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“Fully Equal to That of Any Children”: Experimental Creek Education in the Antebellum Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Rowan Faye Steineker
Rowan Faye Steineker*
Affiliation:
Department of History at the University of Oklahoma
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Abstract

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During the 1840s and 1850s, members of the Creek Nation rejected schools as a colonial tool and instead experimented with various forms of education to fit their own local and national needs. Diverse individuals and communities articulated educational visions for their nation in conversation with fellow citizens, national leaders, and U.S. educators. Rather than embrace education to assimilate into the American republic, Creeks turned to schools and English literacy as one strategy to shape their own society and defend it from further Euro-American colonial policies. By the end of the 1850s, they had established a fledgling national school system consisting of both neighborhood and mission schools. These institutions reflected and reinforced changes in race, class, gender, culture, and religion in the antebellum Creek Nation.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , May 2016 , pp. 273 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 History of Education Society 

References

1 During the colonial period, the Creeks organized their world into a system of autonomous towns with distinct cultural and economic characteristics. Geographic location and clan affiliation divided the towns into Upper Town and Lower Town divisions held together in a flexible coalition. During removal, factionalism divided the Upper and Lower towns, but following removal Creeks increasingly centralized into a nation rather than a confederacy. For a colonial political history of the Creeks, see Hahn, Steven C., The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); and for a history of removal in the early nineteenth century, see Green, Michael D., The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).Google Scholar

2 Opothleyohola from Morrison, W. B., “Father Murrow” in My Oklahoma, n.d., file 1, box 1, Opothleyohola Collection, Native American Manuscripts, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma (hereafter WHC). The typescript is undated, but Murrow attended Creek Councils in the late 1840s when Opothleyohola began publicly advocating education after the resettlement in Indian Territory. Also see Mary Jane Warde, George Washington Grayson and the Creek Nation, 1843–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 41.Google Scholar

3 In 1825, the Choctaws negotiated a treaty with the federal government in which leaders agreed to establish Choctaw Academy in Blue Springs, Kentucky. Under pressure from the federal government, state legislatures, and white intruders to cede their land, Choctaws wished to produce a generation of educated leaders as a strategy to protect their sovereignty. An alternative to missionary-led education, the school became the first national school for Native Americans in the United States. Although largely funded by the Choctaw Nation, children from other Southern indigenous groups attended. Foreman, Carolyn Thomas, “The Choctaw Academy,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 6, no. 4 (December 1928), 453. Also see Fortney, Jeff, “Robert M. Jones and the Choctaw Nation: Indigenous Nationalism in the American South,” unpublished dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2014, 77–83.Google Scholar

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6 I use the term Creek to describe the diverse members of the nineteenth-century Creek Nation, including those with Native, European, and African heritage. Although Muskogee is often used interchangeably with Creek, historically it applied to one of the language groups that had coalesced into the Creek Nation. Yuchis, for example, belonged to the Creek Nation but maintained their own distinct language. In the twenty-first century, Muscogee (Creek) Nation is the official designation.Google Scholar

7 For an outline of this process, see Neuman, Linda K., Indian Play: Indigenous Identities at Bacone College (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 1–28. In this study, Neuman traces the transformation at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, arguing, “Students used Bacone as a space for the exploration of their own and others’ Indian identities, as they learned from one another.” It is worth noting that, although Bacone's founder, Bacone, Almon C., and the Baptist Mission operated the school with assimilationist goals, the Creek government, which gave Bacone permission and a land grant to move the school into the Creek Nation at Muskogee, had a different understanding of the institution. They viewed it as a supplement to their own education system, which began in the period discussed in this article. See “Samuel Checote to the National Council,” October 27, 1881, slide 36083, roll 43, Creek Nation Records, Oklahoma Historical Society (hereafter cited as OHS); Neuman, Indian Play, 42.Google Scholar

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10 For more on the early common school movement, see Kaestle, Carl, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) and Reese, William J., America's Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011). For a discussion of race and the common school movement, see Moss, Hilary J., Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).Google Scholar

