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AMERICAN lVDIAN CUITURE AND RESFARCH,IOURNAL 29.4(2005) 75-94

"I knew how to be moderate. And I knew how to obey": The Commonality

of American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1920s

MARGARET CONNELL SZASZ

In 1743 Samson Occom, a twenty-year-old Mohegan, made his way north from his Native community to the English settlement of Lebanon, Connecticut. Occom eagerly anticipated learning to read through tutoring from Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. As he wrote, "When I got up there, he received me With kindness and Compassion and instead of Staying a Fortnight or 3 Weeks, I Spent 4 years with him."' A little more than a century later, in 1854, a student at the recently opened Cherokee Female Seminary wrote in the student newspaper this advice to her peers: "Let us begin now in new energy that we may gain that intellectual knowledge which will reward the hopes of our Nation, fitting us for doing much good among our people." 2 Some sixty years later, in 1915, during her first day at Santa Fe Indian School, a five-year-old girl from SanJuan Pueblo clung to her mother's shawl as she faced the challenges thrust upon her. Taken to the principal's office, she pulled the shawl about her, recalling later, "The principal pointed to a clock up there and he asked me if I could tell the time. I just looked at it and I didn't know what to say. I didn't know how to tell time, so Ijust covered my face [with my shawl] and the students laughed."'

THE SEARCH FOR UNIVERSALITY IN THE BOARDING SCHOOL EXPERIENCE

These American Indian students lived in three different centuries; they were members of three different tribes; and they attended school in three vastly

Margaret Connell Szasz is a professor of history at the University of New Mexico, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on American history, American Indian/Alaska Native history, and Native American and Celtic higtory since 1700. She has taught at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she is currently a research fellow in the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy.

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different regions of North America. Yet the commonality of their experience may transcend their temporal, tribal, and geographical divisions. This essay explores the common threads of the otherwise seemingly disparate boarding school experiences of Native American children. Each of these boarding schools and its students possessed unique qualities that were shaped by a multitude of conditions, including the cultures of the tribes represented, the location, the era, and the schools' directors-missionary, Indian nation, or United States government. Yet each of these institutions also symbolized an education that removed the students from their homes, their families, and their indigenous communities. This single common theme, and several others that will be introduced shortly, may serve to connect the experiences of the thousands of Indian boarding school youth who found themselves thrust into an institutional culture that contrasted sharply with their own environment. In the long run, whether those outsiders who directed the schools proved to be English colonials, missionaries, instructors from eastern colleges, or employees of the United States Indian Service, Indian youth viewed them as doctrinaire purveyors of foreign customs and beliefs.

During the decades that followed the Red Power movement of the 1960s and 19 7 0s a number of scholars found themselves drawn into the compelling theme of American Indian boarding schools. 4 With the exception of David Wallace Adams's impressive overview, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928, and Michael C. Coleman's valu- able study, Indian Children at School, 1850-1930, most books that have entered this burgeoning field focus on the individual schools that the Indian Office opened during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. The histories of these schools range from Donal F. Lindsey's Indians at Hampton Institute to Dorothy R. Parker's Phoenix Indian School: The Second Half Century.

Scholars writing in this field have relied heavily on Native accounts of the schools. The twentieth century saw the publication of numerous recollections and memoirs of American Indians, and many of these authors related their experiences at school.5 Native American scholars BrendaJ. Child, K. Tsianina Lomawaima, and AmandaJ. Cobb have also drawn on oral stories and written records of their own family members, some of whom attended the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools, including Flandreau, Haskell, and Chilocco; others enrolled at the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females.

Although scholarly works seldom appeal to the public, a singular spark of imagination can propel the leap from academia to the wider populace. During the 1980s, innovative historian Sally Hyer and San Felipe Pueblo elder Frank Tenorio pooled their ideas to compile a unique history of the Santa Fe Indian School (1890) that would appeal to the Pueblos and to the public. This oral history project relied on Santa Fe Indian School students, who interviewed numerous alumni of the school, enabling the Santa Fe Indian School to celebrate its centenary with a popular exhibit that featured a remarkable collection of photos accompanied by quotations drawn from the recorded stories.

A decade later, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, opened a more comprehensive exhibition on Indian boarding schools-"Away from

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1 920s

Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000" [2000- 2005]. Crafted by Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, all of whom have written on Native issues, the Heard exhibit provided an intense visual experience for thousands of museum visitors. Although the exhibit catalog dips into the history of earlier boarding schools introduced by missionaries in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, its primary focus remains the more recent era. Since "Away from Home" does not venture beyond the BIA schools, it also skirts the vibrant seminaries and academies of the five. Southeast nations of Indian Territory. Educational centers like the Cherokee Female Seminary remained thriving institutions from the mid-nineteenth century forward, until the federal government closed them with Oklahoma statehood in 1907.6

Since most of the memoirs and much of the scholarship in this field, including the museum exhibits, restrict their focus to the federal boarding schools during a confined era-primarily from the 1870s through the1930s, and occasionally to the present-the cumulative impact of this emphasis has persuaded the general public that the Indian boarding school remained almost exclusively a BIA institution that arrived in Indian Country at the end of the so-called "Indian Wars." From the 1970s to the present, this narrow perspective has gained popular momentum.

For the general public a capsule definition of the American Indian boarding school might sound like this: the first Indian boarding schools opened in the late nineteenth century. These schools came under the thumb of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which snatched Indian youth from their families without their parents' consent. As soon as the BIA had taken the children to school, it forced them to remain there for many years. At school, they could speak only English-no Native languages; they had their hair cut; they had to dress and behave like whites; and they kept the schools running through their own labor. Many Indian students ran away from the schools; if the BIA police caught them, they received severe punishment. When they finally returned home, man), of them went "back to the blanket."

Although this definition contains considerable truth, it has major faults. It disregards the schools run by the Southeast nations removed to Indian Territory and the schools established by missionaries and other religious educators. Even within its narrow focus on the early federal Indian schools, it does not address features that complicate the federal experience, lending it a certain ambiguity. It fails to acknowledge those Indians who chose to attend boarding schools or whose families asked that boarding schools find a place for their children. 7 It ignores the innovations introduced by the Indian students themselves, which altered the educational blueprint designed by the Indian Office." It also disregards the emergence of English as a lingua franca, a remarkable link that meant students could communicate, despite the matiy languages that separated them.

