Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 (review)

Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949 by Amanda J. Cobb. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, 162 pp., $27.50 hardcover.

Before contact with Europeans, the Chickasaw tribe, numbering approximately 3,500 to 4,500 individuals, lived in what now forms northeastern Mississippi, eastern Alabama, and western Tennessee and Kentucky. In order to survive, the Chickasaws adopted many white customs. In particular, they learned to value literacy education as a tool of survival. When Congress passed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the Chickasaws were learning English, becoming Christianized, building schools, and farming. Congress had not counted on the Chickasaws' ability to adapt successfully to white people's ways while still remaining an independent nation. Because white settlers wanted the land, Chickasaws were forced to leave their homes and move to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. So great was their belief in the value of education for their survival, that even while enduring great hardships caused by forced removal, the Chickasaws founded schools for their children in the new territory. One of the schools was Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females (later renamed Carter Seminary).

Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories recounts the history of this remarkable school, which remained in operation as a boarding school for American Indian girls for 97 years. The Bloomfield Academy was administered in turn by white missionaries, the tribe, and then the U.S. government. Cobb examines the curriculum offered by each administration and discusses the identity they wanted for the girls. She explores how the administration's goals for the girls interacted with the goals of the girls for themselves. During its golden years, when the tribe administered it, Bloomfield was sometimes referred to as "the Bryn Mawr of the West" (58). The school had high academic standards, and it was considered a privilege to attend Bloomfield. The girls were prepared to become leaders in their communities.

What makes this book invaluable is that the author interviewed fifteen women who are former students of Bloomfield Academy/Carter Seminary and used these interviews to tell the history of the school under federal control. My mother, Ora Lee Chuculate Woods, was a student at Bloomfield/Carter Seminary from 1930 to 1936 and is one of the former students interviewed. In addition to their academic studies and studies in the arts, the girls received training in domestic art and science, cleaning, gardening, animal care, nutrition, and etiquette. The students took care of the general maintenance of the school themselves. They were imbued with a belief in the value of education for its own sake. Women who attended Bloomfield/Carter recall with great fondness the life they lived there and the education they received.

This book is a scholarly, historical narrative, an important contribution to the history of women's education. It is valuable as a concise and moving history of the Chickasaw Nation generally, and in particular as it relates to education. The author also presents an overview of other scholars' work in the field of American Indian education. She points out that Bloomfield Academy and other schools established by the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma were shaped by very different historical events than the boarding school system established by the federal government. She describes the differences between Bloomfield and federally founded Indian boarding schools as shocking. Cobb contributes to the existing scholarship by telling a story that has not before been told. In this way, she adds "a thread to the history of women's literacy education, to the type of literacy instruction American Indian students received, and to the special issues of language and identity they faced, particularly mixed-blood students" (9).

Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories richly deserved the North American Indian Prose Award it was awarded in 1998. Amanda J. Cobb, an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University, is herself...