Professor K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Creek and Cherokee)
I was named for my great aunt, Tsianina Blackstone. Tsianina was a singer who toured the country in the nineteen-teens with an Americanist composer, Charles Cadman. Cadman and Tsianina gave "Indian Lectures," about native culture and history, and performed Cadman's compositions. Cadman also composed an opera, "Shanewis" or "Robin Woman," a highly romanticized story of a young Indian woman torn between "fullblood" and "white" suitors. The opera was advertised as being based on Tsianina's life -- not really. "Robin Woman" was the first American opera performed at the Metropolitan opera (when the U.S. entered World War I and the opera season -- featuring Wagner's works -- had to be cancelled due to anti-German sentiments). Some years later, Tsianina performed in the title role in a production staged at Hollywood Bowl, Hollywood, California.
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Her research on the experiences of American Indian alumni of a federal off-reservation boarding school is rooted in the experiences of her father Curtis Carr, who was raised from age 7 at a boarding school in Oklahoma called Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. Interviews with her father and sixty of his contemporaries, plus information from federal policy and archives, appear in They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (1994, University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 1993 North American Indian Prose Award, and the American Educational Association’s 1995 Critics’ Choice Award.
Prof. Lomawaima teaches courses at the University of Arizona on the history of Indian education, contemporary issues in Native America, history and philosophy of native societies and cultures, and ecology demography & disease. In 1991 she received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Washington.
Selected Publications
In press "The Un-Natural history of American Indian Education" in Next Steps: Research & Practice to Advance Indian Education. Karen Swisher & John Tippeconnic (Eds.). ERIC: Clearinghouse on Rural Education & Small Schools.
1996 Guest Editor. Special Issue of Journal of American Indian Education, Spring 1996 Vol. 35 (3): 1-4.
1996 "Estelle Reel, Supt. of Indian Schools, 1898-1910: Politics, Curriculum, and Land," Special Issue of Journal of American Indian Education, Spring 1996 Vol. 35 (3): 5-31.
1995 Chap 30: Educating Native Americans. J. Banks (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. New York: Macmillan Publishing.
1994 They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.(North American Indian Prose Award, 1993)
1993 Domesticity in the federal Indian schools: The power of authority over mind and body. American Ethnologist 20(2): 1-14.
1992 "Blackstone, Tsianina Redfeather." In G. Bataille (Ed.), Garland Directory of Minority Women: Native American Women. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.