Big and Little Sisters: A Story of an Indian Mission School — A Reader’s Guide

Catalog Subjects vs. Excerpt Evidence

The Project Gutenberg catalog lists this work under subjects such as “Indians of North America—Education—Juvenile fiction” and “Off-reservation boarding schools—Juvenile fiction.” Yet the excerpts do not depict an off-reservation school; the building is a “mission building” on the Dakota plains, and the girls are day students who go home or to Sunday-school in a procession. The friction in the story is not between students and institutional authority but among the girls themselves. Hannah and Cordelia compete over cleaning sides, memory skills, and social standing. The white mother (a teacher) appears but does not dominate the narrative; the girls’ Dakota-language whispers exclude her. The catalog framing emphasizes education as a top-down process, but the excerpts show a peer-driven social world where mission lessons are selectively adopted.

Material Goods as Social Currency

A central conflict in the excerpts revolves around shoes, stockings, and hair ribbons. Cordelia has bought brown shoes and stockings for a younger girl, Susie, which Hannah interprets as a bribe: “She wants to hire me to like her.” The girls mock the shoes as “ver-r-y ugly issue shoes” and “very white-minded shoes,” linking footwear to racial and social identity. Cordelia’s attempt to give gifts is met with suspicion, not gratitude. The motto “It is more blessed to give than to receive” is quoted by Cordelia in Sunday-school, but Hannah twists it: “She gives a nickel every Sunday, so she minds the verse and gets the red dress very cheap.” Material goods—shoes, ribbons, a red dress—are not neutral; they are tokens in a system of status and resentment.

Voice and the Limits of the Excerpts

The excerpts provide only two chapters (I and part of II) from an 18,247-word book. The narrative voice is third-person but stays close to the girls’ perspectives, rendering their Dakota-inflected English and their internal logic. Cordelia values memory and hard thinking; Hannah avoids both. The white mother is a peripheral figure who “failed to understand” Dakota whispers. The excerpts do not reveal the resolution of the shoe conflict, Cordelia’s Christmas piece, or the role of the mission school’s curriculum. Readers should note that the catalog’s emphasis on “education” and “boarding schools” may overstate the institutional presence; the story’s center is the girls’ social dynamics, not the school’s pedagogy.

Readers approaching Big and Little Sisters should attend to the girls’ voices—their word choices, their use of Dakota, and their negotiations of mission morality. The excerpts suggest a story less about assimilation than about how children repurpose institutional language for their own rivalries. The catalog subjects offer a frame, but the text itself may complicate that frame.

I keep thinking about those Sioux girls parsing each other's ribbons and braids, how material things carried so much weight in that cramped mission space. It reminds me of Bobby Bright, alone with his choices and their quiet consequences. There's a particular ache in watching children navigate small, closed worlds. Now or Never; Or, The Adventures of Bobby Bright: A Story for Young Folks — Context and Discussion stirred that same tender recognition in me, years ago.