Hence, a more nuanced account of the federal boarding schools between the 1880s and the 1920s reveals a history with many layers. Still, a more inclu- sive view of Indian boarding schools, one that ranges from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth, poses a more intriguing framework of

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analysis. In this broader context the uniqueness of each boarding school seems to defy comparison. Yet beneath the surface surprising commonali- ties connected the experiences of students at these diverse Indian boarding schools, whether they were located in the East or the West, in the colonial era or the late nineteenth century. For the students the connective links extended well beyond the basic bond of immediate physical removal from family, home, and community. Beyond the physical isolation from home, these Native boarding school students were thrust abruptly into a foreign culture. In each school the staff demanded that new students learn to conform to a Euro-American style of child rearing, which relied on physical punishment; a Euro-American expectation of gender roles, which ignored gender role prac- tices of Native nations; and English-only instruction in Euro-American history, religion, and cultural values.

Torn from their familiar environment, the students' sudden immersion in a foreign milieu prompted them to recreate some semblance of their former cultures. Submerged in a culture of military discipline that was enforced by the staff and some of their fellow students, the uprooted Indian youths searched their own wits and their cultural memory to exert some influence over their daily lives. In the early twentieth century, Ojibwe youth enrolled in Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, forced the hand of one school super- intendent by remaining in their communities for the wild-rice harvest, an important early fall event. The superintendent finally conceded that Haskell could not begin classes until October, after the Ojibwe families had harvested the wild rice.9

Once settled in their schools, Indian youth established a student network based on kinship or other ties created at school, and they retained remnants of their own oral cultures by telling stories, praying in their own languages, and forming a covert system of communication that set them apart from most of the school staff.10 Nicknames for staff helped the students retain their separate identity. At Phoenix Indian School Pima student Anna Moore Shaw recalled how she and her friends placed their matron into a Pima cultural context. Fearing her use of the "strap," they dubbed her "Ho'ok," the witch who inhabits a Pima story. When they heard her coming into the dorm, they frantically whispered, "Ho'ok, Ho'ok," and jumped into their beds to avoid the strap." "Outwitting the system," recalled one of Lomawaima's Chilocco alumni, "was a skill developed through student collaboration and practiced with pride. It drew students together as it pitted them against the system, and it was fun."12

Within the hundreds of Indian boarding schools across North America and through the centuries that these institutions remained an educational option, the dialogue between Indian youth and the boarding schools they aftended played out in endless variations. Yet the connective themes for these institutions-the removal from home, the imposition of a foreign culture, and the students' skill at matching their wits to take a stand against the system-remained a constant presence.

In order to recast the perception of Indian boarding schools, I intend to move beyond the restrictive confines of federal Indian boarding schools

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during the height of their power. Since a number of scholars have already explored the role of Native youth enrolled in these institutions between 1879 and 1940, I will move beyond this specific era by searching for the common threads that linked the students attending the three schools mentioned above. The eighteenth-century school, located in Lebanon, Connecticut, was Moor's Indian Charity School; the nineteenth-century institution, located in Tahlequah, Indian Territory, was the Cherokee Female Seminary; and the final institution, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS).

I have selected these boarding schools for several reasons. Cumulatively, they represent three different kinds of direction-the first by a minister, the second by an Indian nation, and the third by the US Indian Office. They also represent multiple Indian peoples-Algonquian and Iroquois in the Northeast; Cherokee in Indian Territory; and largely Pueblo in the Southwest, although Santa Fe Indian School enrolled some students from other tribes, primarily Navajo, Apache, and Ute. Finally, the three institutions represent the changing worldviews of the dozen or more generations of Natives and Euro-Americans involved in American Indian schooling between the mid- eighteenth century and the present.

The boarding school experience has not been limited to North America. One only has to reflect on the powerful film Rabbit Proof Fence, set in Aboriginal Australia, to be reminded of boarding schools' broader impact. When one lives within different cultures, one begins to think comparatively. After living and teaching abroad intermittently for several years, I wrote an essay comparing the experiences of American Indian youth in boarding schools with those of Scottish and English youth sent to boarding schools. Although the contem- porary world tends to focus on peoples' differences, my own multicultural experience has encouraged the opposite: I search for universality within different cultures. Pointing out contrasts can be an exercise in extracting the obvious, since differences often appear on the surface. Discovering similari- ties, however, can require more intensive study. If we accept this premise, then searching for the universal in the boarding school experience will require more energy than pointing out the differences, but in the end the search for universality may have its own rewards: it may bring a new understanding of the experiences-both their differences and commonalities-of those many Native American youth who attended these educational institutions.

With this challenge in hand, I propose to address the issues in the following manner. Initially, I will describe the three schools, depicting each within its unique historical context, its students and their tribes, and its staff, its teachers, and those who provided the funding. These capsule sketches should highlight some of the differences among the schools. Then I will search for those elusive similarities that may prove more difficult to find. Finally, I will attempt to draw some conclusions. I hope that my search will reveal that some aspects of the children's experiences linked their lives through the genera- tions, across Indian Country, and among the different tribes themselves.

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

MOOR'S INDIAN CHARITY SCHOOL, 1754-1769

When twenty-four-year-old Samson Occom left his studies in Lebanon, Connecticut, to begin a decade of teaching and preaching as a Presbyterian minister among the Montauk Indians of Long Island, he left a singular imprint on his mentor, Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. That imprint would later emerge as Moor's Indian Charity School. As Wheelock's first Indian student, Occom had excelled. He had learned to read English, Latin, Greek, and a little Hebrew. The primary reason that he did not attend Yale to further his theology studies was because he had exhausted his eyes during the four years of preparation.1 3 Less than a decade after Occom's departure, two Delaware students left their Christianized New Jersey community, bound for Lebanon, where their arrival at Wheelock's home in December 1754 marked the opening of Moor's School.

