| By addressing the omission of Native American literacy narratives from accounts of literacy's rise and spread in nineteenth-century North America, my dissertation adds to the current understanding of how literacy was imagined and used during that century. Using extensive archival resources, I reconstruct and analyze the rhetorical education of young Native American men who boarded at an academy founded for them just outside Lexington, Kentucky. The academy's founder, U.S. Senator Richard Mentor Johnson, used his federal office to lavish public attention on the school, support that only intensified when Johnson became Vice President under Martin Van Buren. My study of the Choctaw Academy enlarges our understanding of how literacy was imagined and used in the antebellum U.S. Currently, that understanding concentrates on the rise of common schooling for northern whites and the enforcement of illiteracy among African-American slaves in the South. I argue that a network of sponsors, including government officials and religious leaders, ultimately saw this experimental school as a means to discover whether young Native Americans could absorb the neoclassical, civic-minded literacy of common school lessons without expecting democratic privileges. Choctaw students' letters to federal officials and family members—many of which can be read as brilliant literacy narratives—testify to the failure of Johnson's effort and to the difficulty of curbing the power of civic literacy once it has been conferred. Indeed, Johnson's response to his students' protests was to revise the academy's composition program dramatically. Abandoning classical study, the sons of Choctaw elders were taught only literacy suited to the “technical arts”—blacksmithing, shoemaking, and even sewing. When that change failed to silence the Choctaw civic voice, Johnson and other sponsors composed a counter-narrative rendering students, and “Indians” more generally, as uneducable illiterates. |
