to see the Indian warriors they knew only from imagination. Fort Marion Prisoners and the Trauma of Native Education is an evocative work of creative nonfiction, weaving together history, oral traditions, and personal experience to tell the story of these Indian prisoners.

Resurrecting the voices and experiences of the prisoners who underwent a painful regimen of assimilation, Diane GlancyÕs work is part history, part documentation of personal accounts, and a search for imaginative openings into the lives of the prisoners who left few of their own records other than carvings in their cellblocks and the famous ledger books. They learned English, mathematics, geography, civics, and penmanship with the knowledge that acquiring the same education as those in the U.S.Êgovernment would be their best tool for petitioning for freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate understanding of the Fort Marion prisonersÕ predicament.

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Ratings and reviews

The book was not what I hoped for. I was expecting a historical narratve of the imprisonment. There is a bit of history, but much of the book's content is composed of quotes by the prisoners that were manufactured by the author in an attempt to give the prisoners a voice about their experience. In a couple of passages the author indicates a lack of available historical data regarding the events. The author leads the reader to believe that Ft Marion is situated on the beach with crashing waves just below the fort walls. That is not true. The fort sits on the edge of Matanzas River. There are no crashing waves at the fort. The Atlantic is visible through a narrow cut about 1.8 miles distant.

About the author

Diane Glancy is an emerita professor of English at Macalester College and is currently a professor at Azusa Pacific University in California. She is the author of numerous novels, including Claiming Breath (Nebraska, 1992), Designs of the Night Sky (Nebraska, 2002), and The Reason for Crows: A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha.

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