By British standards Moor's School was an outright success. Inspired by the Great Awakening, the intense religious revival that swept through the mid- eighteenth-century colonies and affected the lives of thousands of people, including Occom and Wheelock, Moor's School capitalized on the religious enthusiasm that prompted colonials to open their pocketbooks. Before it shifted locations to become the core of Dartmouth College, founded by Wheelock in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1769, Moor's School had achieved a singular position as the largest private Indian charity boarding school in British colonial America. During its sixteen-year tenure in Lebanon it boasted a total enrollment of approximately sixty-five Indian charity pupils, of whom sixteen were girls and young women, plus a smaller number of English colo- nial charity pupils.

By the standards of its Native American pupils and their communi- ties, however, .Moor's School did not fare as well. As director of the school, Wheelock earned many critics among tribal communities. About the time that he moved the school to Hanover, the Oneida Nation displayed its hostility to Wheelock's style of Indian education by abruptly withdrawing the Oneida children from the school. 15 Other individual Indians who had attended the school also broke off relations with Wheelock. Samson Occom was one of these disillusioned figures. When Occom returned from a tour of England, Wales, and Scotland in the 1760s, a tour on which he had embarked to raise funds for the school, the Mohegan minister discovered that Wheelock intended to use the hard-earned British sterling to open a college for English youth: "The Indian was converted into an English School," he remarked bitterly. In response to this betrayal Occom, once Wheelock's prize pupil, permanently severed relations with his former mentor.1 6

Initially, Algonquian students attracted to Moor's School found its prox- imity to their communities appealing. Following the two Delaware boys, other Algonquians enrolled from Montauk, two of whom were Occom's brothers-in- law; still others came from the Narragansett community in Rhode Island and from other Native communities in Connecticut itself, including the Mohegan and the Pequot. In the early 1760s the first Iroquois students arrived. They were recruited by Occom and his brother-in-law David Fowler, whojourneyed north

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to visit the Haudenosaunee (League of the Iroquois) villages, a grueling trip of about three hundred miles. On one of these trips Occom recruited Moor's School's most famous student, Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea). A Mohawk, Brant was brother-in-law of Sir William Johnson, the influential Irishman who served as trader to the Mohawk and British northern superintendent of Indian affairs. A decade later Brant turned his back on the colonial nonconformists (Congregationalists and Presbyterians) like Wheelock, who had schooled him for two years in Lebanon, and led the Iroquois warriors who fought as allies of the British during the American War for Independence.17 Regardless of its successes or failures, the location and influence of Moor's School placed it in the thick of the action in the 1760s and 1770s.

When the Indian boys arrived on Wheelock's doorstep, they often came with little preparation. Yet they quickly discovered their academic training would be similar to that of the young English charity scholars continuing on to Yale or the College of NewJersey (Princeton). Relying on the unique precedent set by Occom, Wheelock assumed that the Indian pupils would see the merit in reading "Tulley, Virgil, and the Greek testament."1 8 Oddly, this heady learning contrasted sharply with the other half of each school day, when Wheelock required the Indian boys to work on the school farm, a task dignified with the title "Husbandry." With only two exceptions the Native students showed little interest in farm chores, and one Narragansett parent even chastised Wheelock, "To work two years to learn to farm it, is what I don't consent to, when I can as well learn him that myself and have the prophet [sic] of his labour."' 9

In a similar fashion the Indian girls who entered Moor's School discov- ered that they, too, must earn their keep. Delegated to nearby homes in Lebanon, where they learned "the arts of good House wifery," the girls served as servants, possibly as virtual slaves. As females living within the English colo- nial world, they learned that their academic accomplishments were deemed less significant than those of their male counterparts. They attended school only one day a week for instruction in "writing &c., till they should be fit for an Apprenticeship, to be taught Men's and Women's Apparel." Like their female English counterparts in New England, they were taught subjects that would assist their husbands' needs because Wheelock remained convinced that their presence augured well for future wifely companionship for their Indian missionary husbands.

This scenario fit the ideal world that Wheelock envisioned for his Native pupils. He imagined the Indian boys as future missionaries who would leave Moor's School with their wives, their training augmented perhaps by some college course work, and move into the mission field. But Wheelock's dream never came to fruition. Only one of the sixteen female students, Hannah Garrett, a Pequot, married another Native student, David Fowler, and Fowler became a teacher rather than a missionary to the Indians; later he also severed his ties with his former mentor.

As director of Moor's School, Wheelock immersed the Native pupils in the eighteenth-century Calvinist worldview, an instruction that was so intense it led one of the Indian girls to confess, "I have no peace of conscience." The moral strictures accepted by the English communities of the region in the

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aftermath of the Great Awakening proved too demanding for these young Natives, who had already been taught to abide by the ethical codes of their own people before moving to Lebanon. In Lebanon-away from home and kin group-they wavered between the spiritual enthusiasm that Wheelock encouraged and the "frolicks" that tempted them in the nearby tavern in the "commpany of Indian boys & girls." 21 In the end the postschool pattern of those Indian charity students for whom records are available suggests that although they adopted a syncretic religion, they preferred to live within their own communities, as far away from the English communities as possible.

CHEROKEE FEMALE SEMINARY, 1851-1909

On the surface the Cherokee Female Seminary appeared to be the antithesis of the eighteenth-century Moor's Indian School. Its life span far exceeded that of Moor's School. Founded by the Cherokee Nation in 1851, it remained a viable entity until Oklahoma statehood, despite intermittent closures forced by the Civil War, fires, and financial difficulties. When the federal government assumed control of the seminary, it created the institution that would eventu- ally become Northeastern State University. Unlike Moor's School, Cherokee Female Seminary did not come under the direction of missionaries, nor did the seminary intend to change the worldviews of the majority of its students. Still, beneath the surface it may have shared more with the eighteenth-century institution than at first appears.

