This will be a challenging question to answer, not simply due to the vast number of possible responses for Native American nations spread across the country, but because in highly controlled environments like the one I will dive into below, it is very hard to hear unedited Indian voices. So much of what we read and see is filtered through white lenses, for white purposes, and for the dominant white narrative of history. What follows is not so much an answer to your question, but a depiction of a specific time, place, and event that shows how difficult the competing threads of history, identity, and erasure make your question to answer.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the flagship residential school in a national chain of institutions dedicated to killing the Indian to save the man. The founder, Richard Henry Pratt, believed Indians had no means of survival in the United States without full assimilation into the dominant white culture. Pratt, a devout universalist and cavalry officer, believed all that was separating Native American savagery from enlightened white state was the trappings of Indian culture. Removing a generation or two of children from their homes, and immersing them in the white culture of Pennsylvania would be sufficient to solve the Indian problem, and more efficient than sustained military conflict. As Adams wrote, the last Indian war would be waged against children.

By the time in question, however, the initial optimism about assimilation gave way to dominant racial science theories that held specific races, such as Indians and African Americans, were fundamentally constrained by their inherit savagery and would never be able to reach full white enlightenment. They should be trained and prepared for a working class life, and Carlisle's curriculum adapted to fit this model, offering more industrial, farming, and husbandry training. History, when taught, reinforced the dominant white narrative and continued the erasure of native voices.

Now, this brings us to March 1909 and three performances of the comic opera The Captain of Plymouth by the Carlisle students. The director chose this specific play for its "civilizing influence". In attendance, numbering more than one thousand for one of the shows, was the elite of Pennsylvania, potential donors to this school/social experiment, and even journalists from Philadelphia. Indian students, plucked from their homes and brought thousand of miles away to a school dedicated to their erasure, played both the white and native parts in the play. They were now literally performing whiteness on stage, for white eyes, and for the publicity of this white social experiment. They were also required, by the script, to perform Indian-ness as interpreted by white playwrights.

The play begins with the line "(This) land is settled for the benefit of the church." Like so much of our sanitized national narrative, the play does not reckon with the rights of the original inhabitants. What is described is "hand to hand combat with twenty thirsty redskins" and another settler bemoaning he hasn't "killed an Indian for twenty-four hours." Braves dance around a captured colonist, and sang an "Indian Ghost Dance" that mocked the very real Indian Ghost Dance religious movement. The play very clearly paints Indian subjugation as an inevitable cost of progress, and a nation's manifest destiny to control the continent.

How did these children feel about playing Indians, or colonists, for large white audiences? We don't know for sure. Newspapers report a festive, spirited performance. Surely the play allowed for a break from the drudgery of school, and the chance to go off campus. It could also provide, as oral history of Carlisle athletes shows, an opportunity to show what an Indian could do, a chance to excel, and perhaps even play for a brief moment, within the constraints of a militaristic, oppressive school system.

The complexity of the moment, though, is intense. A genocidal system told these kids, for three performances and however many rehearsals, to perform a rude pantomime of Indian-ness, while celebrating the inevitable and necessary victory of white colonists over native peoples. This founding myth, or something similar, would be repeated in a smaller scale for residential school classrooms across the country as a nation at the height of progressive fervor did everything in its power to extinguish the history, and continued presence, of it's indigenous people.

Sources

Education for Extinction Adams

Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations Fear-Segal and Ross

To Show What an Indian Can Do Bloom