White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (review)

Jacqueline Fear-Segal takes the title for her study of the ideology of race behind the early Indian boarding schools in the United States from a Shawnee chief who thought some of the young Shawnee men should be taught to read and write so that they could understand what was written in the treaties and documents, and could "use the club of white man's wisdom against him in defense of our customs and our Mee-saw-mi as given us by the Great Spirit" (xi). Fear-Segal then reads the Shawnee chief 's interpretation of this club as a tool, a means to power that his people might acquire and use, into our more contemporary use of the phrase "white man's club" as a privileged enclave to which access is restricted along racial lines. Allowing both definitions to exist simultaneously, yet uneasily and contradictorily, is appropriate in a text that focuses on an Indian school system that was itself built during a time of intense debate over contradictory racial ideologies. White Man's Club reveals how those contesting ideas and attitudes about race are "inseparable from the drive to educate Indian children" (xiv).

Fear-Segal has two stated aims in her book: "to interrogate the overt and covert agendas of white education programs and to probe the actions and reactions of Indians who struggled to resist as well as claim the power of white schooling" (xv). The first part of the book focuses on the various white theories about Indian education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sketches out Native educational practices, and charts out the shift from the mission schools to the federal school system. In looking at that shift, she highlights the examples of the Dakota Mission and the Santee Normal Training School, their curricula, and their linguistic and pedagogical strategies, in a chapter that will be of particular interest to scholars interested in the teaching and preservation of Native languages.

Fear-Segal uses macrobiographies of particular figures, both Native and non-Native, to comprehend the complexities of this educational project. Thus, in part 2, to explore the story of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Hampton, Virginia, she focuses first on the school's founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, and then on Thomas Wildcat Alford, a Shawnee who attended Hampton, arguing that as a white-educated, Christian Shawnee who worked for his tribe, "Alford's life raises many questions about how we should define leadership and resistance and the processes by which these are enacted" (138). Fear-Segal looks to Wildcat's autobiography and his letters but ends her chapter discussing the text he considered his most important, his Shawnee translation of the Gospels. For Fear-Segal, this act of translation represents "the supreme irony of Alford's life: he was seeking to protect the Shawnee language through the prime text of the white man's religion, the same religion that had, by its adoption, robbed him of his political birthright and estranged him from his own people" (156). Yet, in another way, the act of translation also allows Alford "to convey the values and truths of his manhood in the language of his infancy […] it united all the parts of his bi-cultural identity" (156). The Indian residential schools were (and continue to be) settings of crisis, introducing incredible trauma, conflict, and contradiction into young lives, and Fear-Segal deftly weaves excerpts from books, letters, and other archival materials in order to provide some glimpses into how individuals found creative ways to cope with those contradictions and conflicts.

Part 3 focuses on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. While it includes a macrobiography of Richard Henry Pratt, the most intriguing part is her analysis of the built environment, including her reading of the maps, photographs, and physical layout of the campus and cemetery in order to support her claim that "the design and layout of the...