Main Street
Metamora, Indiana

By Heather Chacón

My first memory of Metamora, Indiana, is of being twelve and sitting on a wooden bench on the front porch of an old house-turned-shop with my friend, Holly. It is December. Above us hang several pieces of artwork for sale, paintings of landscapes and animals on reclaimed barn wood done by a local artist. We are sipping hot chocolate with lots of whipped cream and laughing while her parents shop inside the crowded building, the laughter making what happened next all the more startling. A man suddenly grabs a painting off the wall above our heads and takes off running. He nearly makes it off the porch before being tackled, suddenly and fully about the waist. Other people, whether patrons or employees we do not know, secure the painting. There are murmurs of “shoplifter” amongst the crowd, and eventually the store owner appears to loudly berate the man and ban him from the store. I do not remember any police being called, but the collective scorn from that crowd frightened me regardless.

Had I been more familiar with the history of Metamora, I would have also understood that the concepts embedded in this event — artistic ownership, community censure, thwarted commerce, repurposed materials as the start of mythos-building — were as much a part of this town’s history as the nineteenth-century buildings and homespun atmosphere I loved.

You see, Metamora got its name from the play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), written by John Augustus Stone. Stone entered this play in a competition sponsored by one of the (many say the) most prominent American actors of the nineteenth-century, Edwin Forrest. Keen to find a play he believed would be well-suited to his style of acting and physical presence, as well as show that the young nation could produce works of literary and dramatic merit, Forrest offered $500 for the best original “tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero, or principal character, shall be an aboriginal of this country.” From among the fourteen plays submitted, the Committee of Award (headed by William Cullen Bryant) chose Stone’s.

Initially Stone was elated to win the prize and have his work performed by such an important thespian. This pleasure soon turned to worry and dismay, however, as Metamora became a meteoric success that helped establish Forrest’s professional reputation and personal fortune without yielding such stability for its author. The play’s popularity hinged, in part, on Forrest’s acting talent, but it also gave the American people the opportunity to celebrate a uniquely “American” history.

While some brochures and websites mention the town is named after a play, very few include any details of its plot or popularity. Set in 1600s New England, the melodrama tells the tale of Metamora, a fictional chief cast in the “noble Indian” mode, who eventually kills his wife to protect her from the terrors of settler colonialism and enslavement before being slain by white pioneers. Importantly, by 1829 New England was largely under the control of white settlers, thus allowing northeastern audiences watching Stone’s play the chance to experience catharsis rather than fear of Native American retaliation. Yet Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, insured white Americans’ interest in stories dramatizing the usurpation of Native American lands and “disappearance” of their earlier inhabitants. The play became such a cultural phenomenon that it inspired the name of Metamora, Indiana, when the town was platted in 1838. This was not unique, as towns named Metamora can also be found in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio — locations that had more recently been settled on the frontier.

Forrest performed Metamora to great acclaim until his death in 1872. The play spawned at least 35 additional “Indian” dramas and Forrest made thousands by playing the role. Stone, meanwhile, never saw additional remuneration above his $500 prize money, unless you count Forrest buying Stone’s headstone after Stone committed suicide by drowning in 1834. When Stone died many whispered that Forrest’s unwillingness to share the profits of Metamora contributed to Stone’s melancholy. The scandal clung to Forrest for a while, but ultimately did little to impact his popularity.

Today visitors to Metamora, Indiana, will find little evidence of why the town bears this name or the fact that it was established on land that used to be the home of Miami and Shawnee peoples. Instead, public memory centers largely on its identity as a “canal town.” Metamora was established along the proposed route of Indiana’s Whitewater Canal, an infrastructure project designed to transport raw materials from the state’s interior to the Ohio River. Construction of the canal section in Metamora began in 1836 and was completed by 1847. Yet the canal was unfortunately prone to flooding due to the relatively low elevation of the surrounding land and its proximity to the Whitewater River. By the 1860s, the railroad supplanted canal travel as the preferred means of transporting goods.

With this change, Metamora met challenges well known to much of the rural Midwest: declining populations, gradual shrinkage of family-owned farms, a dearth of well-paying jobs. A resourceful bunch, Metamora residents still used the canal to power several grist mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one of which still operates at the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site under the care of the Indiana State Museum. Their grits are extremely good, particularly on a summer day when you can watch them be freshly ground and placed directly in the bag.