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25 Several scholars chronicle assimilation policies and student experiences in federal boarding schools during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adams provides the most extensive synthesis on the topic. Employing a framework of colonialism, he asserts agents of assimilation believed that the “last great Indian war should be waged against the children.” He argues assimilationists sought “the eradication of all traces of tribal identity and culture” and to replace them with the “values of white civilization” through boarding school education. See Adams, Education for Extinction, 335–36.Google Scholar

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28 Mihesuah, Cultivating the Rosebuds, 21.Google Scholar

29 Loughridge, R. M. to Garrett, Colonel W. H., U.S. agent to the Creek nation, 13 September 1859, ARCIA 1859, 548.Google Scholar

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34 Bass, Althea, The Story of Tullahassee (Oklahoma City: Semco Color Press, 1960), 35–49; Cahill, Cathleen details how late nineteenth- and twentieth-century schools under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs replicated the emphasis on married couples. Instead of modeling the Christian family, however, she argues these couples represent the larger project of “intimate colonialism” because they served “symbolically as federal fathers and mothers to their wards.” See Cahill, Cathleen, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 83.Google Scholar

35 Grayson, George W., A Creek Warrior for the Confederacy: The Autobiography of Chief G. W. Grayson, ed. Baird, W. David (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 43. For an extensive biography of Grayson, see Warde, Mary Jane, George Washington Grayson and the Creek Nation, 1843–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). For details about the history of the Grayson family, see Saunt, Claudio, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).Google Scholar

36 List of Kowetah Students, roll 16, no. 150, PHS.Google Scholar

37 James Ross Ramsay Autobiography, folder 1, box 1, James Ross Ramsay Collection, Seminole Nation Papers, Native American Manuscripts, WHC, 23–24.Google Scholar

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59 Ibid.Google Scholar

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73 Ibid.Google Scholar

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75 Reports on Creek Schools, ARCIA, 1855, 461–471.Google Scholar

76 Allen, W. H. to Garrett, Colonel W. H., 5 September 1855, ARCIA, 469.Google Scholar

77 Lewis, M. J. to Garrett, Colonel W. H., 28 August 1855, ARCIA, 468.Google Scholar

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81 Euro-American educators in the Southwestern territories also aced the language barrier with the Spanish-speaking population. For a community-level analysis, see Blanton, Carlos Kevin, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2004), 24–41.Google Scholar

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88 The Five Tribes excluded noncitizens residing within their territory from their public schools, unless they received permission and paid tuition. After numerous petitions from settlers, Congress commissioned an investigation. The report, “Education of White and Negro Children in The Indian Territory,” indicated an estimated 30,000 white children and 25,000 African-American children “were shut out from the schools supported by the governments of the five nations of Indians who control the territory, as well as from those supported by the United States for the benefit of Indian youth.” The result was “a mass of more than 50,000 children of both races, of school age, for whose education, either industrial or literary, there is no provision whatever.” See Department of the Interior, “Education of White and Negro Children in Indian Territory,” (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1898), 1–2.Google Scholar

89 Warren, Donald provides critique of the focus on institutions within the history of Native American education by arguing they can imply “prior to Euroamerican invasions the Indigenous peoples of the United States lacked enduring practices and teaching and learning.” Natives not only possessed diverse and enduring forms of education prior to European contact but also continued to employ them during the nineteenth century. Creeks did not simply borrow western systems of knowledge and western-style schools. Instead, they adapted English literacy and schools as their own institutions. I maintain that there are important historical lessons to be learned from examining indigenous-controlled social institutions. This essay complements David Wallace Adams's response to the essays in the History of Education Quarterly's thematic issue on the education history of Native Americans. Adams argues that while there is still much work to be done, “don't forget about the schools.” Warren, Donald, “American Indian Histories as Education History,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (August 2014), 263; and Adams, David Wallace, “Beyond Horace Mann: Telling Stories about Indian Education,” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 3 (August 2014), 385.Google Scholar

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93 Opothleyohola from Morrison's, W. B. “Father Murrow” in My Oklahoma, file 1, box 1, Opothleyohola Collection, Native American Manuscripts, WHC.Google Scholar