The two Cherokee seminaries-Male and Female-served as the top tier of the Cherokee National Education System, established when the people began to recreate their lives in Indian Territory. As the elite educational institutions of the Nation, the seminaries symbolized simultaneously the persistence of the Cherokee Nation and the divisions that tore the fabric of Cherokee society following the arrival of the English and, later, the Americans.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the erosion of Cherokee society as the people began to disagree over the nature of Cherokee values. The growing impact of the so-called mixed bloods, those who favored accul- turation and descended from marriages between Cherokee women and white men, forced the nation to reconsider its future path. By the early 1830s, already divided between the traditionalist majority and mixed-blood minority, the Cherokee nation reached a crisis point-the acculturationists favored immediate removal west of the Mississippi, whereas the traditionalists wanted to remain on ancestral lands. The fraudulent Treaty of New Echota, signed in 1835 by seventy-five members of the "Treaty Party" out of a population of about sixteen thousand, proved a hollow victory, leading to the wrenching losses on the eight-hundred-mile trek to the West during the winter of 1838-39.22

Most historians of the Cherokees have described this split by adopting the dichotomy of "traditional" vs. "progressive" or "full blood" vs. "mixed blood."23 But historians Theda Perdue, William G. McLoughlin, and Julia M. Coates have offered a different analysis, which largely discounts the signifi- cance of blood as a distinguishing feature. They argue that the categories of mixed blood and full blood were determined not by blood but by the nature

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of the relationship between the individual and Cherokee culture. McLoughlin writes that "the difference between a full-blood and a mixed-blood was not biological or ancestral; a full-blood meant someone whose cradle language was Cherokee.... A mixed-blood was a Cherokee whose cradle language was English and.for whom it remained the first and only language. Over time the difference between these two groups came to include many aspects of lifestyle, values, and norms."24 Adding a contemporary perspective, Coates observes that "Cherokees may call a Cherokee of mixed racial heritage a 'fullblood' if that person speaks Cherokee and is steeped in Cherokee world view."

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When the Cherokee Nation of Indian Territory created a national school system, its schools echoed these divisive worldviews of its people, who continued to respond in different ways to the gnawing issue of Cherokee values and the pressures for acculturation. The children of the full bloods who were enrolled in Cherokee Nation schools generally attended the "common schools," which taught basic reading and writing in English. Since these children, who came from "conservative" families, entered school with little, if any, English at their command, and their instructors generally knew little, if any, Cherokee, the mixed results attracted criticism within the Nation and led to some efforts to teach literacy in Cherokee as well. 26 Despite the criticism, the common schools attested to the Cherokee Nation's desire for education for all of its citizenry. Although they served only those families who could not afford or who refused to send their children to the seminaries, at the same time they provided free, formal education for more than two-thirds of Cherokee youth. 2 7 While neighboring Arkansas and Kansas enrolled fewer than 10 percent of their school-age children in the late nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation supported almost one hundred common schools.

At the other end of the spectrum lay the seminaries. Their enrollment numbers revealed their elite status. Compared with the common schools, which enrolled as many as twenty-eight hundred pupils in a single year (1876), the Cherokee Female Seminary's total enrollment during its entire life span of some forty academic years was perhaps three thousand pupils. Although the Male Seminary boasted a higher total enrollment, it also suffered lower average attendance.

With a handful of exceptions almost all of the students at the Female Seminary were Cherokee. In addition, most had been raised in acculturated families. Some of them had 1/16 Cherokee blood; a few had as little as 1/128 Cherokee blood. Many of these students had grown up in the prosperous region of the nation where it had built the seminaries, in the vicinity of the capital at Tahlequah. Their families were reasonably well off. Still, they were generally not among the wealthiest Cherokees, who often sent their children outside of the Nation to be educated. John Ross, for example, sent his chil- dren to the east for their schooling.

In the post-Civil War years, when the Cherokee Nation was recovering from the devastation of this era, it managed to reopen the seminaries. At this time the Board of Education made a decision that fractured the social and cultural milieu that characterized the prewar Female Seminary. In order to incorporate the children of poor families, the board added two pre-high

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school levels-a "primary department" for grades one through five, and a "preparatory department" for grades six through eight. Initially, these new students were almost exclusively charity pupils, and while some of their expenses were covered through separate seminary funds, they also had to work to earn their keep. When they arrived, these pupils brought a very different understanding of what it meant to be Cherokee. Generally reared among conservative families in remote regions of the Nation where there was no access to the common schools, they were full bloods, both by blood and by culture, and their first language was Cherokee.3 0

Most of the acculturated students enrolled in the secondary program did not speak the Cherokee language, nor did they know much, if anything, about traditional Cherokee culture. But the apparent mixed-blood vs. full- blood dichotomy of the student body was far from clear-cut. For example, some secondary students who were categorized as full bloods had been raised in prosperous families, where they learned little of traditional culture. Still others, especially the Cherokee primary students who worked for their board and rooms, had not been exposed to the influential elite of the Cherokee Nation, who showed a distinct preference for white culture.

SHence, while the Cherokee Female Seminary catered primarily to the daughters of Cherokees who advocated acculturation, the presence of a minority of traditional students meant that the internal divisions mirrored the external divisions within the larger Cherokee society. The seminary within was like the Nation without. The antagonisms that divided the students hinged on their diverse opinions of the seminary's academic and cultural goals. Like its male counterpart, the Female Seminary looked to the East Coast for its prototype. It adopted the curriculum and deportment taught at Mount Holyoke, introduced to the seminary by its teachers, who had graduated from the Massachusetts institution. Although the seminary remained in the heart of the Cherokee Nation, its secondary students studied English, Latin, algebra, geometry, physics, botany, and physiology. The teachers taught history that focused on the youthful United States. Cherokee history and culture were conspicuous by their absence.

