Kristy Cox
26 November 2002

Educating the Indians: An Act of Detribalization

            In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was written by an affluent group of white men who sought freedom from England.  The purpose of declaring independence upon this vast vacant land was to ensure that its inhabitants, who were all considered to be created equal, had the right, given by their creator, to have life, liberty and the ability to pursue happiness.  Unfortunately, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was distributed to a selected group of people.  This group of selected people is commonly referred to as the white dominant culture.  Though the Declaration of Independence freedom was declared for all that lived in America, Americans did not honor their written concept of equality.  In many regards the Declaration of Independence concerning equality, life, liberty and happiness has bounced like a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds”, in the faces of its original inhabitants, the American Indians (Dr. Martin Luther King handout). 

            Before Columbus sailed the seas in search of India, America was inhabited by thousands of culturally different natives.  Each native culture had its own language, style of hunting, traditions and rituals.  When Columbus set foot on this land, he was in awe of its beauty and abundance.  In his narrative, from Journal of the First Voyage to America, Columbus’s language and tone was that of a conqueror rather than a visitor.  Columbus, like Adam in the book of Genesis, took it upon himself to name trees, animals, rivers and the people.  Columbus did not take into account the fact that the trees, animals, river and people were given names by the Natives who populated the land.  Like a wild horse, Columbus’s goal was to tame this wild land and its barbaric people.  In a letter to Spain, Columbus describes his intent for the land he discovered: 

I have no doubt, most serene Prince, says the Admiral, that were proper devout and Religious persons to come along them [Indians] and learn their language, it would be an easy matter to convert them all to Christianity…(114)

Those who followed in Columbus’s footsteps were determined to detribalize the native savages.  In Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America, Benjamin Franklin states, “Savages we call them, because their Manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs” (798).  Americans considered the Indians savages because the Indians spoke a different language practiced a different religion, dressed differently and thrived in an oral tradition rather than a written tradition.  The Americans wanted to settle the already settled land.  Promises were made to the Indians then broken.  Diseases and war also contributed to the thousands of Indian lives lost.  Americans succeeded in stealing the land yet their appetite for destruction was not satisfied.  The Americans forced the Indians, brutal savages, to live on centralized reservations.  Americans sought to control these savages.  Food, land, clothes, livestock and jobs were scantly distributed among the Native Americans.  Through the early times of struggle, the Native Americans were able to preserve their traditions and language.  Traditional stories were told, rituals were carried out and the language was continually spoken.  Americans were not satisfied; civility, control and order were the ingredients of assimilation.  If the Americans could not win the savages through war or famine, the next step was to win them through education.  The struggle of losing tradition in order to survive in the dominant world is evident in the narratives, poems and novels written by Native Americans.  The idea of loss and survival is a Native American alternative narrative.  The concept can be described by comparing Native Americans to immigrant.  Immigrants define themselves as a people who leave the Old World (previous country; their past) for the New World (a world with abundance, opportunity and success).  Native Americans, unlike the immigrants, never left the Old World nor had they had any intentions to leave.  America belonged to the Natives but lost the land to the immigrants fleeing the Old World.   Education became a way to whitewash or detribalize the Indians, forcing them to assimilate into the dominant culture.  Unfortunately, education further divided the Indians from both cultures in that educated Indians were not accepted back into the tribe and the white dominant culture continued to discriminate against assimilated Indians.  In the book American Indian Stories, the author Zitkala-Sa illustrates through various short stories, how education divided the Natives.  In the short story titled, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood”, the author describes the eventual trials of culture divisions when a young Indian girl begs her mother to let her go to the white man’s school.  The mother is reluctant to release her daughter to the white missionaries.  Eventually the mother agrees to let her daughter go only because she feels that “she will need an education when she is grown, for then there will be fewer real Dokotas and many more palefaces…the palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen land, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education to our children” (44).  The mother as well as the daughter, experienced the white man’s educational system as not being a justice to the Natives but rather an injustice. 

            While at school the young Indian girl was forced to cut her hair, exchange her comfortable moccasins for stiff shoes and convert to Christianity.  After three years of school the young girl returned home for vacation.  While at home she felt out of place, she states “during this time I seemed to hang in the heart of chaos” (69).  She further states that she was unable to receive comfort from her mother because her mother was unable to comfort “her daughter who could read and write” (69).  To the young Indian girl, whose culture thrived on the reliance of nature, felt as though nature itself had no place for her (69).  A few years later the Indian girl, against her mother’s will, decided to attend college.  Her mother hinted in a letter that she wanted her daughter to return home to roam the prairies rather than dwell in the white man’s world.  The Indian girl chose to disobey her mother.  She states “often I wept in secret, wishing I had gone West, to be nourished by my mother’s love, instead of remaining among a cold race whose hearts were frozen hard with prejudice” (76).  The Indian girl is divided between two worlds.  Her traditional culture does not understand her intellect and the white culture refuses to let her fully assimilate.  As an American she has the right to life, which she has, liberty, which is granted only if she does not over step her boundaries as an Indian and the pursuit of happiness, which is difficult to attain when divided between two opposing worlds.  Educating the Native Americans did not attain equality.  Detribalazation and destruction of a culture was the government’s original intent, the intent that stretches back to the day Columbus set foot upon this empty land and declared its inhabitants savages.  An article titled, Teaching the Native American, the author, Jaye Darby describes the U.S. government’s intent to assimilate the Native Americans:

For over one hundred years, the U.S. government’s educational policies actively cut Native parents and tribal communities of their children’s education and consequently sought to eliminate continuation of their cultural traditions.  The institutions, especially the early off-reservation boarding schools where young Native children were separated from their parents at a very young age, were designed to impose the dominant culture’s values onto American Indian children and eradicate any forms of tribal identity.  These institutions’ final goals were to assimilate and culturally annihilate its students (1).

