"I knew how to be moderate. and I knew how to obey": The Commonality of American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1920s

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 75-94

  Szasz, Margaret Connell ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO   (United States)

^b and Philosophy

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845999894     PISSN: 01616463     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17953/aicr.29.4.b2220582h05507u2     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. Samson Occom, "Diary," vol. 1, 84, in Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover, New Hampshire [hereafter cited as DCA].
2. This comment appeared in the student newspaper Cheroke Rose Buds, 1 August 1854, 2, as cited in Devon A. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 39.
3. Student is quoted in Sally Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990), 9. For a collection of these quotes see The First One Hundred Years, Santa Fe Indian School (n.p.: Foundation for Indian Leadership, n.d.). This catalog includes portions of the oral history interviews conducted by students and project staff who contributed to the project "Santa Fe Indian School - The First One Hundred Years."
4. Sally J. McBeth, Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-Central Oklahoma American Indians (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983);
5. Robert A. Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891-1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988);
6. Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart;
7. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds;
8. Michael C. Coleman, Indian Children at School, 1850-1930 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993);
9. K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994);
10. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995);
11. Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995);
12. Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996);
13. Dorothy R. Parker, Phoenix Indian School: The Second Half Century (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996);
14. Scott Riney, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999);
15. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000);
16. Amanda J. Cobb, Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000);
17. James T. Carroll, Seeds of Faith: Catholic Indian Boarding Schools (New York: Garland, 2000);
18. Jean A. Keller, Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902-1922 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002).
19. See, e.g., Jim Whitewolf: The Life of a Kiowa Apache Indian, ed. Charles S. Brant (New York: Dover, 1969), 83-97;
20. Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), esp. the classic account of his arrival and first days at Carlisle, 133-50;
21. Anna Moore Shaw, A Pima Past (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978), 132-47;
22. Albert Yava, Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi Indian's Life and Times and the History and Traditions of His People, ed. Harold Courlander (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 12-19;
23. Irene Stewart, A Voice in Her Own Tribe: A Navajo Woman's Own Story, ed. Doris Ostrander Dawdy (Socorro, NM: Ballena Press, 1980), 15-21.
24. Since it remained open until 1949, the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females proved an exception. See Cobb, Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories.
25. Recent authors emphasize the ambivalent reasons for attendance: "They came because they wanted to; because their families wanted them to; because some judge or social worker or probation officer or federal agent decreed they had to" (Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda K. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences [Phoenix, AZ: HeardMuseum, 2004], 20). Yet Luther Standing Bear knew in 1879 that his culture demanded that he go to school. When Carlisle recruited its first students that year, he recalled, "I was thinking of my father, and how he had many times said to me, 'Son, be brave! Die on the battlefield if necessary away from home ..." When I thought of my father ... it occurred to me that this chance to go East would prove that I was brave if I were to accept it" (Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 124).
26. Adams writes, "Students seem to have been endlessly inventive in finding ways of 'counting coup' on a system that sought to debase all things Indian" (Education for Extinction, 231). Lomawaima concludes that Chilocco was "an institution founded and controlled by the federal government [but] was inhabited and possessed by those whose identities the institution was committed to erase" (They Called It Prairie Light, 167).
27. Child, Boarding School Seasons, 52-53.
28. Omaha Francis La Flesche recalled the stories and other nocturnal Indian events that he and his friends crafted in their dorms at the mid-nineteenth-century Presbyterian school near their reservation. Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 27-31, 115-32.
29. Shaw, A Pima Past, 134-35.
30. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, 118.
31. The only full-length biography of Occom is W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England (1899; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), with an introduction by Margaret Connell Szasz. Recent essays on Occom include "Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary," in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman, OK: Red River Books, 2001), 61-78;
32. John A. Strong, "Samson Occom," in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 434-36;
33. Margaret Connell Szasz, "Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader and Cultural Broker," in The Human Tradition in American History, ed. Nancy Rhoden and Ian K. Steele (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 237-56;
34. David Murray, "Christian Indians: Samson Occom and William Apes," chap. 4 of Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 49-64;
35. Bernd C. Peyer, "Samson Occom and the Vision of a New England Christian Polity," chap. 3 of The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 54-116.