By emulating this eastern model, the teachers, most of the students, and, indeed, the leadership of the Cherokee Nation underlined their stance on the proposition that "white" was superior. By contrast, when the full bloods or traditional students encountered the seminary's heavy emphasis on white culture, they found it a troubling experience. Because of their unfamiliarity with English and their lack of academic preparation, on arrival these students quickly discovered they would be consigned to the third floor, among the primary students, even though they were often much older. Their lack of ready income reinforced a pervasive sense of inferiority. They could not afford party clothes or after-dinner snacks. Nor could they expect much sympathy from the white, largely eastern, teachers, who did not understand their traditionalist position within a predominantly acculturated milieu. According to the dictates of the Cherokee Female Seminary, "the white way was the only acceptable way." 3' Those who flourished in this environment went on to marry mixed-blood Cherokee or white men, and they achieved respected

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positions in Cherokee society or supplied the constant need for teachers at the common schools. Like their counterparts at the Cherokee Male Seminary, their position within the Cherokee Nation was assured.

SANTA FE INDIAN SCHOOL, 1890 TO THE PRESENT

Like its predecessors in Connecticut and in the Cherokee Nation, Santa Fe Indian School would dramatically influence the lives of its students. Unlike its predecessors, Santa Fe came to represent the aggressive vigor of the federal boarding school era. The rise of the federal schools came directly on the heels of the military defeat of Indians in the late 1870s and 1880s. Carlisle Indian School, the catalyst for these institutions, opened its doors in 1879, only thirty-nine months after the last Indian victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. One decade later, the first Pueblo Indian children entered the Santa Fe Indian School, built on the outskirts of New Mexico's territorial capital. Shortly after the school opened, in December 1890, the Seventh Cavalry's massacre of Lakota families at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, marked the last military encounter between Natives and the US Army. With the end of centuries of Native military resistance, highlighted in New Mexico with the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Indians turned to other forms of resistance, responding to new versions of colonialism. During this transition era of 1869 to 1900, sometimes known as the Gilded Age, Congress and the Indian Office launched an assault on Indian sovereignty. Designed to merge Native Americans into mainstream society, it employed three tactics-individual land ownership through allotment, prohibition of Native religions and other civil rights, and federal schooling of Indian children. In this context Santa Fe Indian School was in the vanguard of the new approach.

Alumnae who described their experiences at Santa Fe testified that they did not put up any resistance during their schooling. A former student from San Juan Pueblo recalled, "In June, I think, my parents come for me in a wagon. We had no choice about coming to school. We were told to go to school, and that was it. At that time I guess we were so obedient. We didn't question anything." 32 In retrospect, however, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, whose children formed the majority of the students at the school, did engage in a long-term form of resistance, one that hearkens back to the plan- ning for the Pueblo Revolt. Known for their persistence and for maintaining a position in spite of vigorous opposition, the members of the nineteen Pueblos of New Mexico, through their overarching government, known as the All Indian Pueblo Council, gained control of Santa Fe Indian School a little less than a century after it was founded by the US government. How that happened remains intrinsic to the full history of the school, but it also links it to the other Indian boarding schools described above.

In the early years-1890 to 1929-the Santa Fe Indian School emulated the federal policy of assimilation by relying on military discipline and a mainstream American curriculum. From 1900 until the late 1920s the Indian Service poured very little money into its schools, and, like Phoenix Indian School, Albuquerque Indian School, Haskell Institute, Chemawa (Oregon),

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and others, Santa Fe was "an overcrowded and under-funded institution with pervasive military discipline and a curriculum that emphasized manual labor."3 3 Like the other boarding schools, it crowded the children into dormitories, which became conduits for contagious diseases. Daily marching dominated student lives. One Santa Clara Pueblo woman recalled, "I remember when I first went there they used to drill us. Drill us to the school, drill us to the dining room, and drill us back to the dormitory.... We were just like prisoners, marching everyplace."

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Student labor kept the school afloat, but in spite of student efforts most of the former students who were interviewed recalled that they never had enough to eat unless they were assigned kitchen duty. "That was the place where I had a chance to at least have an extra bite of bread-in the kitchen," 3 5 One-half of each day they carried out tasks that the Indian Service considered relevant to their gender; the other half of the day they were in the classroom, where they learned English, reading, and writing from Euro-American teachers. "We spent eight years in school here [and then we] went home," a Sandia Pueblo man recalled. "At that time the parents thought that if you could speak a little English and read and write a little, you were educated enough to stay home and go to work."3 6 Santa Fe boys worked in the fields, the dairy, and the bakery, and in shops where they learned shoe- and harness-making and carpentry. Girls learned "domestic science," according to the contemporary dictates of mainstream America. Reflecting on her lack of ability, one student recalled, "They tried me in the kitchen-of course I was a horrible failure there. They tried me in the dining room-I guess I was a terrible waitress and table setter and dishwasher, so they threw me out of there. Even in the laundry I was a miserable failure and scorched everyone's clothes."

3 7

Although Santa Fe shared commonalities with other federal boarding schools, particularly in the West, it remained unusual because of its prox- imity to the Pueblos, especially the Keresan and Tanoan Pueblos located along the Rio Grande. The nature of Pueblo society influenced the milieu of the school. A San Juan woman suggested, "I think some of the teaching our parents gave us: to be tolerant, to not be overly aggressive. Being of that mind really made a difference. I knew how to do without. I knew how to be moderate. And I knew how to obey."'3 8 Pueblo families and clans reinforced these values each summer when most of the children-except those who were orphaned-returned home to their villages, stepped back into their Indian clothes, and shared their traditional foods-Indian corn bread, beans, squash, green-chili stew, melons, and wild fruit and vegetables. 39 Students who ran away from the Santa Fe school did so because they missed their families, the traditional food, and the ceremonial dances and annual "feast days." The proximity of Santo Domingo Pueblo, which lay downriver about thirty miles from the school, encouraged students from different tribes-who were already well acquainted with its popular August 4 feast day-to flee to Santo Domingo from Santa Fe.

