Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928

by David Wallace Adams

The prematurely aged look of hopeless heathenism has given way to that dew of eternal youth which makes the difference between the savage and the man who ...

“We cannot civilize ten,” Superintendent of Indian Schools John Oberly remarked in 1885, “and then trust the force of their example to civilize ninety other Indian boys. The savagery of the ninety will obliterate the civilization of the ten.”

Morgan agreed: compulsion must be at the very heart of the philanthropic program.

Since one of the objectives of the educational mission was to win Indigenous children over to the middle class-patriarchal-monogamous family model, the office look favorably on hiring married couples as exemplars of the same, with husbands usually serving as reservation agent or school superintendent and wives serving in a lesser position. What better way, policymakers reasoned, to convince students of the superiority of family life in civilized societies?

According to the cultural outlook, although women were mentally and physically inferior to men, they were genuinely superior in their natural roles as purveyors of moral virtue. Because of their natural gifts in working with children, their proper place was in the home and, by extension, in the classroom.

We are like leaves driven by the tempest, like sheep without a shepherd, like vessels at sea with no sails or rudder, like buffaloes fleeing before the destructive prairie fire,

Brown immediately accepted and admitted that she was completely ignorant of Indians. Indeed, she was genuinely horrified when her father informed her of the background of her future pupils: “South Dakota. That will be the Sioux Indians. Sioux. They’re the ones that butchered Custer and his men.”

As the train gathered speed I thought of a trip I had made ten years before, in a covered wagon, from our old home in Kansas to my father’s claim in Oklahoma Territory. He had stopped his team in that bright new land of opportunity at an Indian burial ground, and the entire family had scrambled to gaze in awe at lines stretched from the tops of poles to stakes in the ground. On the lines, like a family wash put out to dry, hung human scalps. The long, silky hair of white women and the short, crisp hair of white men lifted and rippled in the breeze that blew across the prairie.

For a young Lakota Sioux named Ota Kte, or Plenty Kill—later named Luther Standing Bear—the idea of attending the white man’s school first presented itself in the fall of 1879, when he and a friend noticed a crowd gathering around one of the agency buildings at Rosebud. Curious, the two boys approached the building and peered through a window. The room was mostly filled with Sioux, but there were also a few whites among them.

When they saw us peeping in at the window, they motioned for us to come inside. But we hesitated. Then they held out some sticks of candy.

We wondered whether we had better go back again to see what the white people really wanted. They had offered us candy—and that was a big temptation.

The final farewell was emotional. The children had no sooner boarded the steamer than both parents and children began to sob. “It was a sad scene,” Plenty Kill recalls. “I did not see my father or stepmother cry, so I did not shed any tears. I just stood over in a corner of the room we were in and watched the others all crying as if their hearts would break.”

From the policymakers’ point of view, the civilization process required a twofold assault on Indian children’s identity. On the one hand, the school needed to strip away all outward signs of the children’s identification with tribal life—that is to say, what school authorities saw as their savage ways.

On the other, the children needed to be instructed in the ideas, values, and behaviors of white civilization. These twin processes—the tearing down of the old selves and the building of new ones—could, of course, be carried out simultaneously. As the savage selves gave way, so the civilized selves would emerge. As a “total institution,” the boarding school was designed to systematically carry out this mission.

This motivation can clearly be seen in an incident recalled in a letter from S. M. McCowan to a former student at Fort Mohave Boarding School. McCowan, who had been superintendent of the institution, recalled:

I can see now all the old Mojave women standing around crying, while you covered your long hair with your arms and told me that I wouldn’t dare to cut that hair off, but the hair was cut in spite of all your efforts and the direful predictions of the Mojave women.

the long hair was a symbol of savagery.

The long-haired recalcitrant had undergone a change of heart. Securing a knife, he had walked out on the parade ground to publicly cut off his braids. Since by Sioux tradition the cutting off of hair was always associated with mourning, the boy’s dramatic act spontaneously evoked a characteristic response from those in the barracks. Boys and girls alike now filled the night air with a shrill wailing that was both eerie and not a little unsettling to the staff.

And of course many students must have seen the emphasis on uniform dress for what it was: yet another aspect of the school’s design to turn Indians into carbon copies of their white overseers.

But in the morning, the boys who had taken off their pants had a most terrible time. They did not know whether they were to button up in front or behind. Some of the boys said the open part went in front; others said, ‘No, it goes at the back.’ There is where the boys who had kept all their clothes on came in handy to look at. They showed the others that the pants buttoned up in front and not at the back.

Yet another assault on tribal identity came in the form of new names. The policy of renaming students was motivated by several concerns. First, many students arrived at school with names the teachers could neither pronounce nor memorize.

Most teachers had little patience with such names as Ain-dusgwon, John Sang-way-way, Wah-sah-yah, Min-o-ke-shig, and Mah-je-ke-shig. As one Indian Office official observed at a national educational conference:

“A teacher would be at a disadvantage in trying to be either affectionate or disciplinary with an eight-syllabled girl li...

Finally, renaming students was part of a conscious government policy to give Indians surnames. As Indians became property owners and thoroughly imbued with the values of possessive individualism, it would be virtually impossible to fix lines of inheritance if, for example, the son of Red Hawk went by the name Spotted Horse.