In the last few years, interest in the town has risen somewhat, in part due to renewed interest in preserving historic architecture like Metamora’s nineteenth-century shops and municipal buildings. The town’s beautiful natural setting, affordability, and relative proximity to Cincinnati draw visitors who want to stroll around antique shops or take the family on a historic train or canal boat ride. It’s a pity most visitors to Metamora’s functioning wooden aqueduct, the only one still in existence in the United States, have no idea they’re also visiting a town named after the “last of the Wampanoags.”

Maybe it’s time to make sure that darker history is not also carried off into the night.

Heather Chacón is a proud native Hoosier and scholar of nineteenth-century American Literature. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Communications and Media at Greensboro College in North Carolina. When she isn’t grading or in the archives, she enjoys being outside and visiting historic sites—beloved pastimes she first developed in Indiana.

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Grand Kankakee Marsh
Porter County, Indiana

By Matthew A. Werner

Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River. It was his respite. Then, in the name of progress, men obliterated the marsh and ruined the river.

Of the Kankakee, Wallace wrote, “Never in all my world travels have I seen a more perfect spot, nor a more tantalizing river.” He grew up near the Wabash River. During the Mexican War, Wallace swam the Rio Grande. As a Civil War general, he met the Mississippi. While U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, he saw the Rhine, Danube, and Nile. As New Mexico Territory Governor, he crossed the Pecos and Sante Fe. The man had seen some rivers.

The Kankakee River meandered 250 miles through 2,000 oxbows from South Bend, Indiana, to Momence, Illinois. North and south of this stretch lay one million acres of marsh land — half of which flooded permanently and half with the changing seasons. Sand dunes that served as islands interspersed the flat, peaty marsh. The landscape included tall grass, cattails, oak trees, and giant sycamores. Wild apple trees, walnut trees, wild rice, strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries grew in abundance.

The wildlife habitat had few peers — beaver, mink, otters, opossums, cougars, wolves, bison, elk, and fox lived there. Folklore claimed you could walk across the marsh hopping from muskrat den to muskrat den. The bottom was full of mussels. Lunker bass, walleye, and pike thrived. Bees stuffed hollow trees with honey; bats made homes in others. It was a bird paradise — purple martens, Carolina parakeets, loons, trumpeter swans, egrets, and whooping cranes nested in the marsh. Bird populations were so great that visitors described flocks that darkened the sky.

Local Potawatomi people lived with the marsh, using its abundance of mammals, birds, fish, and plants to provide food and medicine. The Grand Kankakee Marsh was a natural food pantry.

The United States government forced out the Potawatomi in the 1830s. As a result of the Swamp Land Act of 1850, Indiana carved the marsh into squares and sold it to speculators and settlers. It was said that the marsh was “the only place you could buy land by the gallon.” Many men sought to conquer the marsh and drain its water. Others, like Lew Wallace, enjoyed the marsh’s magnificence.

By the time Wallace arrived in the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1858, it was a hunter, trapper, and sportsman’s destination. Gun and hunt clubs that catered to wealthy men flourished on the sand islands and banks of the Kankakee River.

Wallace returned again and again over 43 years. He bought a lumber barge and converted it to a houseboat aptly named The Thing. It moored 100 yards south of Collier Lodge at Baum’s Bridge. With his friend, Ira Brainard, Wallace modified the vessel and created fixtures from neighbors’ unwanted furniture. The floating cabin was 10 feet by 37 feet in dimension. It had three sections (sleeping quarter, kitchen, and living room) and was topped with a framework of iron pipe and canvas. Early Porter County historian Hubert Skinner said, “There have been many boats on the Kankakee, but none ever attracted more attention than the queer barge he devised.” From the living room, Wallace likely wrote parts of Ben-Hur, The Prince of India, and his autobiography.

During his visits, Wallace fished, tinkered with his boat, and visited with the people of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He stopped at various lodges and hunting clubs along the river. “River rats, trappers, guides, pushers, and just ordinary home folks accepted him for his friendliness and his interest in the Kankakee,” wrote Skinner.

For a brief period of time during the Civil War, General Wallace was shelved. With no soldiers to lead, he retreated to the Kankakee to fish, think, and write before he was called back to battle and served through the end of the war.