Between the 1930s and the present, Santa Fe Indian School remolded itself in a variety of ways. During the 1930s it added an art program under the auspices of the Indian New Deal, where students from the Pueblos and other

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, I 750s-i 920s

tribes found abundant encouragement to paint scenes from their own Native cultures. Prominent Indian artists, such as Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara), Pop Chalee (Taos), and Gerald Nailor (Navajo), emerged from those years. During the termination era that followed World War II the school retreated from the multiculturalism approach of the Indian New Deal. By the early 1960s the federal government had closed the school, sending its students downriver to Albuquerque Indian School and opening its doors in 1962 to the newly founded Institute of American Indian Art. In the 1970s, with the demise of the physical plant at Albuquerque and the passage of the Indian Self-Determination Act of 1975, the All Indian Pueblo Council (AIPC) took the initiative to contract with the federal government. The AIPC would direct the Santa Fe Indian School itself, serving as the first example of tribal-federal contracting under the new legislation. In September 1981 Santa Fe Indian School reopened to a student body of about 450 pupils. The school had come full circle, and it was finally in the hands of the people who sent their children to Santa Fe for an education.

SIMILARITIES

Several threads link the experiences of the students who attended these three institutions. Not surprisingly, the students who derived the greatest sense of satisfac tion during their years of study were those who agreed with their institution's goals. As long as Samson Occom and his brother-in-law David Fowler believed in Eleazar Wheelock's educational plans, they were quite willing to carry them out. Their dissatisfaction arose when they disagreed,with his approach. Then they retreated to their own Native communities and the values they had learned there. At the Cherokee seminary the acculturated students who accepted the "white-is-superior" concept found the seminary's approach matched their needs. The school's curriculum enhanced their desire to learn about white education and deportment. Pablita Velarde, the Pueblo student who failed at the domestic science tasks, found little appeal in Santa Fe Indian School until it introduced the art program during the 1930s. Then she excelled.

The relevance of the curriculum and the physical work associated with the schools also form a common thread. At each school the nature of the curriculum affected the students quite strongly. For Samson Occom and a few of the Indian youth at Moor's School, Wheelock's demand for knowledge of Latin and Greek seemed to make some sense. But when David Fowler and other Algonquian students traveled to the Iroquois villages during the 1760s to serve as schoolmasters, they quickly discovered that their preparation was inadequate. Soon after their arrival they realized what they should have been taught at Moor's School, and it was not Latin and Greek. As director, Wheelock never considered the option of teaching the Native languages, such as the languages of the Iroquois nations, nor did he consider that he should have taught the boys how to farm rather than merely assigning farm chores to the reluctant scholars; he would have served the future schoolmasters far better had he encouraged their communities to teach them how to live off the land.

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

When they arrived in the Iroquois villages, none of the former Algonquian pupils knew how to hunt, how to trap, or how to survive without the ameni- ties they had enjoyed at the school. Hence, they never had enough to eat. If the curriculum for the boys seemed inappropriate, the training for the girls proved equally ineffective. Although Moor's School taught tailoring skills to some of the girls, they found no need for this craft in their own villages, and those who tried to survive in the English communities encountered strong prejudice against Indians, which sent them back to their own communities.

By.contrast, instruction in English, which occurred at each of the schools, remained relevant. At Santa Fe it served as a lingua franca for the students. The Pueblos spoke a number of different languages; and the Navajo and Apache spoke variations of Athabascan. At the Cherokee Female Seminary English served the purpose of the acculturated students, but it remained an embarrassment for the Cherokee full bloods, since their monolingual status assigned them to an inferior position. English aided the students during their years at Moor's School because they came from a mixed-language back- ground, but it did not serve the schoolmasters in the Iroquois villages because most of the Iroquois-except for some of the Mohawk-spoke little English.

A further link among the schools addresses the issue of students' aware- ness of their own traditional culture. At the Cherokee Female Seminary the full bloods knew their culture and their language. Like the Pueblo students, these Cherokees were comfortable with their own identity. Unlike the Pueblos, however, they remained a minority at the seminary and consequently could not retain. that level of comfort at school. For the Cherokee full bloods the seminary's focus on "white" culture may have served as a more severe shock than the Anglo environment at Santa Fe Indian School because at Santa Fe the Pueblos, unlike the Cherokee traditionalists, remained the majority, and all of the students there came from strong Indian cultural backgrounds. My research suggests that Moor's School was more problematic because the Indians who attended the school came from varying backgrounds in terms of cultural awareness. Some of the Algonquian villages had already adopted Reformed Calvinism. By contrast, the Iroquois, and especially the Mohawk, had been exposed to the presence of Anglican missionaries, but they had retained stronger Native spiritual traditions. Catholicism, which had reached the Iroquois via the French and the Huron, had also exerted considerable influence, but it did not appear to affect those Iroquois students who attended the Protestant Moor's School.

The proximity of these boarding schools to the students' own communi- ties also shaped their attitude toward the schools. For the Navajos and Apaches who enrolled at Santa Fe, the return journey to their distant camps remained difficult for many decades. By contrast, the Pueblos, who lived as close as thirty miles away in villages like Santo Domingo, knew that they would return to their communities during the summer. This promise offered a degree. of security. In like fashion most of the Iroquois students, with the exception of Joseph Brant, did not remain for a lengthy time at Moor's School because of the vast distance, both cultural and physical, that separated their homes from an English-run boarding school located in Connecticut. For some of the

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1 920s

Algonquians, who were already partially Christianized and lived closer, the school held their attention for several years.

Finally, the schools shared a common thread in the nature of the relations among the students themselves. Often this relationship proved far more signif- icant than the relationship between students and teachers, reinforcing the concept of a vibrant student network that involved skilled tactics of commu- nication and evasion. 4 1 This did not always lead to unanimity of purpose, since rifts among the students proved common. The issue of conservative vs. acculturated Indians was not limited to the Cherokee seminary, where it remained an obvious source of dissonance. It also appeared at Moor's School, where it erupted when a fight broke out between an Iroquois student and an Algonquian student, who accused the Iroquois of being a "white eyes." The Iroquois student, reputedly, was a son of the Irish trader William Johnson and an Iroquois woman. The fight, which took place during a time when Wheelock was away from the school, reportedly lasted the better part of a day.

