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

by David Wallace Adams

Standing Bear was immensely proud of the progress he was making, at one point writing his father: “We are trying to speak only English nothing talk Sioux. But English, I have tried. But I could not do it at first. But I tried hard every day. So now I have found out how to speak only English. I have been speaking only English about 14 weeks now I have not said any Indian words at all.”

Unlike the German- or French-speaking student, to whom similar linguistic patterns would be readily recognizable, the Indian student struggled with a language that was entirely outside his Native morphological and syntactical frame of reference. Many Indian languages place little emphasis on time

still others build into a single word thoughts that in English can only be expressed in an entire sentence.

What was the Dakotaspeaking child to make of a sentence such as “One bright summer’s day Gracie took Zip for a romp in the orchard”? The white child, Riggs noted, would immediately assume that Zip was a dog, but a Santee Sioux would have a different interpretation. The latter would never think of naming a dog; one did not bestow a personal name on something likely to end up in a kettle of soup.

And what was the young Dakota speaker to make of the word “orchard,” again something outside the child’s cultural experience? It was, Riggs claimed, very much like asking the white child to make sense of taking “Zip for a romp in a glacier.”

Thus, it was one thing for an Indian child to mechanically pronounce words but quite another for him to genuinely comprehend what he was reading. Words and concepts...

Convinced that pupils would never achieve English proficiency unless forced to use it as the sole means of communication, the school service was informed in 1890 that “pupils must be compelled to converse with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule.”

Perhaps the most ingenious solution was that devised by the superintendent of the school at Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency. In this instance students were organized into military companies, complete with sergeants and corporals, solely on the basis of their facility with English and then periodically promoted or demoted in rank on the basis of their adherence to speaking only English.

Minnie Jenkins frankly describes in her memoirs how on one occasion she laid thirty-five Mohave kindergartners—“like little sardines”—across tables, whereupon she spanked them for speaking Mohave.

Certainly no superintendent could ask more of a student than what Pratt got from one of his Sioux girls in 1881:

Dear Sir Capt. Pratt: I write this letter with much sorrow to tell you that I have spoken one Indian word. I will tell you how it happened: yesterday evening in the dining-hall Alice Wynn talked to me in Sioux, and before I knew what I was saying I found that I had spoken one word, and I felt so sorry that I could not eat my supper, and I could not forget that Indian word, and while I was sitting at the table the tears rolled down my cheeks. I tried very hard to speak only English. Nellie Robertson11

With characteristic sensitivity, Pratt published this letter in the school newspaper.

“It took me three years to learn to say, ‘I want this.’”

For some schools, all of the object lessons, the copying over of sentences, and recitations paid off to the point that some students began to lose touch with their Native tongue. In 1908, one Haskell student wrote home:

“My friend and I, both big Pawnees, have fun trying to make a sentence in Indian without saying a word of English. It is hard as well as fun, when you get ninety in English, to make a good sentence in the Pawnee language.”

“If you hear anyone talking in their tribal language, you tell us.”

After several failed attempts to continue their palm-tree sessions they finally surrendered to the school’s “no Indian” policy. Returning home for a visit after four years at Sherman, Viola quickly understood the extent of her loss. When her relatives spoke Paiute to her, she wasn’t “understanding any of it.”

a teacher at Genoa Indian School wrote:

“We hope to obtain some story-books and pictorial papers for our boys and girls to read. They enjoy them thoroughly, and I am sure that it will broaden their views of life and

give them a greater desire to live and be ‘li...

As the poem “English Speaking” proclaimed in the Indian Helper, one of Carlisle’s newspapers:

So keep to the English Help others to rise Leave the Indian behind you If you wish to grow wise.

a teacher in endeavoring to overthrow the Indian belief that the earth is flat, stands still, and that the sun passes over and under it every twenty-four hours, said, in conclusion: “So you see, it is the earth that goes around while the sun stands still.” A tall boy asked, “Then what for you tell us one story about man in the Bible—I forget his name—strong warrior—fight all day, but get dark so can’t fight, and he say ‘Sun stand still.’ What for he say that if sun all time stand still.”

How this was accomplished is revealed in short essays written by Indian students at Hampton Institute. One reads:

The white people they are civilized; they have everything and go to school, too. They learn how to read and write so they can read newspaper. The yellow people they half civilized, some of them know to read and write, and some know how to take care of themself.

The red people they big savages; they don’t know nothing.

Philip Garrett attempted to strike just the right note when addressing Carlisle students in 1893:

you are a race thrown by the Providence of God in the pathway of a mighty and resistless tide of civilization, flowing Westward around you.

So mighty is the flood, that resistance is fruitless, and the only choice is between submission and destruction on the one hand, or joining the flood and floating with it, on the other.

But great is the force of example and imitation. You are in the midst of an advanced civilization, which ...

In 1881, shortly before his assassination, President James Garfield paid Hampton Institute a visit.

Garfield took the opportunity to give students a brief history lesson.

The black race, he explained, had learned the first three words of this text. “Slavery taught you that labor must be.”

And for those of you from the far west, I would omit the last word in order to enforce the first lesson. To you I would say: Labor must be!—for you, for all. Without it there can be no civilization.

The white race has learned the truth. They came here as pioneers, felled the forests and swept away all the obstacles before them by labor.

Your came from a people who have been taught to destroy;—to fight but not to labor. Therefore to you I would say that without labor you can be nothing. The first...

his remarks also reveal the extent to which “labor” was at the heart of the assimilationist mission. Once

As we have seen earlier, when addressing the inadequacies of Native families they always extolled the superiority of the patri-centered nuclear model as the only model worthy of the description “civilized.” Only after Native women fully embraced the “empire of the home” and men accepted their roles as farmer and wage-earner could the race join the march toward civilized progress.

The lines recited by a group of Indian boys in a stage performance at Hampton caught the spirit of the new outlook school officials sought to inspire:

My friends, I shake your hands! I’m ready To do the work I once despised, I’ve thrown away my bow and arrow, I’ve taken up the plough and harrow, I’m willing to be civilized!

It was in this context that the goal of making Indians self-reliant involved a twofold objective: teaching gender-specific work skills, and inculcating the values and beliefs of possessive individualism. Toward the first objective, male students spent approximately half the school day either learning industrial skills or performing manual labor.

in one school’s stage performance a group of girls sang:

Dash, dash, dash—pour the water in the tub; Plash, plash, plash—so the clothes we gaily rub; Then we’ll hang them in the sun, And we’ll iron them aright, And when our work is done, They’ll be clean and smooth and white.

A civilizing power is the laundress with her tub,

We are cleaning more than clothes, as we ...

Anna Shaw, who attended the Indian school in Phoenix, would always remember the time she spent scrubbing floors in the dining room. “If we were not finished when the 8:00 a.m. whistle sounded,” she recalls, “the dining room matron would go around strapping us while we were still on our hands and knees. This was just the right position for a swat—all the matron had to do was raise our dresses and strap.”

“Literary training should not be neglected,” he explained, “but it should be . . . in the service of the respectively fundamental aim of securing industrial fervor and efficiency on the part of the children.”

On one occasion, she criticized science teachers who instructed pupils in “the chemical and physical properties of matter, a knowledge which will be of little practical value to Indian children.”

Why not, Reel suggested, instruct them instead in topics related to “animal industry” such as “the anatomy of the horse’s foot?” Such subjects would have beneficial carryover to farm life.

The same practical focus applied to the education of Indian girls. Too many girls, she complained to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1904, were “practicing on the piano” wh...