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The Consequences of Competition: Federal Boarding Schools, Competing Institutions, Pueblo Communities, and the Fight to Control the Flow of Pueblo Students, 1881–1928
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Extract
Samuel M. Cart, superintendent of the recently opened federal boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sat down at his desk in September 1891 to write the commissioner of Indian affairs regarding his recent recruiting tour through the pueblos under his jurisdiction. The recruiting trip was in preparation for the first full school year of Santa Fe Indian School's (SFIS's) existence. Though Cart had only recently arrived, his would-be pupils belonged to communities who had lived in the region for over millennia. The Pueblos among whom Cart had just traveled had established successful agricultural committees in the arid region and developed complex social and cultural means to order and influence the world that Cart's countryman now called the American Southwest. And for generations, they had educated their children in order that their communities would survive. Now Cart, and men and women like him, had traveled to the Southwest to convince the Pueblos (and other Native American groups) that their way of life was inferior, their social–cultural complex was immoral, and their methods for educating their children were insufficient.
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References
1 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 11 September 1891; vol. 2, 263–67 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M1473, roll 1); Bureau of Indian Affairs Records Created by the SFIS, 1890–1918, Record Group 75; National Archives and Records Administration – Rocky Mountain Region (Denver). Henceforth known as M1473. In this article, I use “Pueblo” when referring to people and “pueblo” when referring to the communities.Google Scholar
2 Readers should begin by consulting Dozier, Edward, The Pueblo Indians of North America (New York: Waveland Press, 1983) and Sando, Joe, Pueblo Nations: Eight Centuries of Pueblo History (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing, 1992). Dozier's book is more technical, while Sando's work is intended for a more popular audience. Also, Dozier writes as an anthropologist, while Sando writes as a historian; thus their questions and concerns differ. Alfonso Ortiz's The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969) is also helpful, though it focuses on the pueblo of San Juan as a case study.Google Scholar
3 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 11 September 1891; vol. 2, 263–67 (M1473, roll 1).Google Scholar
4 Ibid.Google Scholar
5 Ibid.Google Scholar
6 Ibid.Google Scholar
7 Ibid.Google Scholar
8 Cathleen Cahill does an excellent job of showing how government personnel in the Indian Service shaped, supported, or resisted federal policy through their daily interactions with the Native American population. Policymakers and bureaucrats in the East had no guarantee that either the letter or the spirit of their instructions would be carried out in the field. Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).Google Scholar
9 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 11 September 1891; vol. 2, 263–67 (M1473, roll 1)Google Scholar
10 Ibid.Google Scholar
11 Ibid.Google Scholar
12 For a helpful introduction to Lummis, see the chapter entitled “Charles Fletcher Lummis and the Fight for the Multicultural Southwest” in Smith, Sherry L., Reimagining Indians: Native Americans Through Anglo Eyes, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 It is difficult to recreate the interactions between AIS and local Catholic influences with the surviving records, but what little does survive suggests a similar pattern to that of SFIS. The general pattern of relations with Catholic influences for SFIS moved from hostility and direct competition toward eventual cooperation, though the occasional confrontation still occurred. The limited AIS records seem to follow the same pattern.Google Scholar
14 McKinney, Lillie G., “History of Albuquerque Indian School,” New Mexico Historical Review 20, no. 2 (1945): 109–38, 123–24.Google Scholar
15 I focus more directly on Pueblo agency in their relationships with AIS and SFIS in my larger work: Gram, John, Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico's Indian Boarding Schools (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2015). Much of this article is drawn from the second chapter of that book.Google Scholar
16 The literature on federal Indian schools is too vast to mention in full here. Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); and Trennert, Robert, The Phoenix Indian School (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988) remain seminal older works in the field. Some of the more important recent works include the following: Child, Brenda J., Boarding School Seasons (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Vuckovic, Myriam, Voices From Haskell: Indian Students Between Two Worlds, 1884–1928 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2008); Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, White Man's Club (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Gilbert, Matthew Sakiestewa, Education Beyond the Mesas (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2010). Each of the works previously mentioned deals with off-reservation boarding schools, the same category in which the two schools mentioned in this article fall. Those wishing to study in on-reservation boarding schools should still start with the following: McBeth, Sally, Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), as well as Ellis, Clyde, To Change Them Forever (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). In the words of Adrea Lawrence, the government-run day schools “remain a mystery to be uncovered.” Sadly, her Lessons From an Indian Day School (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2011) remains one of the few scholarly inquiries into the operations of these important institutions. Finally, those wishing to understand the Catholic experience with Indian education should still begin with the works of Francis Prucha, in particular American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976) and Churches and the Indian Schools (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).Google Scholar
17 AIS was actually founded in 1881 by Presbyterians five years earlier, with the understanding that the federal government would eventually take over operations, which it did in 1886.Google Scholar
