3 education. Teachers can adopt the system of Cherokee education including the
characteristics, the teaching method, the contents, and the learning process seen in the novel.
This study aims to find out the reactions of the main character in the novel, as the indigenous, against white educational system as colonizer. This aim is
achieved by analyzing the novel. In order to do so, there are theories and approach used in this study. The
first is theory of the intrinsic elements of fiction; character and characterization. The second theory is postcolonial theory. This theory includes the understanding
of post-colonialism, colonialism, and the reactions of the colonized against colonizer that is called abrogation. The approach used in this study is postcolonial
approach.
1.2. Objective of the Study
The objective of this study is to examine one’s reactions against colonial education seen in Little Tree, the main character in Forrest Carter’s The Education
of Little Tree.
1.3. Problem Formulation
There are three problems formulated in order to achieve the objective of this study.
1.3.1. How is Little Tree, the main character in Forest Carter’s The Education of
Little Tree, depicted in the novel?
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4 1.3.2.
What are the characteristics of Cherokee education and colonial education seen in the novel?
1.3.3. How does Little Tree react against the colonial education?
1.4. Benefit of the Study
There are some benefits of this study. First, this study will give a reference or a point of view for readers in reading Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little
Tree. Second, the researcher hopes that this study is able to create the readers’ awareness of colonial representation and colonized resistance against the
representation. This study will be useful also in teaching English in school and university. Teachers and lecturers can use this novel as teaching English material
and resources in their classes.
1.5. Definition of Terms
1.5.1. Colonial Education
Colonial education is the education practiced by colonizer in their colonial lands to indoctrinate the colonized, to colonize the colonized
nation mentally.
1.5.2. Little Tree
Little Tree is the main character in Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. He is a mixed-blood between Cherokee and White.
Cherokee is American indigenous lived in the southern Appalachians. In the early nineteenth century, the United State of America
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5 forced the Cherokee Nation to surrender its homeland and relocate west of
the Mississippi. Today they live in eastern Oklahoma with only a small remnant remaining in the mountains of western North Carolina Perdue,
2008: xiii.
1.5.3. Reaction
It means a response to something, an act, an influence. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 1995:966
According to Concise Oxford English Dictionary, reactions mean “a person’s ability to respond physically and mentally to external stimuli.”
In this study, reaction also refers to Little Tree’s words, attitudes, belief, thought, and point of view dealing with his reactions and rejection
against colonial education he experienced.
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6
CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter consists of four parts. They are review of related theories, review of related study, theoretical framework, and contexts of the novel. Those
parts help the readers see the theories used in this study and how the theories are used to achieve the aim of this study.
2.1. Review of Related Theories
This part provides the theories used in this study. There are two theories used to answer the problems formulated in this study. The first theory is character
and characterization. The second theory is theories related to postcolonial discourse.
2.1.1. Character and Characterization
Abram’s Glossary of Literary Term defines characters as ”the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as
being endowed with particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what the persons say and their distinctive ways of saying it —the
dialogue— and from what they do—the action” Abrams, 1981: 20. A character can be known through characterization, the way author defines
the characters. There are four different ways to convey the character and a characterization according to Robert and Jacobs in An Introduction to Reading
and Writing, which are from 1 what the characters themselves said and think, if
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7 the author expresses their thoughts, 2 what characters do, 3 what other
characters say about them, and 4 what the author says about them, speaking as story teller or observer Baldick, 1991.
According to Murphy 1972:161-172, there are nine ways in which an author attempts to make his characters understandable to, and come alive for, his
readers. a.
Personal description The author can describe a person’s appearance and clothes.
b. Character as seen by another
Instead of describing a character directly the author can describe him through the eyes and opinions of another. The reader gets, as it were, a reflected image.
c. Speech
The author can give us an insight into the character of one of the persons in the book through what that person says. Whenever a person speaks, whenever he is
in conversation with another, whenever he puts forward an opinion, he is giving us some clue to his character.
d. Past life
By letting the reader learn something about a person’s past life the author can give us a clue to events that have helped to shape a person’s character. This can
be done by direct comment by the author, through the person’s thoughts, through his conversation or through the medium of another person.
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8 e.
Conversation of others The author can also give us clues to a person’s character through the
conversations of other people and the things they say about him. People talk about other people and the things they say often give us a clue to the character
of the person spoken about. f.
Reactions The author can also give us a clue to a person’s character by letting us know
how that person reacts to various situations and events. g.
Direct comment The author can describe or comment on a person’s character directly.
h. Thoughts
The author can give us direct knowledge of what a person is thinking about. In this respect he is able to do what we cannot do in real life. He can tell us what
different people are thinking. In the novel we can accept this. The reader then is in a privileged position; he has, as it were, a secret listening device plugged
in to the inmost thoughts of a person in a novel. i.
Mannerisms The author can describe a person’s mannerisms, habits or idiosyncrasies which
may also tell us something about his character.
