By: Melissa Greene-Blye

It is with pleasure and gratitude that I share an update on a research project made possible by support from the American Journalism Historians Association via a Joseph McKerns Research Grant awarded in July of 2022. 

The grant funding made it possible for me to visit the Sequoyah National Research Center (SNRC) housed at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. During my three-day visit, I had the privilege of talking with SNRC Director Daniel Littlefield, Ph.D. and Erin Fehr, Assistant Director and Archivist, both of whom were generous in sharing their time, expertise, and knowledge of the materials housed in the archive. 

For those not familiar with SNRC, its self-stated mission, paraphrased here, is to acquire and preserve the writings and ideas of Native North Americans, through collecting the written word and art of Native Americans and creating a research atmosphere that invites Indigenous peoples to make SRNC an archival home for their creative work. SNRC’s collection includes artistic expression, literature, photography, as well as historical and contemporary Indigenous newspapers and journalistic work product. 

For my purposes, I went with the intent of finding copies of student-produced newsletters and newspapers from residential boarding schools, places where Native children were forced to give up their traditional languages, cultures and beliefs and, instead, adopt non-Native ways of speaking and behaving. I wanted to find out what, specifically, these publications contained in the way of student-generated content. What were these students talking about and, perhaps more importantly, what weren’t they talking about?

My interest in this topic began with the mention of a single newsletter produced by young Cherokee women who attended a church-sponsored residential school in the territory where that tribe, like so many others, had been forcibly relocated. So, it was with great excitement that I learned SNRC had some copies of this newsletter in the archives, and it was that information that prompted my plans to visit.  

It truly was a journey into the past as I had to rely on microfilm to view the archival materials I sought to examine, but thanks to today’s technology, I had scanned copies of those newsletters in my email inbox before I left at the end of my first day. Sadly, there were only two copies of the Cherokee student newsletter in the archives, likely other copies were destroyed in a fire at the seminary school in 1887. This gave me pause to rethink the focus of my intended research, particularly as this research was taking place only months after the discovery of mass graves on the sites of several of these schools was making international headlines alongside calls for justice for those children, their descendants, and the tribal communities those children came from. I am now broadening the scope of this research to re-examine “captivity narratives” using Indigenous Standpoint Theory to go beyond the words on the page, to provide a broader context for how these students’ words were controlled and edited to support the assimilationist mission of these schools.  

Traditional captivity narratives tell the stories of the experiences of White persons who were taken captive by Native tribes, often in ways intended to reinforce negative images of those tribes. The words of these Native students, contained in residential school newsletters and newspapers, flip that narrative, making the Native student the captive; this research project seeks to examine that role reversal and cast new light on how we define “captivity” narratives. 

The funds provided through this grant were crucial in taking the first step to elevate the voices and experiences of these students while also supporting a project that will serve to educate non-Native readers and scholars about a watershed moment in our history as Indigenous people, while simultaneously telling an important, and overlooked, part of our media history.

Melissa Greene-Blye is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and an affiliate faculty in Indigenous Studies at the University of Kansas. She is also a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Her research explores representations of American Indian identity in journalism.