Early Native Writers Were Educated in the Eastern Indian Boarding School System, where they learned to read and write English.

Recurring themes in early Native American literature include the importance of religious ritual and belief, pride in heritage, memory of the old ways with a mingling of these with the ways of the white man, the pain of change, and the loss of dignity. The manner in which American Indians and whites regard one another is woven into the early stories by native writers, sometimes with humor and always with pain. They included information on Native American heritage and culture because that is what readers wanted to hear.

The renaissance of American Indian writing since World War II is so remarkable that we might be tempted to forget that in fact American Indians have been writing fiction seriously for a long time. Some stories were not published for centuries.

They are important in various ways for understanding the origins of the present remarkable flowering of Native American fiction. Like the present generation, the early writers reveal a profound concern for tribal legend and tradition, and though--again like most contemporary American Indian writers--every one of them was of mixed descent, their stories reveal enormous tribal pride.

Some of them include Susette and Francis LaFlesche, who were two members of a remarkable Omaha family. Another was Pauline Johnson, a Mohawk who enjoyed a considerable Canadian reputation before her death in 1913.  William Jones is also an important early writer. He was from the Fox tribe and he was also an anthropologist whose distinguished career ended tragically when he was killed in the Philippines in 1909

Another noted native writer was Gertrude Bonnin who wrote under her Yankton Sioux name, Zitkala-Sa. And we cannot forget Charles Eastman a Sioux Indian writer well known to mainstream literature. He was also a physician.

Other important native writers include: Alexander Posey, the Creek political satirist; D'Arcy McNickle, the distinguished Flathead novelist and anthropologist; and Angel DeCora (Winnebago), John M. Oskison (Cherokee), and John Joseph Mathews (Osage).

Gertrude Bonnin's "Soft-Hearted Sioux" is a harrowing story of a Christian convert who finds himself in a terrible crisis of conscience because his sick father wants to eat meat before he dies; he rustles a cow, is forced to shoot its pursuing owner, and is last seen awaiting capture and execution. Two of the pieces are from the Fux Fixico letters that Posey wrote to satirize Oklahoma politics during the debate over statehood early in this century; they are funny, they often reveal genuine insight into the apparently eternal predicaments of reservation life, and they deserve to be reprinted.

D’Arcy McNickle's "Train Time" is told from the point of view of an army officer who is sending a group of Indian children to a boarding school but who feels strangely uneasy about the kind of philanthropy that uproots children from their families and tribe "for their own good."

Native literature is richer today thanks to these early trail-blazing writers who had the fortitude to tell their story.