2.1.2. Postcolonial
There is no fixed definition of postcolonial discourse. The term “post” indicates “after” which means the condition of nations after their independence.
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9 However, the effects of colonialism are still apparent in the construction of the
present-day societies. Although a nation has been independent, the effect of colonialism still appears in their nation, such as culture domination, apparatuses,
and educational system. Postcolonial addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the
beginning of colonial until after-independence, all the process that testify the fact that post-colonialism is a continuing process of resistance and
reconstructions. The studies in it are based in “historical fact” of European colonialism and its diverse effects Ashcroft, 2002: 2.
Additional, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin 1989: 2 use
the term ‘post-colonial’ to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.
Since colonialism is not only limited in taking land, but also culture domination, there are many issues happened under colonialism that uncovered by
postcolonial discourse. In other words, postcolonial becomes a discourse used by the colonized to see the issues in their reacting against colonialism.
It is clear that postcolonial is not simply defined as a condition after independence of a nation. It deals with many issues as seen in the quotation
bellow: Postcolonial deals with some important issues: migration, slavery,
suppression, representation, difference, race, gender, place, and response to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe such as history,
philosophy, linguistics, and the fundamental experiences causing the appearance of these writings. These vast issues, they continued, are not
‘essentially’ post-colonial, but together they create complex fabric of the field Ashcroft, 2002: 2.
Ania Loomba 2000:17-20 refers postcolonial to specific group of
oppressed or dissenting people or individual within them; intellectual and
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10 activist who fought against colonial rule, and their successors who now engage
with its continuing legacy, challenged and revised domination definition of race, culture, language, and class in the process of making their voice heard.
Postcolonial is the struggle of colonized nation to liberate their nation. Awareness of the colonized about colonizer’s representation is coming in their
mind during this continuing process. Then, they reclaim their past and identity from their point of view. They will react against colonialism.
According to Peter Barry 2002: 194, characteristically, postcolonial writers evoke or create a pre-colonial version of their own nation, rejecting the
modern and the contemporary, which is tainted with the colonial status of their countries. In his book Beginning Theory, he formulated some characteristics of
postcolonial criticism. First, it is an awareness of representations of the non- European as exotic or immoral ‘Other’. The second area of concern in
postcolonial criticism is language. Some postcolonial writers have concluded that the colonizers’ language is permanently tainted, and that to write in it involves a
crucial acquiescence in colonial structures. The third characteristic is the emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or unstable. Then, the last is the stress on ‘cross-
cultural’ interactions Barry, 2002: 194-196.
2.1.3. Forms of Colonialism
Ania Loomba 2000: 2 defined colonialism is the process of ‘forming a community’ in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the
communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices
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11 including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide, enslavement and
rebellions. Colonizer does not only take the land but also empowers and builds a new culture community domination in their colonial land.
Boehmer gives similar definition about colonialism. According to Boehmer 1995: 2, colonialism involves of imperial power, and is manifested in
settlement, of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitant of occupied lands.
Stephen Slemon, in his essay The Scramble for Post-colonialism published in Postcolonial studies Readers, defines the concept of colonialism as an
ideological and discursive formation with the way in which colonialism is viewed as an apparatus for constituting subject positions through the field of
representation. The description of colonialism’s multiple strategies for regulating Europe’s others can be expressed by the following diagram:
Institutional Regulators Colonialist educational apparatuses
C B
A F Colonizer Colonized
D E
The semiotic field ‘textuality’
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12 The general understanding that is colonialism works on a left-to-right
order of domination, with line ‘A’ is representing various theories of how colonialism oppresses through direct political and economic control. Line ‘BC’
and ‘DE’ are representing differing concept of the ideological regulation of colonial subjects, of subordination through the manufacture of consent. Line ‘F’
representing colonialist power is seen to operate through a complex relationship between the apparatus Ashcroft, 2002: 46.
From the diagram above, colonialism runs in some ways. The first one is called ‘brute force’ or ‘direct political’ of colonialist oppression. The physical
colonialism is usually done when the colonizer doing expands of their territory. The other form of colonialism is by indoctrinating their ideology to the colonized.
It is done softly through the constitutive power of state apparatuses like education and academic field. The other colonialist ways are reproducing ideology through
the strategic deployment of semiotic field of representations, such as literary works, advertising, sculpture, travelogues, exploration document, maps. Those
ways are unified by colonizer to colonize the others. Those constitutive powers are called hegemony.