4 2

At Santa Fe Indian School a sense of camaraderie enabled the students to survive the lengthy school year, but the significant number of students, espe- cially Pueblos, who were related to each other helped to reinforce this bond. The same held true at the Cherokee Female Seminary, where staff permitted several of the students who were related to share a room. It also occurred at Moor's School, which attracted two or more children from single families, such as the Montauk brothers of Occom's wife. In spite of the acculturation or mixed-blood issue that divided some of the students, the strength of kinship and other ties among students, often formed after they arrived, suggests that the students' relationships with each other may have influenced their lives more profoundly than any other aspect of their boarding school experience.

CONCLUSION

The multiple threads linking Indian boarding schools from the eighteenth century through the twentieth suggest that even though the students' experi- ences differed in accordance with their unique circumstances, some common ground can be found among the Natives enrolled at all three institutions. The relevance of the curriculum and the physical workload for the students; the background cultural knowledge that they brought from their own commu- nity; the proximity of the boarding school to their homes and tribal lands; and their crucial alliances with other students, especially those siblings, cousins, and other relatives who shared kinship ties-all of these themes suggest that the students introduced an indispensable yet common asset to each of the schools. They arrived with their own cultural view of the world, a view that retained its presence during the years when they were ostensibly immersed in a boarding school environment. In each situation they reshaped their schools in ways that we have not yet fully grasped.

Although the students who remolded these educational institutions may have been widely separated by culture, location, and generation, their stories reflect a measure of universality. Because of these commonalities, they shared some of the experiences of their counterparts who lived in other times and

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

other places. These experiences-homesickness, the institutional environ- ment that the students themselves modified, and their efforts to resolve the clash, or the similarity, between Native values and the values taught at the school-all served to forge a hidden bond that linked the Indians at Moor's School, the Cherokee Female Seminary, and the Santa Fe Indian School. By contributing to this student bond, however tenuous, the American Indian boarding schools gained a common ground. Across the generations, the Indian youth who found themselves at boarding school, regardless of the circumstances, contributed to an educational stream that they made their own: it bore the stamp of their cultures and their tribes, it demonstrated their ability to negotiate the foreign ways taught at the boarding schools, and, in certain instances, it suggested their talent for drawing those unwitting foreigners into the circle of their own worldviews.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the multiple sponsors of the 32nd Annual Symposium of the American Indian, "Cultural Journeys: Four Centuries of American Indian Education," held at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, 14-16 April 2004, where I delivered a draft of this paper. It has been considerably revised since that presentation.

NOTES

1. Samson Occom, "Diary," vol. 1, 84, in Dartmouth College Archives, Hanover, New [4ampshire [hereafter cited as DCA].

2. This comment appeared in the student newspaper Cherokee Rose Buds, 1 August 1854, 2, as cited in Devon A. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 39.

3. Student is quoted in Sally Hyer, OneHouse, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1990), 9. For a collection of these quotes see The First One Hundred Years, Santa Fe Indian School (n.p.: Foundation for Indian Leadership, n.d.). This catalog includes portions of the oral history interviews conducted by students and project staff who contributed to the project "Santa Fe Indian School-The First One Hundred Years."

4. SallyJ. McBeth, Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-Central Oklahoma American Indians (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983); Robert A. Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891-1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds; Michael C. Coleman, Indian Children at School, 1850-1930 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Clyde Ellis, To Change Them Forever: Indian Education at the Rainy

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1 750s-1 920s

Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996); Dorothy R. Parker, Phoenix Indian School: The Second Half Century (Tucson: University

of Arizona Press, 1996); Scott Riney, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898-1933 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Amanda J.

Cobb, Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); James T. Carroll, Seeds of Faith: Catholic Indian Boarding Schools (New York: Garland, 2000) ;Jean A. Keller, Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902-1922 (East Lansing: Michigan

State University Press, 2002). 5. See, e.g., Jim Whitewolf: The Life of a Kiowa Apache Indian, ed. Charles S. Brant

(New York: Dover, 1969), 83-97; Luther Standing Bear, My People the Sioux (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1928), esp. the classic account of his arrival and first days at Carlisle, 133-50; Anna Moore Shaw, A Pima Past (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1978),

132-47; Albert Yava, Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi Indians Life and Times and the History

and Traditions of His People, ed. Harold Courlander (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 12-19; Irene Stewart, A Voice in Her Own Tribe: A Navajo Woman's

Own Story, ed. Doris Ostrander Dawdy (Socorro, NM: Ballena Press, 1980), 15-21.

6. Since it remained open until 1949, the Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females proved an exception. See Cobb, Listening to Our Grandmothers'Stories.

7. Recent authors emphasize the ambivalent reasons for attendance: "They

came because they wanted to; because their families wanted them to; because some judge or social worker or probation officer or federal agent decreed they had to"

(Margaret L. Archuleta, Brenda K. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, eds., Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences [Phoenix, AZ: Heard Museum, 2004],

20). Yet Luther Standing Bear knew in 1879 that his culture demanded that he go to school. When Carlisle recruited its first students that year, he recalled, "I was thinking

of my father, and how he had many times said to me, 'Son, be brave! Die on the battle- field if necessary away from home.. . 'When I thought of my father.., it occurred to me that this chance to go East would prove that I was brave if I were to accept it"

(Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 124).

8. Adams writes, "Students seem to have been endlessly inventive in finding ways of 'counting coup' on a system that sought to debase all things Indian" (Education for Extinction, 231). Lomawaima concludes that Chilocco was "an institution founded and

controlled by the federal government [but] was inhabited and possessed by those whose identities the institution was committed to erase" (They Called It Prairie Light, 167).

9. Child, Boarding School Seasons, 52-53. 10. Omaha Francis La Flesche recalled the stories and other nocturnal Indian

events that he and his friends crafted in their dorms at the mid-nineteenth-century Presbyterian school near their reservation. Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 27-31, 115-32.

