Kindle Notes & Highlights
Education, not land, makes a citizen great.
Such school celebrations sought to convince Indian students that the benefits of the Dawes Act—allotment, citizenship, education—far outweighed the dispossession of “surplus” land.
In 1901, for instance, Phoenix Indian School students were paid a visit by none other than President William McKinley. Like all such occasions, this affair was carefully scripted, complete with drill routines, fluttering flags, and marching bands. According to a local news account, the drill routines were “executed like clockwork, unmarred by a single mistake or bungle.”
The highlight of the ceremony came when, at the sound of a bugle, 700 students snapped a salute to the president and cried out in perfect unison: “I give my head and my hand and my heart to my country; one country, one language, and one flag.”
Within a decade Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft also made appearances. For one new recruit in 1909 it was all terribly confusing.
At his first sight of the massive Taft on the reviewing stand, all he could do was utter: “Gee! George Washington is fat.”
But some superintendents used the occasion to honor Indian figures who had distinguished themselves as friends of the government—even when this involved killing Indians.
In 1893, for instance, Agent James McLaughlin sent the Standing Rock brass band over to Fort Yates to participate in the unveiling of a monument dedicated to several Indian policemen who were killed in 1890 during the arrest of Sitting Bull. In 1900, among the graves decorated by Piegan students, was that of Billy Jackson, described by the agent as “one of Custer’s most trusted scouts.”
year later, the agent at Klamath Agency in Oregon reported that “the graves of men like Chief David Hill, who was always a leader in civilization and a noted ally of the whites during both the Paiute and Modoc Indian wars, have been careful...
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In this instance, the pathetic scene of Nez Perce children decorating the graves of those “who slew their fathers” was too much even for the superintendent to endure.
and marched out to the graves of two soldiers who had come out here to fight the Hopi and had died.”
In the latter instance, braves raced through the woods “dressed in all their barbaric splendor, mounted on fleet horses, filling the welkin with the soulcurdling war whoop.” The rationale for allowing such displays? They were a lesson to the schoolboys of “the wonderful advancement made in a few years, under reservation training, from active savagery to a position well advanced toward practical civilization.”
At the very least, whites expected Indians—and here, of course, the extent of the list differed with cultures—to abandon their ancestral gods and ceremonies; redefine the division of labor for the sexes; abolish polygyny; extinguish tribal political structures; squelch traditions of gift-giving and communalism; abandon hunting and gathering; and restructure traditional familial and kinship arrangements.
Across campfires, tribal elders weighed the issues. And many, like this parent, asked:
What is that thought so great and so sacred that cannot be expressed in our own language, that we should seek to use the white man’s words?
The situation was particularly critical at Fort Hall, Idaho, home to nearly a thousand Northern Shoshone and half as many Northern Paiute, known as Bannock.23
Rather than till the soil, they held fast “to the primitive idea that they were not made to work, resisting stubbornly every effort to induce them to improve their condition.”
One-half to two-thirds of the Indians at Fort Hall wanted no part of the school, and with this fact in mind Agent S. J. Fisher, with the help of a school superintendent, began beating the bushes for students in January 1892.
On one occasion, he even had been compelled “to choke a so-called chief into subjection” to get hold of his children.
In particular, the five Bannock policemen had recently declared in tribal council that they would no longer force parents to give up children. Hearing of this statement, Fisher called the policemen to his office and ordered each one to produce a Bannock child by the end of the week or face dismissal.
When no children were brought in, Fisher, true to his wor...
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“As matters now stand,” Fisher informed Morgan, “there are but two alternatives. Troops must be sent at once, or it must be admitted that the Bannocks with a few of their Shoshone followers are on top.”
As for the possibility of an actual military clash should soldiers be sent, he was convinced that it would never come to that: a simple show of force would settle the issue.
Morgan pounded away at a single theme: the entire civilization program was in jeopardy unless the government renewed its commitment to place all Indian children in school—at gunpoint if need be.
His final annual report, written in November 1892, amounted to a thinly veiled denunciation of the government’s inaction. The Indian Office, Morgan wrote, was “confronted with a crisis.” Although “the rights of parents” should not be tread on lightly,
I do not believe that Indians like the Bannock and Shoshones at Fort Hall, the Southern Utes in Colorado, the Apaches and Navajos of Arizona—people who, for the most part speak no English, live in squalor and degradation, make little progress from year to year, who are a perpetual source of expense to the Government and a constant menace to thousands of their white neighbors, a hindrance to civilization and a clog on our progress—have any right to forcibly keep their children out of school to grow up like themselves, a race of barbarians and semisavages.
Next, a number of Indians began interfering with police attempts to round up students. Agent Irwin then did what Fisher had done five years before: he called for a troop of cavalry. This time the request was granted.
Indeed, in 1911 a faction of the Hopi mounted such a determined resistance to government schools that the issue could be resolved only by calling in federal troops.
