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 “trouble causers,” 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
Glancy’s 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. government would be their best tool for petitioning for
freedom. Glancy reveals stories of survival and an intimate
understanding of the Fort Marion prisoners’ predicament.