This story is a semi-autobiographical tale by Francis La Flesche, the first professional Native American ethnologist who worked with the Smithsonian Institution. Here, he shares his experiences growing up with his fellow Native Americans who are entrenched in White American society - with a particular focus on his student years.

The Middle Five, first published in 1900, is an account of Francis La Flesche's life as a student in a Presbyterian mission school in northeastern Nebraska about the time of the Civil War. It is a simple, affecting tale of young Indian boys midway between two cultures, reluctant to abandon the ways of their fathers, and puzzled and uncomfortable in their new roles of "make-believe white men." The ambition of the Indian parents for their children, the struggle of the teachers to acquaint their charges with a new world of learning, and especially the problems met by both parents and teachers in controlling and directing schoolboy exuberance contribute to the authen-ticity of this portrait of the "Universal Boy," to whom La Flesche dedicated his book. Regarded by anthropologists as a classic of Native American literature, it is one of those rare books that are valued by the specialist as authentic sources of information about Indian culture and yet can be recommended wholeheartedly to the general reader, especially to young people in high school and the upper grades, as a useful corrective to the often distorted picture of Indian life seen in movies, comics, and television.

Excerpt from The Middle Five: Indian Boys at School As the object of this book is to reveal the true nature and character of the Indian boy, I have chosen to write the story of my school-fellows rather than that of my other boy friends who knew only the aboriginal life. I have made this choice not because the influences of the school alter the qualities of the boys, but that they might appear under conditions and in an attire familiar to the reader. The paint, feathers, robes, and other articles that make up the dress of the Indian, are marks of savagery to the European, and he who wears them, however appropriate or significant they might be to himself, finds it difficult to lay claim to a share in common human nature. So while the school uniform did not change those who wore it, in this instance, it may help these little Indians to be judge, as are other boys, by what they say and do. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The Middle Five, written by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche, is a series of vignettes portraying La Flesche’s childhood growing up on the Omaha Reservation and attending a Presbyterian mission school. Published in 1909, the book portrays both the cultural conflicts arising from the assimilatory nature of the mission school and the youthful escapades of Frank (La Flesche’s younger self), Brush, Edwin, Warren, and Lester, who together make up the titular gang of schoolboys called the “Middle Five.” Like Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The School Days of an Indian Girl” from American Indian Stories, The Middle Five depicts life in an American Indian residential school, but takes place much closer to the reservation and thus portrays the interactions between the mission school and reservation life. It is regarded as a classic work of Native American literature and is often assigned in classrooms as a vivid firsthand account of 19th-century indigenous life. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

The Middle Five, written by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche, is a series of vignettes portraying La Flesche’s childhood growing up on the Omaha Reservation and attending a Presbyterian mission school. Published in 1909, the book portrays both the cultural conflicts arising from the assimilatory nature of the mission school and the youthful escapades of Frank (La Flesche’s younger self), Brush, Edwin, Warren, and Lester, who together make up the titular gang of schoolboys called the “Middle Five.” Like Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The School Days of an Indian Girl” from American Indian Stories, The Middle Five depicts life in an American Indian residential school, but takes place much closer to the reservation and thus portrays the interactions between the mission school and reservation life. It is regarded as a classic work of Native American literature and is often assigned in classrooms as a vivid firsthand account of 19th-century indigenous life.

Risk in Children’s Adventure Literature examines the way in which adults discuss the reading and entertainment habits of children, and with it the assumption that adventure is a timeless and stable constant whose meaning and value is self-evident. A closer enquiry into British and American adventure texts for children over the past 150 years reveals a host of complexities occluded by the term, and the ways in which adults invoke adventure as a means of attempting to get to grips with the nebulous figure of ‘the child’. Writing about adventure also necessitates writing about risk, and this book argues that adults have historically used adventure to conceptualise the relationship between children and risk: the risks children themselves pose to society; the risks that threaten their development; and how they can be trained to manage risk in socially normative and desirable ways. Tracing this tendency back to its development and consolidation in Victorian imperial romance, and forward through various adventure texts and media to the present day, this book probes and investigates the truisms and assumptions that underlie our generalisations about children’s love for adventure, and how they have evolved since the mid-nineteenth century.