Viewed as a land of financial opportunity, profiteers plundered the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Railroad box cars carted away the marsh’s splendors. Businessmen killed swans for down, egrets for fancy hats, muskrats and mink for fur, cattails for furniture stuffing, and mussels for pearls and buttons. Frog legs and waterfowl were killed by the thousands and served in Chicago and New York City restaurants.

To drain the water, men dug ditch upon ditch, but the marsh remained. Then men blasted a mile of limestone ledge on the river bottom in Illinois. The marsh retreated, but only a little. In 1902, steam dredges began straightening the bends and curves of the Kankakee River and doomed the marsh.

Wallace last visited the Grand Kankakee Marsh in 1904. He died in 1905. In 1922, dredges bypassed the final bend of the Kankakee, turning its 250 miles of meandering river into a 90-mile-long ditch. Ninety-nine percent of the marsh drained away. Finally, the Grand Kankakee succumbed to its killers.

Loggers removed trees for lumber. In its wake, men planted rows of corn. The United States migratory bird population declined by one-fifth. No more duck, geese, cattails or frog legs shipped out. The hunt clubs vacated. The Kankakee River no longer flowed where Wallace moored The Thing.

Today, you cannot jump from muskrat den to muskrat den. Fox dens have been plowed. You won’t find mussels. There is no wild rice to harvest. Loons do not come here. Flocks of birds do not darken the sky. The marsh tries to reclaim its territory when heavy rains flood the corn fields, but the water stubbornly drains.

It would be kind to say the men who drained the Grand Kankakee Marsh did not know what they were doing. They knew. They called it progress. Men murdered that perfect spot, that tantalizing river that Lew Wallace loved. Had Wallace lived to see its death, he would have died of a broken heart.

Matt Werner is a story-teller and jack of all trades. He grew up on a farm in Union Mills, Indiana — land that once was the outer reaches of the Grand Kankakee Marsh. He has authored three books — Season of Upsets, How Sweet It Is, and A White Sox Life — and numerous articles on history and interesting people. You can learn more about him at www.matthewawerner.com.

To learn more about Lew Wallace and the Grand Kankakee Marsh, watch Everglades of the North and visit the Kankakee Valley Historical Society and the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum.

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2907 Cleveland Street

Hammond, Indiana

By Samuel Love

“Ours was not a genteel neighborhood,” Jean Shepherd wrote of Hohman, his fictional Northwest Indiana hometown. The opening story from his 1971 book Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories and Other Disasters describes a community “nestled picturesquely between the looming steel mills and the verminously aromatic oil refineries and encircled by a colorful conglomerate of city dumps and fetid rivers.” Whomever wrote the back cover copy for the 2000 Broadway Books trade paperback apparently didn’t read that part, describing the collection as a “beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana.”

The association of nostalgia with Shepherd’s work has long puzzled but not surprised me, especially in the light of the 1983 film A Christmas Story, which is based on parts of his 1966 novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. He is the author of arguably the quintessential modern American Christmas tale, but much of the bite of his work has been lost in the process of transcribing and adapting for viewing audiences the narratives that originated on late night radio in New York City in the 1950s. His stories first saw print in Playboy and The Village Voice in the 1960s, were adapted for public television in the 1970s, and finally in the 1980s, Hollywood.

Shepherd always insisted that his books were novels, not memoirs or collections of short stories. He also insisted that his literary works were fictional, that Hohman was a “mythical place,” a composite of all of the region’s industrial communities. Yet his description of fictional Hohman accurately describes the geography of his actual boyhood neighborhood in Hammond, Indiana. The Indiana Harbor steel mills and the Standard Oil refinery were just a few miles upwind. Even closer was the polluted Grand Calumet River. To the south were the brackish waters of the Little Calumet. And to the east, the Gary City Dump.

Jean Shepherd was born in Chicago in 1921 but grew up in Hammond, where the main street is Hohman Avenue. His family lived on Cleveland Street on the southeast side of town, in the Hessville neighborhood, near families named Schwartz, Flickinger, and even Bumpus. His books and films contain the typical disclaimers about “resemblance to individuals living or dead,” yet he often used the names of real people for his popular “kid-dom” stories.

