The Man

I think that all children in school grow up with some fear of their principal, whether it be a fear of being judged or disciplined. This is probably thought out by the school in order to have the students cooperate. This concept of ominous watchful figure was taken to an extreme with "The Man on the Bandstand". Of course the persona of the man on the bandstand could not exist without the school publication in which he recounted his observations of the students. The "Indian Helper" revealed just how closely the lives of the children were watched and, I think, used to make the children aware that if they misbehaved they might be written about in the next issue.

Also, after we learn all this about the publication and the man, we learn that there is in fact no man behind the writing. It was Marianna Burgess, a woman who worked in the school's print shop. I'm not sure if I was alone in my opinion that either this woman was crazy or power hungry. She pretended each week to be a man that was watching over the students and reporting details of their lives to the readers of the paper. However, even though she was writing as the man who stood on the bandstand, there was in fact a man who did stand on the bandstand at the center of the school and carefully observe the children. Captain Richard Henry Pratt was in charge of running the school and took his job as supervisor seriously. Marianna took the idea of the man and used it to create a scary character that with each publication threatened the students of the school with public humiliation. And with this threat they came closer to their goal of assimilating the children into society by discouraging differing from social norms. The narrative of the man was also used to change the way of thinking by the Indian students. The man on the bandstand helped to instill in the children a Christian feeling of guilt and conscience that they had not grown up with, but the Indian Helper made sure that they would develop.