Teaching “dear Mihia”: Sentimentalism and Cross-Cultural Education in S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest

Only a few chapters into S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891), believed to be the first novel by a Native American woman, (1) Wynema Harjo, the young daughter of the chief of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe, reveals the deep affection that she has for Genevieve Weir, a white Methodist woman who becomes Wynema's teacher when she is solicited by both Wynema's father and a missionary, Gerald Keithly, to establish and run a school for the Muscogee children. When Wynema happens upon a meeting between Gerald and Genevieve not long after Genevieve begins teaching at the school, Gerald informs Wynema, whom he has not seen for some time, that he has "been telling Mihia ["teacher" in Creek] how [all of the students] like her" (19). Wynema responds by declaring, "'Mihia' knows I luf her,'" while "drawing herself away from him and looking up confidingly into her teacher's face" (19). What is more, when Gerald points out that Genevieve is "a pale-face" and inquires about whether she thinks that Genevieve loves her in return, Wynema confidently asserts, "Oh, yes, I know she does" as she tenderly "caress[es] her teacher's hand" (19). The events that precede and follow this remarkable, romanticized scene suggest that the intimacy between the young Native American pupil and her white Christian instructor is made possible only by cross-cultural sensitivity and understanding. More specifically, Callahan's novel asserts that affectional bonds between women of different racial groups, especially between Anglo-American and Native American women, are socially desirable and, significantly, hinge upon a familiarity with one another's cultural traditions and interests. While the text seems to propose that a strong interpersonal connection between the Native American heroine and her white teacher depends in part upon cultural likeness, Wynema experiments with the traditional (white) teacher/(Native American) student binary in ways that underscore how educational practices might foster familiarity and deconstruct interpersonal barriers. The novel thus characterizes cross-cultural education as instrumental in the formation and maintenance of interpersonal bonds, thereby proposing that the sentimentalism of women's sentimental writing can effectively support rather than simply eradicate or impede cultural diversity. While cross-cultural education often is a vague term associated with multiculturalism, a term that has been rendered problematic in Native American studies, I use it in this essay as a way to engage the broad anti-racist dimensions of sentimentalism. (2) Wynema thus usefully complicates ongoing critical discussions about the racist ideologies embedded in the American sentimental literary tradition. Recent studies of nineteenth-century women's "sentimental" literature frequently have examined what Shirley Samuels's collection The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America has aptly characterized as the highly vexed relationship between sentimentalism and race. In one such analysis, "Rape, Murder, and Revenge in 'Slavery's Pleasant Homes,'" Carolyn Karcher proposes that female abolitionist writers such as Caroline Healey Dall consciously chose to depict experiences of slavery in "a literary form and language" consistent with the sentimental "tastes" of nineteenth-century, middleclass, women readers (59); accordingly, they opted not to relay the brutal crimes committed against slaves, since such readers "would have recoiled in horror" (58). Although this restrained depiction maximized the successful reception of abolitionist ideas by a wider American audience, Karcher maintains, playing to the feminine delicacies of middle-class female readers ultimately rendered sentimental anti-slavery fiction an incompetent conveyor of such horrific realities of slavery as sexual abuse and other forms of physical violence. (3) Other critics have gone further than Karcher to claim that sentimental literature not only failed to adequately address, but also perpetuated, racial oppression. …