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

by David Wallace Adams

Henceforth, superintendents should see to it that their “large Indian girls become proficient in cooking, sewing and laundry work before allowing them to spend hours in useless practice upon an expensive i...

they also were being taught a host of values and virtues associated with the doctrine of possessive individualism: industry, perseverance, thrift, self-reliance, rugged individualism, and the idea of success.

Many students did in fact come from cultures where the concept of private property scarcely existed, where extended kinship obligations made the accumulation of personal wealth all but impossible, and where one achieved status through generosity rather than accumulation.

Hence, the gospel of possessive individualism permeated virtually all areas of school life: the classroom, the workshop, Sunday sermons, evening lectures, and special assemblies.

School newspapers were particularly effective forums for indoctrination. Students at Phoenix, for instance, were trea...

The man who wins is the man who works— The man who toils while the next man shirks; . . . And the man who wins is the man who hears The curse of the envious in his ears, But who goes his way with head held high And passes the wrecks of the failures by— For he is the man who wins.

Indeed, in 1915 one inventive Phoenix businessman sought to link his own economic interest in Indian consumers with those of the school by placing this item in the school newspaper:

Early to bed and early to rise, Love all the teachers and tell them no lies. Study your lessons that you may be wise And buy from the men who advertise.

My boy, you are going away from us to work for this school, in fact, for your whole race.

They think he can neither work nor learn anything;

Now you are going to prove that the red man can learn and work as well as the white man. If John Wanamaker gives you the job of blacking h...

Die there if necessary, but do not fail.

“This is what we train them for, to take care of other people’s houses and toilets.”

Fourth, and by way of comparison to Christianity, Indigenous religions tended not to conceive of personal morality or ethics as the special domain of religion. Although it is true that all cultures certainly knew of “evil” and possessed their own definition of proper social behavior, the social regulation of interpersonal behavior had its source in the larger social fabric of tribal existence.

This, of course, was in direct contradiction to Christianity, which, from the Native perspective, seemed preoccupied with “sin” and provided a biblical prescription for nearly all aspects of social relations.

An extension of the morality issue was the whites’ conception of heaven as the exclusive destiny of the righteous, as compared with the Indians’ view of the afterlife, which was rarely as restrictive.

What Henry Warner Bowden says of northeastern cultures applies to Indians generally: “They thought the gods would punish sacrilegious acts almost immediately, just as socially destructive behavior met with swift communal justice. But they assumed that everyone would eventually reside in the same place after death.”

A classic instance of confusion is recorded by Helen Ludlow at Hampton. As part of her efforts to instruct students—still learning English—in the morality of Christianity, she asked students to memorize the following verse: Yield not to temptation, for yielding is sin Each victory will help you some other to win Fight manfully onward, dark passions subdue, Look ever to Jesus, he’ll carry you through.

Ludlow thought she sufficiently explained the poem’s meaning until one of her female students reported to her that when another girl had gotten angry with her, “I no like, she big temptation; I no yield to temptation; I fight her, I was victory!”

After three years at Carlisle, Luther Standing Bear wrote his father:

Day before yesterday one of the Sioux boys died. His name is Alvan. He was a good boy always. So we were very glad for him. Because he is better now than he was on Earth. I think you maybe don’t know what I mean. I mean he has gone in heaven. Because he was a good boy everywhere. I hope you will understand exactly what I mean, and you should think that way. I want you must give up Indian way. I know you have give it up a little. But I want you to do more than that and I told you so before this. But I will say it again you must believe God, obey him and pray to Him. He will help you in the right path and He will give you what you want if you ask Him. Dear father I know it is very hard for you to do that out there. But you can try to think that way. You must try day after day until you can do it. Then you will be always happy.

In the eyes of reformers no sphere of Indian life was more reprehensible than the relations between the sexes. There were two aspects to the issue. One concerned the perceived low status of women in tribal society, the proverbial image of the degraded “squaw,” totally subservient to the whim and will of her hunter-warrior husband.

The second widely held belief was that Indian cultures lacked the rigid moral code necessary to govern sexual conduct along ethical—that is to say, Christian—lines.

most of the school’s energy was invested in keeping the two sexes apart from one another. In the eyes of the Indian Office, most Indian children had “no inherited tendencies whatever toward morality and chastity.”32 Until the sexes were thoroughly Victorianized, free association beyond the playground or in sitting rooms could only result in disaster.

Perhaps the most invasive yet effective means of preventing the girls from getting in a “delicate condition” was adopted at Chilocco and several other schools: assigning the matron to keep a chart of the girls’ menstrual cycles.