Colonizer uses hegemony to create unconsciousness of the colonized about the colonialism. in this case, the colonized will have willingness to be
empowered by the colonizer. Gramsci formulated the concept of hegemony. Hegemony is power
achieved through a combination of coercion and consent. He argued that the ruling classes achieve domination not by force or coercion alone, but also by
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13 creating subjects who ‘willingly’ submit to being ruled. In other words, hegemony
is achieved not only by direct manipulation or indoctrination, but by playing upon the common sense of people, or lived system of meanings and values Loomba,
2000: 29. In Postcolonial Studies Reader, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin wrote that:
Education is perhaps the most insidious and in some ways the most cryptic of colonialist survivals, older systems now passing, sometimes
imperceptibly, into neo-colonialist configuration. Education, whether state or missionary, primary or secondary and later tertiary was a massive
cannon in the artillery of empire. The domination by consent is achieved through what is taught to the colonized, how it is taught, and the
subsequent emplacement of the educated subject as a part of the continuing imperial apparatus- a knowledge of English Literature, for
instance, was required for entry into the civil service and the legal professions. Education is thus a conquest of another kind of territory-it is
the foundation of colonialist power and consolidates this power through legal and administrative apparatuses. Education can be a technology of
colonialist subjectification. It strongly reinforced such textual representation Aschroft, 2002: 425.
In colonialism, education becomes an effective media for colonizer to
achieve hegemony. It is a soft way to indoctrinate the mental and ideology of colonized nation. Moreover, in White point of view, educate the colonized is
civilizing the colonized. They create a concept in natives’ mental that White’s concept of education is good. Through education, colonizer constructs the
colonized mind to think and act as White. Indirectly, Whites creates culture domination in their colonial subject because colonized nation will be inferior and
ashamed to act in their culture through this hegemony.
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14
2.1.4. Colonialist Representation and Stereotyping of the Colonized
The colonized is represented in such way by colonizer through its manipulated knowledge which can not be taken for granted as the truth. It is
mainly caused by the unbalance power relationship between colonizers and colonized, especially in the moment of ‘old’ colonialism expanded by the
colonizer, which is dominated and determined by the colonizer Said, 1979: 40. In ColonialismPost-colonialism, Ania Loomba pointed out that:
The colonial stereotyping description of the indigenous people is constructed by the projector that the ‘New World Natives’ are birthed by
the European encounter with them, accordingly a discourse of primitivism surrounds them. They are constructed as savage, barbaric or degenerate,
and regarded as barbarous infidels Loomba, 2000: 108. Loomba 2000: 47 also asserts Edward Said’s thesis in Orientalism about
the European self conception as: colonized people are irrational. Europeans are rational: if the former are barbaric, sensual, and lazy, Europe is civilization itself,
with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic that of hard work. Elleke Boehmer in ColonialPostcolonial Literature tells the colonial
projection of the indigenous peoples as innately degenerated, degraded, barbarian, and natural Boehmer, 1995: 21. Boehmer formulates that this stereotype
reproduction has always come with the superiority of an expanding Europe, and to distinguish its hegemony, whereas colonized peoples were represented as lesser:
less human, less civilized, and child or savage, Wildman, animal, or headless mass. It is caused by unbalance power relationship between Eroupean as colonizer
and the colonized Boehmer, 1995: 79. European evaluative stereotyping of this other peoples as irrational, barbarian, Indian, and animal-like.
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15 From the representation above, there are dichotomist representation
between White and Other created by White. We can see that White as colonizer represent other as savage, infidel, bad, and uncivilized. Meanwhile, White
represents themselves as civilized and the best one. Then, the aim of their colonialism is to civilize Other that they considered as uncivilized.
2.1.5. Abrogation
One of reactions of colonized nation against colonialism is called abrogation. It is defined in Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts that:
Abrogation refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ English used by certain classes or
groups, and of the corresponding concepts of inferior ‘dialects’ or ‘marginal variants’ Ashcroft, 2000: 3.
Abrogation is used to describe the rejection of a standard language in the
writing of post-colonial literatures. It can be used to describe a great range of cultural and political activities in form of film, theatre, the writing of history,
political organization, modes of thought and argument in rejecting colonialism. In The Empire Writes Back, abrogation is a refusal of categories of the
imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or “correct” usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning “inscribed” in the
words Ashcroft, 1989: 38. In other words, abrogation simply can be defined as refusal to use imperial or colonial culture, including its language and systems.
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16
2.2. Review of Related Study
The previous study on Forest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree was conducted by Mark McGurl on an essay entitled Learning from Little Tree: The
Political Education of the Counterculture, published in The Yale Journal of Criticism. Mark wrote this essay to set the readers understanding how the figure
of native American came to function in the 1960s as a symbolic vehicle, or personification, of the increasing complexity of the questions upon which they
hinged, and to draw attention to the importance of one social institution in particular, the school, in producing the historical conditions of their seeming
unresovability McGurl, 2006. This study tells the readers how the colonial politician ruled the Cherokee’s educational system. He argues that education
might be traded for three terms, with activism, culture, and politics of colonialist representations.
The difference between this study and McGurl’s study is the focus of the study. McGurl focuses on the how the education of colonial function as political
culture. Meanwhile, the researcher focuses on the main character’s reactions against the colonial education.
2.3. Theoretical Framework
