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

by David Wallace Adams

the time she was slapped in the face for looking out the window.

“Emancipation Through Work.”

Reverend J. A. Lippincott proclaimed at one Carlisle commencement. “Let all that is Indian within you die! . . . You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the Indian within you is dead.”

Captain Richard Pratt was so impressed with the reverend’s remarks that he immediately jumped to his feet to add the postscript: “I never fired a bigger shot and never hit the bull’s eye more center.”

Begin immediately! Work first and visit when work is done. . . . Take hold of the work that lies next you. You don’t need to go to the agent and ask him to give you something to do. Work for all you can get, but work. Work for nothing rather than not work. You can work your way up and out, but you can’t play your way up and out, you can’t idle your way up and out.

Some feared that students, although genuinely converted to civilized ideals, would succumb to the countervailing influence of traditionals. What would happen, for instance, to Ralph Feather, who after three years at Carlisle was moved to write home:

“Father, I think of you all, but I don’t like your Indian ways, because you don’t know the good ways, also you don’t know good many things.”

It was at homecoming that parents and children first came to realize the cultural chasm that now separated them.

Imagine the scene of parents dressed in blankets, shawls, and moccasins catching their first glimpse of sons and daughters stepping from the train or wagon dressed in the “latest styles,” boys in tailored uniforms or suits and patent leather shoes, girls in store-bought dresses, silken hose, high-heeled shoes, and hats of the “latest creation.”

Agent Albert Kneale, who observed many such scenes, recalled: “I have seen these girls, when they first cast eyes upon their parents, stare in abject horror, then as the truth dawned upon them, burst into tears. I have seen parents glance fleetingly on these visions of civilized loneliness, then turn away in...

but they asked me many questions I was not able to answer. Here is some of the questions they asked me. If God made men and women his own image why is it they are so many different colors of nations in the world and why did the white people killed Jesus Christ? You say he was the son of God and could do everything. Why he did not save himself when they was going to kill him? And what is the reason his Father did not save him when he prayed so many times, and so hard? All of these I was not able to answer and many others.

“With the Indian, he is richest who gives most; with us, it is he who keeps most,” mused William Hailmann, the superintendent of Indian schools,

It was one thing to memorize the poem “The Man Who Wins” (which included the sentiment “And the man who wins is the man who hears / The curse of the envious in his ears”). It was quite another to act on this sentiment after going home.

For one thing, most Native societies valued hospitality. “The old Indian instinct of tribal communism and unlimited hospitality is still a great barrier in the way of young people and their prospect of ‘getting ahead in the world,’” Cora Folsom observed after visiting several reservations.

“No sooner does a young man, or woman, get a good salary than all his relations . . . immediately spring up in poverty and distress, and are really so needy that it requires a strong heart to turn away from them.”

The temptations to participate in elaborate gift-giving ceremonies (the traditional mechanisms for cementing tribal ties and redistributin...

Consider Pratt’s response to the news that one of his former prisoners, Chief Killer, had celebrated his daughter’s homecoming from school in th...

I am sorry that you are so foolish as to give away horses and spend money because Maud came home. It is a very foolish Indian way. No man will ever prosper and get rich who does that way.

I have always hoped that you would some day be a rich, influential farmer among the Cheyennes, but you never will be, if you throw away what you work for, in that manner.

Holman made an astounding charge: returned students almost invariably relapsed into barbarism.

When Stiya first sees her parents she confesses that she “actually turned my back on them. I had forgotten that home Indians had such grimy faces.”

Indeed, Native Americans volunteered at a higher proportion than any other ethnic-racial group in the country, including whites.

“Less than 50 years ago, the blood thirsty Sioux were scalping and mutilating the dead bodies of Custer’s men, but today we find the sons and grandsons of those Indians standing in the trenches, facing the cannons, bombs, and poison gas, offering their lives as a sacrifice, that justice, mercy, humanity, and freedom shall not perish from the earth.”

