Summary Of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised By Wolves

Improved Essays
“Kill the Indian and save the man.” These are words spoken by a popular Indian boarding school principal in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. (History Today) This was the objective for civilization in Indian boarding schools and in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, to practically obliterate students’ preceding culture. Students from both St. Lucy’s and Indian boarding schools did not see their family, and were forced to deal with homesickness. However, all of these conditions were considered necessary for a student to adapt to a foreign lifestyle, students not seeing their relatives, and being mandated to hate where they came from. Forced into boarding schools, the students in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” and American Indians

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    The Roundhouse Analysis

    • 1341 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Americans have a well-established tradition of imposing themselves onto other, less powerful peoples. The United States government has perfectly exemplified this when it comes to their treatment of Native Americans. Since their arrival in the fifteenth century, Europeans have exterminated Indian tribes, relocated them, and attacked their cultures. These strategies compounded and advanced well into the modern era, coming into fruition in the American government’s policies of termination in the 1950s, The Dawes Act of 1887, and Richard Pratt’s boarding schools in the late nineteenth century. Sherman Alexie’s…

    • 1341 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The ultimate goal of Indian Boarding Schools was to assimilate Native American children into the “white” culture. The famous saying of “kill the Indian, save the man” seemed to be used as the motto for these Indian Boarding Schools. As stated in the book “The boarding school ‘was the institutional manifestation of the government’s determination to completely restructure the Indians’ minds and personalities.’” A superintendent stated the purpose of their school was to “change them forever.”…

    • 416 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Karan Russell “St. Lucy Home for Girls’ Raised by Wolves” is an abstruse baffling short story that embrace a human-like wolf pack to be taught into a human. The pack consist of three main captivating characters: Claudette, Jeanette, and Mirabella. Claudette, the narrator of this story is an average normal wolf girl that is “...Not great and not terrible, solidly middle of the pack” (232). This illusive narrative contains five stages that is written through the handbook, The Jesuit Handbook on Lycanthropic Culture Shock, which is supposedly meant as a guide toward the conversion of custom and culture of humanity. However in some of the stages, Claudette doesn’t meet the expectations, yet in some stages she does.…

    • 802 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Pates Community Analysis

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The objective of these boarding schools was to assimilate Indians into a white society and “destroy Indian cultural communities” (Locklear, et al. 27). The construction of…

    • 1307 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Growing Tensions: Assimilation Within Modernity Much of American history glosses over the Indian experience; the European notion that indigenous peoples were inferior and “savage” reinforced their justification for years of conquest, killing, and destruction. The stories of two native boys reflect the pain of their ceaseless struggle and highlight the repressed suffering felt as they tried to progress in society, simultaneously inching further from their history. In his short story, and then I went to school, author Joe Suina is able to pinpoint the tension native millennials feel when they must give up parts of their culture to grow up. This pressure, to adopt more “whiteness,” was increasingly felt by Suina through his formative years as he attended traditional schools and was exposed to Western ideology. Comparatively, in Sherman Alexie’s, I Hated Tonto--Still Do, the native experience is better understood as it relates to the usage of stereotypes and generalizations in the media.…

    • 1790 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The short story of “St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” By Karen Russell has an interesting character that brings up a big question. Claudette is the middle sister between Mirabella being the youngest and Jeanette being the oldest. Just as her name suggests she is stuck with deciding if she wants to be a wolf or a human. As the story progresses Claudette does make progress on the surface because the nuns would like to eradicate this type of behavior from the girls ,but Claudette’s mindset and temptations are like a wolf . These struggles and temptations come up constantly in the short story.…

    • 804 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rina Swentzell Thesis

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The tone of Swentzell’s article is one of reflection and grieving because she realizes the disappointment rooted in the gentrification. She realizes that Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) not only “civilized” her and her fellow students, but also isolated them from their culture. The BIA’s schools were based on the “American” (Anglo) way of education. Furthermore, the BIA’s action of building a school without the input of the local culture was an insult to injury. Not only did they build without cultural consideration, but they also infected the community with the sense that school and…