Second, as already discussed, a major justification for changing names was the argument that assigning surnames was an essential step in transforming Indians into self-reliant property owners.

the boarding school environment was patently militaristic. This was especially the case at off-reservation schools, where students were organized into army units and drilled in elaborate marching routines.

On special celebrations, when marching students shouldered rifles, brass bugles gleamed in the sunlight, drums pounded out marching rhythms, and school banners flapped in the breeze, the military atmosphere was only enhanced.

No aspect of school life left a more profound impres...

One Hopi who attended an off-reservation school at the turn of the century remembers that it was like “a ...

In broken English a former student at Albuquerque recalled:

Then we boys made a lot of mistakes when we doing that. Sometimes we don’t take the right step like they wanted us to. The ones that don’t know how to do, the captain would go up to this boy and take him by the shoulders and shake him and tell him to do like the way he was told to do.

Although spared the burden of bearing rifles, girls were subjected to the same drill routines. In fact, for Anna Moore Shaw, who attended Phoenix Indian School, the cadence of military marching was so internalized that it was hard to walk in a normal manner.

At first the marching seemed so hard to learn, but once we had mastered the knack, we couldn’t break the habit. Sometimes on our once-a-month visit to town, a talking machine would be blasting band music outside a store to attract customers. Then we girls would go into our act; try as hard as we could, we just couldn’t get out of step. It was impossible! We’d try to take long strides to break the rhythm, but soon we would fall back into step again. How embarrassing it was!

The superintendent of Haskell even reported in 1886 that, by organizing the school into a battalion of five companies, he had managed to break up persisting tribal associations;

But there were deeper reasons for the military atmosphere, reasons related to policymakers’ perceptions of the “wildness” of Indian children. Indian children, it was argued, were products of cultures almost entirely devoid of order, discipline, and self-constraint—all prized values in white civilization.

It was a well-known fact, according to Commissioner Morgan, that Indian parents “generally exercise very little control over their children and allow them the utmost freedom.”

Part of the problem, policymakers surmised, stemmed from Indians’ unfamiliarity with the white man’s clock and, once exposed ...

From a less ethnocentric perspective, the anthropologist Bernard Fontana has made a similar observation, namely, that Indian and white societies have historically...

Whereas white society has increasingly become governed by “clock time,” Indians have traditionally been oriented to “natural time.” “In devising a mechanical means of arbitrarily segmenting the day into regularly spaced units,” writes Fontana, white society has “made an artifact of time. . . . Our notion of time and our methods of time-keeping are the very underpinnings of our entire industrial system.” Indians, in contrast, traditionally lived out their lives in accordance with natural phenomena. Fontana makes an import...

It was a long time before we knew what the figures on the face of a clock meant, or why people looked at them before they ate their meals or started off to church. We had to learn that clocks had something to do with the hours and minutes that the white people mentioned so often. Hours, minutes, and seconds were such small divisions of time that we had never thought of them. When the sun rose, when it was high in the sky, and when it set were all the divisions of the day that we had ever found necessary when we followed the old Arapaho road. When we went on the hunting trip or to a sun dance, we counted time by sleeps.

“Make the most of time,” one school newspaper exhorted. “You have no right to waste your own time; still less, then, the time of others. Be punctual in the performance of all your duties.”

Or as students at one school were reminded:

Obedience is the great foundation law of all life. It is the common fundamental law of all organization, in nature, in military, naval, commercial, political, and domestic circles. Obedience is the great essential to securing the purpose of life. Disobedience means disaster. The first disastrous act of disobedience brought ruin to humanity and that ruin is still going on. “The first duty of a soldier is obedience” is a truth forced upon all soldiers the moment they enter upon the military life. The same applies to school life. The moment a student is instructed to do a certain thing, no matter how small or how great, immediate action on his part is a duty and should be a pleasure. . . . What your teachers tell you to do you should do without question. Obedience means marching right on whether you feel like it or not.

Whereas the use of corporal punishment to discipline children was something of a rarity in Native cultures, among whites the old maxim “spare the rod and spoil the child” was widely embraced as an effective, even necessary, tool in childrearing. It is not surprising, then, that Indian children as well as their parents viewed spanking and strapping as one of the most egregious features of boarding school policy, or that white authorities viewed corporal punishment as an essential element in their efforts to enforce compliance with the regimen of rules governing boarding schools—

One Navajo woman would never forget the punishment she and some other girls received for leaving the school to pick apples in a nearby canyon. That evening the matron lined up the girls in the dormitory. “She told us to pull our blankets down and lie on our stomachs. She had a wide strap in her hand. She began whipping us one by one, and we screamed with agony.”

One evening in 1922, the superintendent at Albuquerque, a school where whipping was a fairly a rare occurrence, wrote in his diary the punishment he had handed out to four students found in bed together: “This morning I whipped the two boys here in the office building until they lay down on the floor and whined like dogs. I also whipped the two girls.”

One woman who attended a boarding school in Oklahoma recalled that students who spoke Kiowa were made to brush their teeth with harsh lye soap. “The kids would end up with the whole inside of their mouth raw.”

At Albuquerque, the punishment for “speaking Indian” was a meal of bread and water.

My Son: I want to tell you one thing.

I send you there to be like a white man and I want you to do what the teacher tells you.