18 This was a holdover from the Grant Peace Policy under which the federal government contracted with religious groups to run mission schools to educate Indian children. As the federal government began running its own schools, it canceled almost all of these contracts. Eventually, St. Catherine lost its government funding, but survived due to the personal fortune of Katherine Drexel who joined the order of nuns that ran St. Catherine and used her wealth to keep it open. Between 1907 and 1932, St. Catherine enrollment remained in excess of 250 students on a yearly basis. My information on St. Catherine comes almost exclusively from the excellent dissertation by Collier, Brian, “St. Catherine Indian School, Santa Fe, 1887–2006: Catholic Indian Education in New Mexico” (PhD dissertation, Arizona State University, 2006).Google Scholar
19 See, for example, Cashman, Sean Dennis, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 97–98; Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 57–58. Further complicating the debate of Catholic involvement in education was the fact that sometimes the Catholic instructors themselves were first-generation immigrants. See the work of Carroll, James, “Self-Direction, Activity, and Syncretism: Catholic Boarding Schools on the Northern Great Plains in Contact” U.S. Catholic Historian, 16, no. 2 Native American Catholics (Spring 1998): 78–89. Consult also his larger manuscript covering the same four mission schools examined in that article, Seeds of Faith: Catholic Indian Boarding Schools (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000).Google Scholar
20 This direct pitting of nearby schools against each other may have been practiced by other Indian groups, but it has not been well explored in the existing literature. Scott Riney rives one example of parents pitting the nearby reservation school against the Rapid City off-reservation school. Riney, Scott, The Rapid City Indian School, 1898–1933 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 32–34.Google Scholar
21 I say “minimal” Mexican attempts mostly because Mexico largely ignored its northern frontier during this period due to its preoccupation with political troubles in the center of the country. See Pueblo historian Sando, Joe, Pueblo Nations (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing, 1992) for an excellent overview of Pueblo history through the present, including very helpful overviews of their experiences with both Spain and Mexico. In my opinion, Weber's, David The Spanish Frontier in North American (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994) and The Mexican Frontier (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1982) remain the best introductory works to the Southwest region as a whole during these time periods. Though they fall beyond the scope of this study, it is also worth noting that the Pueblos faced other significant attempts at American assimilation during this period besides school, in particular the attempted suppression of Pueblo dances and the attempted passing of the Bursum Bill. Wenger, Tisa, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) is an excellent introduction to the controversies surrounding Pueblo dances. Another excellent introduction to the controversy surrounding the Pueblo dances is Margaret Jacobs's “Making Savages of Us All: White Women, Pueblo Indians, and the Controversy Over Indian Dances in the 1920s,” in American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, 1850 to Present, eds. Hoxie, Frederick E., Mancall, Peter C., and Merrell, James H. (New York: Routledge, 2001), 172–98. Consult Joe Sando, Pueblo Nations, 114–19, for a brief overview of the Bursum Bill.Google Scholar
22 Collier, “St. Catherine,” 55.Google Scholar
23 In fact, Catholics complained not only about the Protestant nature of federal boarding schools for Indian students, but of public education in general. Catholic leaders felt that even the supposedly secular public schools still harbored Protestant bias through such methods as anti-Catholic history textbooks and the use of the King James Version of the Bible, a thoroughly Protestant translation. Thomas, George, Peck, Lisa, and de Haan, Channin, “Reforming Education, Transforming Religion, 1876–1931,” in The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life, ed. Smith, Christian (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 360.Google Scholar
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25 Pamphlet attached to Crandall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1 May 1903; vol. 3,347 (M1473, roll 18).Google Scholar
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32 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 28 July 1890; vol. 1, 113–14 (M1473, roll 1).Google Scholar
33 Cart to Rev. Robert Goltman, 5 September 1891; vol. 2, 256 (M1473, roll 1).Google Scholar
34 Of course, the extent to which these communities were “Catholic” and what Catholicism meant to these communities is a topic well beyond the bounds of this article. Interestingly, even some of the superintendents struggled to understand to what extent their Pueblo students were Catholic. For example, writing to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1907, Superintendent Crandall (SFIS) noted that “Out of the 117 girls [in attendance here] 101 are Catholic – I mean nominally Catholic, many of them are not properly confirmed in the church nor never are for that matter, but they are recognized as Catholics.” Crandall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 4 May 1907; vol. 8, 148 (M1473, roll 4).Google Scholar
35 This system of weekly instruction remained unchanged through the period under study here.Google Scholar
36 Dozier, Edward, “Spanish-Catholic Influences on Rio Grande Pueblo Religion,” American Anthropologist 60, no. 3 (1958): 441–48. Cited in Frank, Ross, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
37 Crandall to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 25 January 1902; vol. 2, 234 (M1473, roll 17).Google Scholar
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42 Diaries of John David DeHuff; Elizabeth Willis DeHuff Family Papers, Center for Southwest Research, General Library, University of New Mexico.Google Scholar
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55 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 26 August 1891; vol. 2, p. 244 (M1473, roll 1).Google Scholar
56 Cart to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 25 October 1891: vol. 2, 364–65 (M1473, roll 1).Google Scholar
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60 Ibid.Google Scholar
61 Ibid.Google Scholar
62 Ibid.Google Scholar
63 Ibid.Google Scholar
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65 Jones to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 15 July 1895; vol. 6, 141–44 (M1473, roll 3).Google Scholar
66 Jones to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1 July 1896; vol. 6, p. 393 (M1473, roll 3).Google Scholar
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87 Jones to Capt. Nordstrorm U.S. Army, 21 September 1897; vol. 7, 348–49 (M1473, roll 4).Google Scholar
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