Of the two houses on Cleveland Street that the Shepherd’s called home, the one at 2907 has the strongest claim as “The Jean Shepherd Boyhood Home” — on February 18, 1939, a seventeen-year-old Jean etched his name in the attic rafters. The current owners have lived there since the late 1970s, raising a family and growing to tolerate the curious people who wander by and photograph the exterior — provided the curious don’t linger around too long or violate the family’s privacy. When Shepherd’s younger brother Randy arrived in a limousine and asked to see the inside, they turned him away. They had no idea who he or Jean Shepherd were.

The nearest thing to a public Shepherd monument is the Christmas Story House Museum in Cleveland, opened in 2006 in the home used for the film’s exterior shots. It is a more appropriate celebration of the cultural phenomenon and ultimately the creativity of Jean Shepherd. Better to celebrate his talent as a fiction writer than perpetrate fictions about his life for tourists. Shepherd’s real-life father abandoned the family. And Shepherd himself eagerly left Indiana after his World War II service. “People ask me if I miss Hammond,” he told a crowd at the county library in 1984. “Do you miss the cold sores you had last week?”

Shepherd’s relationship with the region is often mischaracterized as “love-hate.” I don’t think there was hate from either side. Even before the film his hometown began embracing the man and his myths. Shepherd made regular public visits in the last three decades of his life. And we continue to remember him since his death in 1999. On the south end of Hessville is the Jean Shepherd Community Center, opened in 2003. Local theatre companies stage adaptations of A Christmas Story during the holiday season, and the nearby Indiana Welcome Center hosts an annual exhibit called A Christmas Story Comes Home.

Perhaps what some people mistake for nostalgia was Shepherd’s refusal to pander to his audience by mocking his hometown and the people there. “Never make fun of anything,” he frequently reminded his audience, “unless you love it.”

Samuel Love is the editor of The Gary Anthology (Belt, 2020) and lives in Gary, Indiana. Visit him at www.samuelalove.com.

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North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

By Wesley R. Bishop

Booth Tarkington would still recognize his hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, which he described in The Turmoil as “a midland city in the heart of fair open country, a dirty and wonderful city nestling dingily in the fog of its own smoke.” Although the city has undergone significant changes since he grew up there more than a century before, the spirit of the city, a spirit he often strove to capture in prose, is still very present. The Turmoil, first published in 1915, is not Tarkington’s most well-known work, but it makes a strong case to be the novel that best understands the sprawl of Indianapolis. Even in the twenty-first century, the city feels less like a compact entity and more a conglomeration of different parts haphazardly tied together by long avenues that serve as borders for racial, geographic, and socioeconomic divisions.

Often these expansive streets — 38th Street, Keystone Avenue, Massachusetts Avenue, Meridian Street — feel less like connections within the city and more like corridors racing somewhere else, kicking up smog from endless exhaust. Again, Tarkington’s words feel familiar:

The smoke is like the bad breath of a giant panting for more and more riches. He gets them and pants fiercer, smelling and swelling prodigiously. He has a voice, a hoarse voice, hot and rapacious trained to one tune: ‘Wealth! I will get Wealth I will make Wealth! I will sell Wealth for more Wealth! My house shall be dirty, my garment shall be dirty, and I will foul my neighbor so that he cannot be clean — but I will get Wealth!’ . . . And yet it is not wealth that he is so greedy for: what the giant really wants is hasty riches. To get these he squanders wealth upon the four winds, for wealth is in the smoke.

I read The Turmoil this past year, a year of considerable unrest. COVID, the George Floyd protests, and the fallout from the final year of Trump’s presidency swirled together, clogging the air, suffocating all in its path. It felt like monumental, terrifying, history was being recorded on an hourly basis.

Yet the thing that most stood out to me as I read Tarkington from my apartment in Indianapolis was the almost audible cries of the American nation’s demands for continued growth. Not just businesspeople, but school administrators and customers and politicians, all demanding quick reopenings, defying mask mandates, and adding another level of grime to an already perilous situation. These calls for “wealth” — much like we see in The Turmoil — happened while we all could see the impacts of COVID. Air quality, smog or virus laced, be damned. Things needed to be open. To stop economic activity — shopping, working, selling — was to die even if going forward meant actual death.

Tarkington’s acknowledgement of social issues often earned him notice from contemporary readers and some critics. The Turmoil was followed by two other novels — The Magnificent Ambersons and The Midlander — that dealt with the issue of America’s transition into a new industrial age. These novels all take place in a fictionalized Indianapolis, and ultimately, The Turmoil’s major characters conclude that despite the hurried rush of growth and development, the United States could (and probably would) continue to move forward culturally. Today it reads as incredibly optimistic, but as I drive through the city over a hundred years later, I think Tarkington was essentially correct. It is not an admission I expected to make.