36. Additional information on Moor's School can be found in James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock: Founder of Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1939), chaps. 5-11;
37. James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock's Indians (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932);
38. James Axtell, "Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School," in James Axtell, The European and the Indian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87-109.
39. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 130.
40. Occom's statement was recorded by a former English pupil; see David McClure to Wheelock, 21 May 1770, file 770321, DCA.
41. On Brant's leadership and the split within the Iroquois League see Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 104, 106, 108-12, 142-43;
42. and Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60, 122-28.
43. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 85.
44. Quote is in ibid., 86. On the students' aversion to farm chores see Eleazar Weelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763), 33.
45. The two quotes are in ibid., 34.
46. Hannah Nonesuch Confession, 11 March 1768, file 768211.1, DCA.
47. For a good introduction to the removal issues see Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2005).
48. On the background of the Cherokee division see William G. McLoughlin, "Accepting Christianity, 1839-1860," in McLoughlin, The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794-1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 189-91.
49. Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 98-99.
50. Ibid., 100. McLoughlin added, "The mixed-bloods favored rapid acculturation, behaved like whites, and brought their children up by white values. Full-bloods kept as many of their old ways and values as they could" (McLoughlin, "Accepting Christianity, 1839-1860," 189-90). Still other scholars maintain the significance of blood as a determining factor in Cherokee society. Anthropologist Circe Sturm writes that "Cherokee blood continues to be one of the most important aspects of Cherokee national and social identity" (Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 152).
51. On the complexity of the issue see Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians, 100-101, 127n99.
52. Julia M. Coates, "'None of Us Are Supposed to Be Here': Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Production of Cherokee Histories" (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2002), 85.
53. The term conservative comes from Perdue, as quoted by Coates in ibid., 80. John B. Jones, well-known Baptist minister to the Cherokee, encouraged a bilingual system of teaching in the common schools, but he was unable to persuade the leadership to accept this plan. (The federal Indian schools adopted a similar idea during the 1930s.) Robert H. Skelton, "A History of the Educational System of the Cherokee Nation, 1801-1910" (EdD diss., University of Arkansas, 1967), 135-37, 140-43.
54. Also see William G. McLoughlin, "An Alternative Missionary Style: Evan Jones and John B. Jones among the Cherokees," in Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 109. Other Cherokees believed that the Nation should introduce vocational training for the youth, suggesting that "the Post at Fort Gibson might be transformed from a Military Post into an Indian Farming School such as that at Carlisle or Lawrence," but the National Council took no action (Robert S. Owen, Indian Agent, to D. W. Bushyhead, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, 18 August 1886, Cherokee National Records, microfilm, Schools, Miscellaneous, CHN 102, frames 163-64, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City).
55. In 1845 the Cherokee Nation declared that "if the funds of the nation are sufficient, all her schools should be free for every free citizen. . . . [A]ll the youths should be considered as entitled to equal privileges standing on a common level" (Cherokee Advocate, 13 April 1845, as cited in Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 101).
56. In 1876 the population of the Cherokee Nation was approximately nineteen thousand. Of the school-age population of 4,041, some 2,800 children, or 69 percent, were enrolled in school. In Arkansas 7 percent were enrolled, in Kansas 6 percent. Per pupil expenditures also differed widely. The Cherokee Nation spent $35.76 per pupil; Arkansas spent $7.45 and Kansas $8.28. Also, the Cherokee Nation expected teachers in the common schools to attend summer institutes. In 1880 the National Council determined to restrict the number of common schools to one hundred. See Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 134-35, 147-48, 152.
57. These estimates come from Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds, 2, 97. In this section I have relied heavily on Mihesuah's study for my assessments of the Cherokee Female Seminary.
58. Ibid., 50; Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 165.
59. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds, 80-81.
60. San Juan Pueblo student, arrived at SFIS in 1927, quoted in Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 25.
61. Sally Hyer, "Pablita Velarde: The Pueblo Artist as Cultural Broker," in Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 277.
62. Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 11.
63. Ibid, 26.
64. Ibid., 21.
65. Pablita Velarde, interviewed by the author, 9 February 1972, Albuquerque. Tape Recording 853, American Indian History Research Project Files, Center for Southwest Research, Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
66. Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 8.
67. Ibid., 13.
68. John Wolfe Lydekkcr, The Faithful Mohawks (1938; repr., Long Island, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1968, 55);
69. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), chap. 5.
70. Adams, Education for Extinction, 138;
71. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, 167.
72. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 93-94.