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Here Child notes that disease and infection were frequent throughout the schools, due to poor sanitization, malnourishment and overcrowding. These occurrences are similarly seen throughout Native American history once the white settlers arrived, as they often forced Native American tribes onto land with limited space and nourishment, and additionally brough disease that infected and killed many peoples and tribes. Further, in “Chapter Four: Homesickness,” Child accounts through the letters of the sadness, separation anxiety, and loss of sense of family and self that ensued among many of the student and families. Students were often far away from parents, so far that visitations were rare or nonexistent, and parents were often unable to truly know if their children were alright, with letters not always transpiring or school officials neglecting to send word after inquiring. These trends are, again, common place upon the white settlers entering into the Native American’s land and home.…

    • 521 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Analysis Of Rez Life

    • 1162 Words
    • 5 Pages

    “Assimilation is the process through which newcomers adjust to a situation by deciding how much of their old culture and habits they want to give up”(600) defined by Holtzman and Sharpe. The government believed in the process of “Americanization”. This scenario would entail that the Native Americans would transfer beliefs, lifestyles, languages and all other cultural aspects to those of non-indigenous heritage. The main source of Americanization and forced assimilation came from the boarding schools. Many Native American children were forced to attend these boarding schools, where they were forced to cut their hair, change their names, permitted from speaking their native languages and stopped from practicing American Indian customs(658).…

    • 1162 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Hyeon Chung 10/24/17 SSCI 350 Personal Analysis of “In the White Man’s Image” The film “In the White Man’s Image” illustrates how white Americans wanted to civilize Native Americans. Anglo Americans, settlers who colonized United States, encroached on the land and culture of Native Americans. At that time, any hostile or violent behavior toward Whites’ intention was punished severely. Moreover, Whites believed that Native Americans needed to conform to the white way of civilization in order to live in America and thought that the way of life of Native Americans as immoral.…

    • 850 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In Karen Russell’s fictional book, “St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised by Wolves”, she tells the story of how werewolf girls are taught how to adapt to be more human-like. Claudette has truly conformed into the human ways the nuns at St. Lucy’s have taught her. The passage tells the struggles and accomplishments that Claudette faces and that how the rules will make her more human. Within the first three epigraphs, Claudette faces many struggles of lycanthropic culture shock in her educational journey at St. Lucy’s.…

    • 1108 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” There are three different girls, Claudette, Jeanette, and Mirabella, who portray three different characteristics. The author, Karen Russell, uses a vast amount of literary devices throughout the story to help demonstrate a deeper meaning. A deeper meaning in the story is much like how the three girls have to adapt to human culture, humans everyday try to strive to be perfect and fit into society. A pack of girls raised by wolves have to learn to fit into a new environment. There were many conflicts amongst the pack, whether it was over food, miscellaneous things, or wanting to be the best.…

    • 1279 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A rough childhood would be an understatement when talking about a minority child’s. Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education” illustrates the life of a young Native American boy from early 1st grade, to the final moments he walked down to get his diploma. Along the way we are confronted by challenging suspects who test his patience and character. Being bullied in first grade, Victor tries to gain respect by having a physical confrontation with his teasers. Little does this do, because for the next two years, it continues.…

    • 1016 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout the short story, “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” Karen Russell, the author, shows the unity of the wolf-raised girls as they were so close together, until their unity later disintegrated as each character distinguished themselves as separate entities instead of one character. Near the end, these girls reunite towards a new culture: our culture. This all happens throughout the three stages of the assimilation process, in which Karen subtly presents this essential information by showing these girls redefining themselves. We see that one is outstanding and nearly perfect at the tasks given to her for rehabilitation for the human world while an aforementioned, struggling other contrasts highly by sticking to her roots…

    • 822 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Zitkala Sa Analysis

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages

    “The melancholy of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days.” This quotation depicts the emotions of many young Native American students that attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The infamous boarding school was opened in 1880, to assimilate the Native people of the “white” country that was once theirs. Carlisle had a prodigious significance in the depreciation of the Native American culture.…

    • 1513 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays