Journaling a Unique Life

In the words of Paula W Graham, “Keeping a journal is living a wide-awake life.  Whatever its name – notebook, sketchbook, log, daybook, diary, or journal – the blank book we fill with bits and pieces of our lives affirms us and validates our experiences.  It also provides a safe place to make discoveries, celebrate one’s story, and to confide, confer, question, and confess.  Alert to the outside world, attuned to the inner one, the journal keeper lives with the consciousness that his or her life matters.  Throughout history, as various strands of its traditions combined and recombined, the journal became an invention of writers, artists, naturalists, sea captains, and explorers.  In the eighteenth century the journal served as a tool for self-education as men and women copied down in Commonplace Books observations, reflections, and pieces of wisdom from what they had read or otherwise experienced.

     In recent rears the journal has surfaced in American schools as a major component of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement.  Teachers appreciate the connections between writing and learning, recognizing how writing clarified between writing and learning, recognizing how writing clarifies thinking and helps to internalize new constructs.” [Ref: Speaking of Journals, by Paula W. Graham, “Preface,” p. ix.]

Recently, I happened to be in the Children’s Books section of the public library and I ran into an interesting publication: Native American History for Kids, by Karen Bush Gibson, Chicago Review Press, 2010.  It has all kinds of class activities to engage Native American children in discovering their own history.  One activity [p. 81] mentions “Journaling at Indian School,” a Native American boarding school, c. 1879.  It suggests that the student imagine that they are a student at an Indian school, and write about a day in the life of this young person.  What clothing would be worn?  What language would be spoken?  What would a day in their life would be like? 

As motivation for this assignment, it includes a page from a real journal of a student of the period. [Excerpt from Zitkala-SA, a Yankton Sioux, wrote about her first day at White’s Manual Institute, a Quaker missionary school for Native Americans.]  “I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.  Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities.  People had stared at me.  I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet.  And now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s!  In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me.  Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

Many of these boarding schools have long gone, which is probably a mercy. However, the Haskell Institute, originally a Native American trade school in 1884 in Lawrence, Kansas, still exists, though now it is called Haskell Indian Nations University, a nationally recognized center of Native American education and cultural preservation.

And this journal by a young Native American is a treasure to be honored.

Some Words of Encouragement:

·        “Whether they carry journals in their shirt pocket, back pocket, pocketbook or whether they write at home, all authors  agree: the journal is a writer’s laboratory.” [Ibid, Graham, p. x.]

·        “It is the mind that makes the body.” [Sojourner Truth]

·        “The Crone is the wise woman who watches over our dreams and visions, who whispers secrets to our inner ears.” [Vicki Noble]