While some parents were willing to cooperate, a good portion were not. In fact, the opposition was so great that in December 1890, and again in July 1891, federal troops were called in to force compliance.
Youkeoma, meanwhile, chose to resist white schooling to the very end, prompting Agent Reuben Perry on November 4, 1906, with the aid of soldiers, to enter Hotevilla, where they rounded up eighty-two children for enrollment at Keams Canyon. For good measure, Youkeoma and sixteen other resisters were then arrested and imprisoned—this time at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. Perhaps after yet another period of incarceration, it was reasoned, the old man would be persuaded on the necessity of cooperating with Washington. But again, when released from prison the following year, Youkeoma and his
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All this added up to the following conclusion: Agent Crane and his staff, supported by troops, should occupy the village.52 And so they came. On December 2, the troops made a night march from Keams Canyon and before dawn surrounded the village, cutting off all avenues of escape. Troops were also deployed in the village at key positions to keep parents from assembling. After wagons were brought into the village, Crane and other employees began house-to-house searches.
Second, resistance was in part political. For older students especially it took little imagination to discern that the entire school program constituted an uncompromising hegemonic assault on their cultural identity. As already discussed, many Indian parents were quick to see boarding schools as yet another attempt to destroy Indian lifeways.
Before leaving their homes, children were surely reminded of this fact. Moreover, once at school the day-to-day message served only to reaffirm parental fears: Indian children, whether on the drill field or in the classroom, were expected to look and act like white people. In time, perhaps, they would come to think like whites and, for all practical purposes, be white.
But where police were unreliable, the superintendent had a much tougher time of it. Consider this episode that Helen Sekaquaptewa witnessed at Keams Canyon:
One Saturday morning when we were out on the playground, our attention was drawn to the yard of the main office where many Navajos, among them many policemen, had ridden up on horses. We could not hear them but concluded they were talking loud, because of the violent gesturing. Then one policeman dismounted and, stepping forward, took off the shirt of his uniform and threw it on the ground at the feet of the Superintendent. Next he stripped off his pants and followed with his cap and belt and gun, and threw them on the ground before the Superintendent. He had other clothes on under his
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Perhaps the events unfolding were set in motion by a love affair; perhaps the police’s curious response was a fulfillment of some promise to assist the girls’ return to their families. In any event, the two girls were prepared to leave, and the policeman was determined to assist them:
When the policeman started toward the girls, they stood up. He stopped in front of them, took the hand of one girl and helped her mount behind him on the horse, while the second girl leaped to the back of the second horse. We all watched as they raced up the canyon, to freedom? When we turned our eyes back to the group of men the crowd was dispersing. Nobody made any effort to go after the runaways. The Navajo policemen did not want to bring the girls back.
At this point they were assigned to the school farmer, a Mr. Bight, who, under order by the superintendent, put the boys to work hauling dirt. After three days of backbreaking labor, the superintendent appeared on the scene with a strap and directed Bight to give each of the runaways ten licks. Bight refused. “Mr. Bight told him that we boys had worked hard three days and that we were tired. He said he wasn’t going to beat us on top of it.”
In joyous disbelief, Whitewolf watched as the standoff between the superintendent and the farmer quickly degenerated into a full-fledged slugfest. By the time it was over, the superintendent had received a thorough thrashing and was considerably humiliated.
But parents could also be stern taskmasters. “You say in your letter that you felt bad because they cut your hair,” Cloud Bull wrote to his son. “Never think anything of that kind. You have gone there to learn to be a white man.”
Also from Rosebud came this father’s query: “Why do you ask for moccasins? I sent you there to be like a white girl, and wear shoes.”
but I wear white man’s clothes [now], and am trying to live and act like white men.
and am trying to be civilized like the whites,
I have dropped all the Indian ways, and am getting like a white man, and don’t do anything but what the agent tells me.
“gives us the opportunity to reclaim ourselves from an obscure life of barbarism, to climb the ladder of civilization.
Centuries ago we undoubtedly held full control over this fair land—this vast domain from east to west. Bodily we were free to roam, but our freedom of thought lay dormant as we slumbered heavily by the campfires of prosperity.
But when the white man came he put everything in a new light. He saw how everything in nature could render him a service.
To accomplish this feat they must sever all ties with the past: their communal lifeways, their barbaric religious rituals, and perhaps most important their aversion to manual labor.
“Work is the birth and civilizer of the human race,” proclaimed one Haskell student in a graduation address. And by this measuring stick, “Indians are the most uncivilized race of our land today. Why? For the simple reason they are lacking in knowledge of manual training.”
Think of that moment when Chester Yellow Bear was hauled in front of a school assembly to apologize for having said that Mr. Jones was “crazy,” how he was coached by Agent Kneale to say “I’m am sorry I said Mr. Jones is crazy” but instead uttered “He don’t ought to be so crazy.”
