The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

mainstream American life, the federal school service established English as the sole
means of communication in their boarding schools in 1890. (Adams 140) This “no
Indian” rule was often enforced with corporal punishment: “Minnie Jenkings frankly
describes in her memoirs how on one occasion she laid thirty-five Mohave kindergartners
– ‘like little sardines’ – across tables, whereupon she spanked them for speaking
Mohave.” (141) This, coupled with the stigma of being identified in white communities
as Indian, had a devastating toll on fluency in indigenous languages. For example,
William Bright estimated that there were 100 speakers of Káruk in the 1950s. (1) It
should be mentioned that population-loss is also a factor in that low number. The tribe
was around a quarter of its 1850 population in the 1950s at 755 people. Still, that comes
to about 6/7s or 86% of the population not speaking their indigenous language only 100
years after colonization. The effect on storytelling is clear – stories were now largely told
in English. But what were the stories propagated by the new education system?
Some of Grimm’s fairy tales and Norse myths factored into the mix. Arnold and
Reed write about a student being horrified at the fate of Little Red Riding Hood’s
Grandmother (97), and Chippewa student Maude Martin at Haskell tells an “Indian Story
of Cinderella.” (Indian Legends and Superstitions 58-60) a Papago student references
“The Heroes of Asgard” in that same publication. (98) But Christian mythology took up a
lion’s share of the introduced storytelling repertoire. This comes as no surprise: as we
saw above, Christianity was considered one of the necessary features of civilization.
Hence, when the government ended the patronage system of appointments to the Indian
Office, they contracted administrative duties to Christian groups. (Cahill 2011, 43) As
Herbert Welsh of the Indian Rights Association enthused, “the work must be done, not be
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