“I had occasion to see some of the boys masturbate until they ejaculated. Sometimes we played a little with each other. One boy wanted me to pretend that I was a girl with him, but I did not want to do it.” Later at Sherman Institute the boys were given a pamphlet on the evils of masturbation. “It said that the practice ruined a boy’s health and caused him to go insane. But I saw the boys doing it right along. They did not mind being watched by other fellows.”

The school physician was called in, and once he surmised what had happened he asked Lucy why she had murdered her baby. Lucy could only glance at the matron and reply: “So she wouldn’t know. She say it is a sin, to marry so. Her God will burn me forever if He finds out. Now she will tattle to her God and He will burn me.”

For Pratt, winning football games was not an end in itself but a means to a larger objective: winning support for the idea that Indians, if given the opportunity, were capable of competing with whites not only on the football field but also in society as well. Pratt also believed that football was a powerful tool for acculturating Indians to the American value system.

From football Indians would learn the value of precision, teamwork, order, discipline, obedience, efficiency,

and how all these interconnected in the busine...

It also gave ritualistic expression to one of the cardinal elements in American social thought: survival of the fittest.

But as school book say, a genius capacity for taking infinite pain.

And so Indians should play football. It would win them white friends, and once again it would show them they could “win” only by becoming white men.

And the race with a civilization and a history won the day.”

At the direction of the Indian Office, Indian schools began celebrating Columbus Day regularly on October 21, 1892. Although the nature of its program activities was left to the discretion of each school, the Indian Office decreed that “the interest and enthusiasm of the children in these proceedings should be thoroughly aroused and the day of the celebration made to exert as inspiring an influence over them as possible.”

75What

The parents were clearly interested, although unknown to Flora Iliff was the suspicion being voiced quietly among the Walapai that the white man’s Santa Claus might in reality be Quiqete—the great evil spirit of the Walapai.

Suddenly in a tense silence there came the jingle of sleigh bells, a loud pounding on the front door and a demand for admittance. Every eye focused on the entrance. No one stirred or seemed to breathe until the door was thrown open and old Santa, with a monstrous pack on his back, bounded in. Not an Indian in the hall had ever in his life seen anything that resembled that apparition. The ruddy-complexioned, bewhiskered mask, the long white hair, the red coat with its white cotton trim, and the high rubber boots made a bewildering combination.

The students at this point sat rigid and wild-eyed with excitement, but the villagers were not so sure. Indeed, as children stood transfixed, one of the tribe’s old wisemen jumped up, waved his arms, and with fierce emotion screamed—“Quiqete, Quiqete!”

At this moment, complete chaos erupted. Walapai parents bolted for the doors and “pandemonium broke loose among the children.” Some followed their parents’ cue that the strange figure was in fact Quiqete and stampeded out of the hall.

Others stood their ground. Many of the kindergartners “ran to the teachers . . . and clung to us, tears rolling down their fat cheeks while they sobbed, ‘No good! No good!’” In the midst of the din, teachers tried to restore order. Indian policemen circulated through the crowd outside, ass...

Especially created for Indian schools, Indian Citizenship Day, also known as Franchise Day, commemorated the passage of the Dawes Act on February 8, 1887.

Two years after the General Allotment Act (its official title) became law, the Indian Office directed all schools to prepare programs designed “to impress upon Indian youth the enlarged scope and opportunity given them by this law and the new obligations which it imposes.”

Because the Dawes Act combined two favorite themes in Indian reform—private property and citizenship—celebrations of the holiday went to extraordinary lengths to imbue the law with deep symbolic meaning.

Now we are citizens We give him applause: So three cheers, my friends, For Senator Dawes!

But Columbia has yet to honor an Indian, and the fate of the Native American living in Columbia’s empire remains ambiguous. Finally, this issue is raised by an Indian petitioner who pleads:

Let us join the great tribe of the white men, As brothers to dare and to do!

Columbia challenges the Indians to name individuals of their race equal to those white heroes “that have made me great and established my throne in the New World.” In the developments that follow, it becomes clear what Columbia’s standard is for a place of honor in Indian history. One by one they come forth. There is Samoset: “I said to my paleface brother, welcome Englishmen.” There is the chieftain who says to Washington: “We welcome you to our country.” And an Indian convert recites a Bible verse in Algonquian. In the end Columbia is convinced. She gazes upon a group of Indians dressed as farmers, teachers, and mechanics. Their pleas for a place of honor and citizenship seem too reasonable to deny, and she says to her Indian wards: “You have gained your cause. Your past, your present, and your purposes for the future prove your right to share all I have to give. Take my banner, and your place as my citizens.” So ends “Columbia’s Roll Call.”

A particularly troublesome area for such celebrations was the issue of land loss. Under the terms of the Dawes Act, all surplus reservation land beyond that needed for a...

Thus, if students were to embrace the Dawes Act, then they must be divested of the impression that the price of citizenship came at too high a cost. This was exactly the issue addressed i...