Indianapolis and the United States have been violently remade in the process of industrialization, and as Tarkington saw the rise of the industrial belt, residents of the Midwest’s rust belt are watching the tail end of that process. From rise to fall, to remaking again, again, again. Yet despite that, we still make art, we still think, we still strive for beauty and dignity.

As Tarkington notes, though, this is not a smooth process. The social classes that Tarkington discusses are still very much present in the city. The Indianapolis police department, a frequent subject of protests and calls for change, patrols the vast spread of the city. Even more sprawling than in Tarkington’s lifetime, Indianapolis often feels like a city held together by nothing more than geography.

At the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, marchers crossed 38th Street, a de facto border within the city that separates the city’s working class from its wealthiest residents. Marchers transgressed that border, going so far as to stand outside the governor’s mansion on North Meridian Street. I remember that night as my phone dinged with messages from friends and colleagues. Many in the city understood that a reckoning may be about to begin, where the wealthy and sheltered were being forced to see the cost of this inequality. Yet the protesters after chanting turned away from the mansion and began the long trek back to the center of Indianapolis.

What lies in store for us, the subjects of a tumultuous age? It’s impossible to say. Yet, like Tarkington’s novel, I remain largely optimistic that despite whatever dirt- or pandemic-congested state waits for us we will have (and must have) our ability to create meaningful representations of our lives — that, after all, is culture. We must do it, even as the giants pant violently for wealth.

Wesley R. Bishop is a historian, poet, and editor living in northern Indianapolis. He is an assistant professor of American history at Marian University Indianapolis and is the founding and managing editor of The North Meridian Review: A Journal of Culture and Scholarship.

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The Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library
Indianapolis, IN

By Laura Beadling

Like many, I found and loved Kurt Vonnegut somewhere in my miserable teenage years. Slaughterhouse-Five is now one of my favorite novels to teach, whether in Great American Books or Science Fiction Literature, and at least some of my students have had similar reactions. When the Kurt Vonnegut Library and Museum moved to its new location in downtown Indy, I knew I had to go, and, late in December 2019, my husband and I packed up the dogs and headed west from Youngstown.

Slaughterhouse-Five showcases Vonnegut’s finely tuned eye for evocative juxtapositions. Structurally, the book strings together short vignettes from across protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s life, which is fitting given his assertion that he’s “come unstuck in time,” as the first page tells us. The narrative ping pongs between Billy’s sad youth, his hellish experiences in World War II, his humdrum breakdowns in Illium, NY, and his domestic contentment as an exhibit in a Tralfamadorian zoo with porn star and fellow captive Montana Wildhack.

The trip from Youngstown to downtown Indy is also filled with jarring incongruities. After several hours of flat sameness on I-70 West, suddenly you’re in the city. As we drove through downtown, we passed the gigantic blue curved-glass Marriott Hotel and a minute later a small homeless encampment under an overpass. Less than five minutes later, we pulled into a spot just off Indiana Avenue, right outside the museum.

The most striking artifact inside the museum was the icebox from Vonnegut’s childhood home. Such an incongruous object to include in a museum dedicated to a writer, especially a writer of science fiction and satire. It can’t have been easy to install either. The giant thing, made of painted wood and a number of serious-looking metal fasteners, looked murderously heavy and was, also incongruously, topped by a jaunty toy Tralfamadorian. My eyes went back to it again and again.

The museum building itself is lovely, brick with a second floor patio and plenty of windows situated in a lively neighborhood. I noticed that the Madame C.J. Walker Building was across the street, so we took a walk around the area, one of Indy’s six Cultural Districts. Although the Walker Building is closed on the weekends, we appreciated the beautiful detail on the flatiron-shaped brick structure. On it, a number of intricate, Art Deco-esque terra cotta ornaments depict African art motifs. Both buildings sit quite near to Indy’s Canal Walk, which is a pretty promenade alongside an old industrial canal that cuts through downtown.