Lawrence Gazette concurred that Haskell’s contribution to the parade was “distinctive and remarkable.”54 The price for such enthusiasm was high, evidenced by the fact that 5 percent of Native soldiers died in action compared to 1 percent generally.

I went with General Pershing’s Troops and I had bad luck while I was across I got wounded last October and lost my left leg and they said I was of luck at that all my other of a company of 250 men got kill and I wish I gotten kill myself this is a hard country to live when you are wounded.

In 1919, Indian Commissioner Cato Sells declared that for the Indian the recent war was a great “civilizer,” that exposure to the wider world of modernity had removed him even further from old tribal attachments.

Even though plural marriages and various “heathenish” dances were officially banned by the 1890s, Native cultures proved stubbornly resilient.

“He also paints profusely and adopts all the old habits and customs which his education in our industrial schools has tried to eradicate.” Jones instructed agents as follows:

You are therefore directed to induce your male Indians to cut their hair, and both sexes to stop painting.

if they become obstreperous about the matter a short confinement in the guardhouse at hard labor with shorn locks, should furnish a cure.

Black freedmen, according to the Hampton philosophy, although not as civilized as whites, were still more advanced than Indians for the simple reason that they had undergone the experience of slavery.

Slavery, for all its brutality, Armstrong believed, had taught enslaved blacks two vital aspects of civilization: the importance of work, and the Christian religion.

Indians, therefore, could benefit immensely by associating with blacks, who might serve as role m...

Stephens asked. In the opinion of the committee, the federal government ought to “elevate the red race to the level of the white race and not degrade and humiliate him by sinking him to the low plane of the Negro race.”

“has nothing left but his self-respect, and now you come to him with Hampton school and ask him to surrender that self-respect by placing his children on a social equality with an inferior race, a level to which you yourself will not deign to descend.”

John Collier

Vowing to reject “all desire for worldly or hedonistic success,” he was slowly rejuvenated by his readings of the poet William Wordsworth as well as long camping trips in the Appalachians.

The visit to Taos proved to be a turning point in Collier’s life. Arriving in late December, he arrived in time to witness the Taos Indians’ performance of the Red Deer Dance, an event that appealed greatly to his communal-mystical being.

Pueblo Indian life surely had something to teach modern civilization. As he later wrote in his memoirs:

The discovery that came to me there, in that tiny group of a few hundred Indians, was of personality-forming institutions, even now un-weakened, which had survived repeated and immense historical shocks, and which were going right on in the production of states of mind, attitudes of mind, earthloyalties and human loyalties, amid a context of beauty which suffused all the life of the group.

What I observed and experienced was a power of art—of the life-making art—greater in kind than anything I had known in my own world before. Not tiny, but huge, this little group and its personalities seemed. There were solitary vigils which carried the individual out into the cosmos, and there were communal rituals whose grave, tranquil, yet earth-shaking intensity is not adequately suggested by anything outside the music of Bach.

In the case of Indians, the challenge facing educators was nothing less than monumental: eradicating all traces of Indigenous identity and culture while simultaneously replacing them with the commonplace knowledge and values of white civilization.

Reformers believed that the school’s capacity to accomplish this transformation would determine the long-term fate of the Indian race, for if the doctrine of historical progress and the story of westward expansion taught anything, it was the incompatibility of white civilization and Indian savagism.

The former must inevitably supplan...

Once they shed their attachment to tribal ways—that is to say, their Indianness—and joined the march of American progress, their continued existence in the nation’s futur...

For Native elders who witnessed the catastrophic developments of the nineteenth century—the bloody warfare, the near-extinction of the bison, the scourge of disease and starvation, the shrinking of the tribal land base, the indignities of reservation life, the invasion of missionaries and white settlers—there seemed to be no end to the cruelties perpetrated by whites.

And after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to render them culturally extinct. And so, the last great Indian war should be waged against children. They were coming for the children.