My research for any
historical novel begins with reading as many first-person accounts as I can.
This is especially important when writing outside my culture, as is the case
with my newly released middle-grade historical novel. Memoirs are usually the
best source, although diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper stories are
also good.
As I said in my last
post, Creating Esther is about an
Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19th
Century. There are plenty of memoirs about the Native American boarding school
experience, but few come from the right perspective. Most took place several
decades later, when the students knew what to expect. Others came from the male
perspective or that of a white teacher.
The three most helpful
memoirs were (1) three essays by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), which can be
found in her American Indian Stories;
(2) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s
Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q.
White); and (3) Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood by John Rogers
(Chief Snow Cloud). The Zitkala-Sa essays tell about her experiences as a
Native American student and teacher shortly before the time of my story, but
they are short on details. No Turning
Back begins at about the right time and provides a few more specifics, but
it spans a number of years and is written by a woman from a different tribe
than my protagonist. Red World and White gives a reasonably detailed look at
Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation life around the right time but gives little
information about the male author’s boarding school experience.
I also read a number of
academic books about the Native American boarding school experience or the
Ojibwe tribe. Putting all this information together with what I learned from location
research, I believe I have portrayed an accurate picture for my readers. But it
wasn’t easy.
Next month I’ll talk
about the location research that helped me understand the broader picture.
__________
The photo at the head of
this post shows one of the abandoned buildings from the Mount Pleasant Indian
Industrial Boarding School. I took the picture on my research trip in 2015. And
before you ask, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make it look old. Somehow I
set my camera to grayscale and didn’t notice it until later.
__________
This post was repurposed
from the August 25, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink
blog sponsored by the Indiana chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.
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