The visit made me think about structures and organization. Given the lack of a chronologically coherent narrative, Slaughterhouse-Five relies on purposeful juxtapositions between the vignettes to create meaning. Museums are similar, deliberately placing objects to illuminate connections and disjunctions. City blocks can sometimes do the same, although not always intentionally. The placement of the museum on Indiana Avenue, once a thriving residential and commercial African American neighborhood, is an example. Although few of Vonnegut’s characters were African American, he was an outspoken lover of jazz, and Indiana Avenue boasted over 33 jazz clubs at its height. Furthermore, each building offers different but important programming throughout the year. The Walker Legacy Center offers a wide variety of African American art, history, and cultural programs. Alongside its usual focus on banned books and freedom of speech, the Vonnegut Museum’s particular focus this year is on civic engagement.

Whether inside the museum or throughout the city, these juxtapositions can, like jazz, be improvisational and surprising and beautiful. I’m sure Vonnegut would approve.

Laura Beadling was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio where she now teaches literature, film, and screenwriting at Youngstown State University. She realizes now that she should have bought the plush toy Trafalmadorian on offer at the Vonnegut Museum’s gift shop as it would be a good addition to her office collection of tchotchkes.

Photo by Neil Teixeira, courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library.

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Earlham Hall
Richmond, Indiana

By Leah Milne

I was a Midwest transplant, born and raised on the East Coast. Before I left home, friends joked about flatland and cornfields and voiced concerns about my entering what they perceived to be a region of overwhelming whiteness. Culture shock, however, was nothing new to me. As the first in my immigrant family to attend college, I knew what it meant to feel unmoored, to walk into a room where no one resembled you.

My conference visit to Earlham College was an attempt to soften that dislocation. Books have always been my second home, so sitting in the Runyan Center listening to literary presentations, I was already more comfortable. A bonus? Zitkála-Šá went here in the 1890s. Having read her stories about being the only American Indian among over 400 college students, I felt a kinship.

Earlham Residence Hall — where she stayed — was right next door. Bright leaves floated onto the campus quad where I stood before a sweeping red-brick building. Its entrance was framed by white columns, wooden benches, and painted Adirondacks. This was what the child in me imagined all college campuses looked like. Later, I would learn that this tree-lined enclosure was called The Heart.

In “School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá — known to Earlhamites as Gertrude Simmons — writes about leaving her happy childhood on South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation for White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. Her introduction to education left her homesick; she was forced to cut her hair, adopt a new language and religion, and endure numerous abuses. One wouldn’t blame her for leaving school entirely. And yet she went to college, much to the chagrin of her mother, who feared losing her daughter to “the white man’s ways.” If my visit was a modest attempt at self-encouragement, Zitkála-Šá’s more permanent move to Earlham represented a willful assertion of a new life.

Gertrude’s time at Earlham was lonely. She often isolated herself in her dorm room, and a classmate described her as “pleasant but somewhat distant.” Nevertheless, she flourished, publishing poetry in the school newspaper and performing in recitals. Her speeches, however, were where she found her voice as an activist.

After winning Earlham’s oratory contest, Gertrude was surprised when fellow freshmen celebrated by decorating the student parlor. Maybe, she thought, my classmates aren’t so bad. But then, weeks later in the subsequent state-level competition, students from one university mocked her with racist epithets. Gertrude rallied. In her soft but determined voice, she lambasted America’s prejudices, winning over all the judges save a Southerner offended by her position on slavery. She won second place.

I picture her afterwards in The Heart, staring at Earlham Hall, those columns festooned in cream and yellow drapery in her honor. Like many of Gertrude’s triumphs, this one was bittersweet. The humiliation of the night’s racism lingered, and she rushed to her dorm room, questioning her decision to leave home.

Even as she became a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, she would remember this night. Maybe she stared at the stars and stripes flying above the Hall’s entrance and thought about how her speech referenced “our nation’s flag” and “our common country,” stubbornly and even hopefully insisting on a shared humanity that she knew was often denied. The image of her standing before Earlham Hall inspires me to contemplate my experiences in education, both alienating and invigorating, and the way that institutions can both fail us and uplift us. If Zitkála-Šá could make such resolute demands for equality after all she had experienced, I figure there’s still hope for me.

Leah Milne writes about and teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis. It took her a full year living in the Midwest to learn how to properly pronounce “Louisville.” You can find out more about her publications and courses at LeahMilne.com.

Photo by Rebekah Trollinger, the Plowshares Assistant Professor of Religion at Earlham College.

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