            As a result of the government’s intentions to alienate Native American students, the Native American students now linger between two unaccepting worlds.  With what culture does the Native American student identify? 

            In a case study preformed by the Hampton Institute in the late nineteenth century, the U.S. government created an educational program designed to teach English to American Indian students.  Ruth Spack, the author of English, Pedagogy, and Ideology: A case study of the Hampton Institute, 1879-1900, describes the type of whitewashing curriculum that was taught to the American Indians at the Hampton Institute.  Throughout the article, the English program was described as producing docile students rather than independent thinkers.  The teachers were encouraged to impose their own values and to assert their superiority of their own culture and language on the Native Americans.  A school textbook used at the Hampton, titled William Swinton’s Geography illustrated the assertion of superiority upon the Native American students:

When we find people who are not so enlightened, but who still are not savages, and seem to be on the way to become civilized people, we call them semi-civilized, which means half-civilized.

The races who, in their own way of living, are least civilized,--who have no written language, and only the rudest arts,--are called savage races. (20)

The teachers at the Hampton Institute reinforced the prejudice rather than challenge its demoralizing theme.  The following is a sample of teacher question-class response illustrating how the teachers reinforced the dominance of the white culture:

§         To what race do we all belong? –The human race

§         How many classes belong to this race? –There are five large classes belonging to the human race

§         Which are the first? –The white people are the strongest

§         Which are next? –The Mongolians or yellows

§         The next? –The Ethiopians or black

§         Next? –The Americans or reds (22)

This type of student/teacher curriculum created a form of cultural genocide that attempted to persuade the Native American students to dismember themselves from their traditional culture and replace it with the dominant American culture.  Educating the Native Americans through a bias curriculum weakened the link between the students and their traditional culture. 

            For further devastation, the Native Americans were forced to send their children to the detribalizing schools.  Scott Riney, the author of “I like the School So I Want to Come Back”: The enrollment of American Indian Students at the Rapid City Indian School, states that the commissioner instituted what became widespread practices of “coercion, authorizing reservation superintendents to withhold rations form Indians families that refused to send children away to school, and to use Indian police to seize children” (2).  The Rapid City Indian school, like the Hampton Institute, was designed to detribalize Indian Children, in hopes of making the students assimilation process easier.  While many young educated Indians thought through education, assimilation would be easy; a cold reality of two unaccepting worlds shunned their efforts to belong. 

            In the book American Indian Stories, a short story titled “The Soft-Headed Sioux” describes a young mans attempts to dwell in his tribe after being educated by white missionaries.  Upon the young Indian’s arrival, he learns that his father is deathly ill.  The young man, being a Christian, shuns his father’s desire to consult the tribe’s Medicine Man.  Instead the young son proclaims that his newly found God will save his father.  At this proclamation the tribe accuses the young son of being a “traitor to his people” (117).  Because the young son’s father is ill and unable to hunt or gather food, the food supply has diminished to nothing.  The father asks his Indian son to “bring your father meat, or he will starve to death” (120).  On the young son’s second attempt to find food his father tells him that a herd of cattle is “two hills eastward” (121).  The cattle his father spoke of belonged to a white man.  In desperation, the young son found the fattest creature.  While running back to feed his dying father the white man realized that he had been robbed.  Before the young Indian son could reach the tribe, the white man caught up with him. Rather than negotiate, like the white man taught him, the Indian allowed his tribal survival instincts to take over.  A struggle between the Indian and the white man resulted in the death of the white man.  When the young Indian reached his father’s teepee, he found his father dead.  The next day the son turned his self over to the authorities.  While in jail the guard informed the young Indian that he would die the following day.  At the news of dying the young Indian laughed.  In his attempts to belong to the white Christian culture he lost his Indian identity and was considered a traitor.  When faced with the death of his father he regained his Indian survival instincts to try to save his father.  In the end neither world, the white world nor the traditional Indian world, accepted him.  Before the young Indian’s death he again struggles with his identity concerning the after life.  He states: “Yet I wonder who shall come to welcome me in the realm of strange sight.  Will the loving Jesus grant me pardon and give my soul a soothing sleep? or will my spirit fly upward to a happy heaven? or shall I sink into the bottomless pit, an outcast from God of infinite love?” (124-125). 

            The Native American identity struggles, the loss of a culture and the survival in the dominant world, the promise of equality, life liberty, and happiness; this is the Native American narrative.  These are the cries of an alleged vanishing culture.  Their land was stolen; their identity was cut in half, their traditions and rituals were unaccepted by the dominant culture.  How has the Declaration of Independence, written by white man for the benefit of the white men, aided in the equality of a nation of people who populated America before America was found?  Education has whitewashed, divided and detribalized the true founders of this land, the Native Americans.  Jaye Darby states: “The legacy of more than a century of misguided and often destructive educational policies remains as Native students too frequently find mainstream school, colleges and universities unwelcome places”(200). 

Works Cited

Columbus, Christopher.  “from Journal of the First Voyage to America.”  The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Canada: DC Heath and Company, 1990. 114.

Darby, Jaye T.  “Teaching the Native American.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24.2 (200): 1-24.

Dr. Martin Luther King. Class handout, Fall 2002.

Franklin, Benjamin.  “Remarks Concerning the Savages.”  The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Canada: DC Heath and Company, 1990. 114.

Riney, Scott.  “‘I Like the School So I Want to Come Back’: The Enrollment of American Indian Students at the Rapid City Indian School.”  American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22.2 (1998): 171-192.

Spack, Ruth. “English, Pedagogy, and Ideology: A Case Study of the Hampton Institute, 1878-1900.”  American Indian Culture and Research Journal 24.1 (200): 1-24.

Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.