11. Shaw, A Pima Past, 134-35. 12. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, 118. 13. The only full-length biography of Occom is W. DeLoss Love, Samson Occom

and the Christian Indians of New England (1899; repr., Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000), with an introduction by Margaret Connell Szasz. Recent essays on Occom

include "Samson Occom: Mohegan as Spiritual Intermediary," in Between Indian and

AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman, OK: Red River

Books, 2001), 61-78;John A. Strong, "Samson Occom," in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick Hoxie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 434-36; Margaret

Connell Szasz, "Samson Occom: Mohegan Leader and Cultural Broker," in The Human Tradition in American History, ed. Nancy Rhoden and Ian K. Steele (Wilmington, DE:

Scholarly Resources, 1999), 237-56; David Murray, "Christian Indians: Samson Occom

and William Apes," chap. 4 of Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing,.and Representation in North

American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 49-64; Bernd C. Peyer, "Samson Occom and the Vision of a New England Christian Polity," chap. 3 of

The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst: University

of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 54-116.

14. Additional information on Moor's School can be found in James Dow McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock: Founder of Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth

College Publications, 1939), chaps. 5-11; James Dow McCallum, The Letters of Eleazar Wheelock's Indians (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Publications, 1932);James Axtell,

"Dr. Wheelock's Little Red School," in James Axtell, The European and the Indian (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 87-109.

15. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 130. 16. Occom's statement was recorded by a former English pupil; see David

McClure to Wheelock, 21 May 1770, file 770321, DCA.

17. On Brant's leadership and the split within the Iroquois League see Barbara

Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,

1972), 104, 106, 108-12, 142-43; and Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in

Indian Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60, 122-28.

18. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 85.

19. Quote is in ibid., 86. On the students' aversion to farm chores see Eleazar

Wheelock, A Plain and Faithful Narrative of the Original Design, Rise, Progress, and Present

State of the Indian Charity-School at Lebanon, in Connecticut (Boston: Richard and Samuel Draper, 1763), 33.

20. The two quotes are in ibid., 34.

21. Hannah Nonesuch Confession, 11 March 1768, file 768211.1, DCA.

22. For a good introduction to the removal issues see Theda Perdue and Michael

D. Green. eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin's, 2005). On the background of the Cherokee division see William G.

McLoughlin, "Accepting Christianity, 1839-1860," in McLoughlin, The Cherokees and

Christianity, 1794-1870 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 189-91.

23. Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 98-99.

24. Ibid., 100. McLoughlin added, "The mixed-bloods favored rapid accultura- tion, behaved like whites, and brought their children up by white values. Full-bloods

kept as many of their old ways and values as they could" (McLoughlin, "Accepting

Christianity, 1839-1860," 189-90). Still other scholars maintain the significance of

blood as a determining factor in Cherokee society. Anthropologist Circe Sturm writes

that "Cherokee blood continues to be 'one of the most important aspects of Cherokee

national and social identity" (Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the

Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002], 152). On

the.complexity of the issue see Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians, 100-101, 127n99.

American Indian Boarding School Experiences, I 750s-i 920s

25. Julia M. Coates, "'None of Us Are Supposed to Be Here': Ethnicity, Nationality, and the Production of Cherokee Histories" (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 2002), 85.

26. The term conservative comes from Perdue, as quoted'by Coates in ibid., 80. John B. Jones, well-known Baptist minister to the Cherokee, encouraged a bilingual system of teaching in the common schools, but he was unable to persuade the leader- ship to accept this plan. (The federal Indian schools adopted a similar idea during the 1930s.) Robert H. Skelton, "A History of the Educational System of the Cherokee Nation, 1801-1910" (EdD diss., University of Arkansas, 1967), 135-37, 140-43. Also see William G. McLoughlin, "An Alternative Missionary Style: Evan Jones andcJohn B. Jones among the Cherokees," in Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 109. Other Cherokees believed that the Nation should introduce vocational training for the youth, suggesting that "the Post at Fort Gibson might be transformed from a Military Post into an Indian Farming School such as that at Carlisle or Lawrence," but the National Council took no action (Robert S. Owen, Indian Agent, to D. W. Bushyhead, Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, 18 August 1886, Cherokee National Records, microfilm, Schools, Miscellaneous, CHN 102, frames 163-64, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City).

27. In 1845 the Cherokee Nation declared that "if the funds of the nation are sufficient, all her schools should be free for every free citizen .... [A]II the youths should be considered as entitled to equal privileges standing on a common level" (Cherokee Advocate, 13 April 1845, as cited in Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 101).

28. In 1876 the population of the Cherokee Nation was approximately nineteen thousand. Of the school-age population of 4,041, some 2,800 children, or 69 percent, were enrolled in school. In Arkansas 7 percent were enrolled, in Kansas 6 percent. Per pupil expenditures also differed widely. The Cherokee Nation spent $35.76 per pupil; Arkansas spent $7.45 and Kansas $8.28. Also, the Cherokee Nation expected teachers in the common schools to attend summer institutes. In 1880 the National Council determined to restrict the number of common schools to one hundred. See Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 134-35, 147-48, 152.

29. These estimates come from Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds, 2, 97. In this section I have relied heavily on Mihesuah's study for my assessments of the Cherokee Female Seminary.

30. Ibid., 50; Skelton, "History of the Educational System," 165. 31. Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds, 80-81.

32. San Juan Pueblo student, arrived at SFIS in 1927, quoted in Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 25.

33. Sally Hyer, "Pablita Velarde: The Pueblo Artist as Cultural Broker," in Connell Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 277.

34. Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 11. 35. Ibid., 26. 36. Ibid., 21. 37. Pablita Velarde, interviewed by the author, 9 February 1972, Albuquerque.

Tape Recording 853, American Indian History Research Project Files, Center for Southwest Research, Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

38. Hyer, One House, One Voice, One Heart, 8.

94 AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL

39. Ibid., 13. 40. John Wolfe Lydekker, The Faithful Mohawks (1938; repr., Long Island, NY- Ira

J. Friedman, 1968, 55); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse (Chapel Hill: University of North CAirolina Press, 1992), chap. 5.

41. Adams, Education for Extinction, 138; Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light,

167. 42. McCallum, Eleazar Wheelock, 93-94.

TITLE: “I knew how to be moderate. And I knew how to obey”: The Commonality of American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1750s-1920s

SOURCE: Am Indian Cult Res J 29 no4 2005 WN: 0500404662008

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