Indian Day Schools Are a Created Ecosystem

It would be a mistake to think of this work as another Indian School book. Instead it is a book that focuses on policies and histories that make the Indian Schools, particularly the day schools at the pueblos of northern New Mexico, possible. By studying the land and its stories, diseases and their transformative powers, citizenship and its explicit responsibilities and tacit omissions, institutions and their colonial impact on people, and education and its transformative power, Adrea Lawrence gives us a book about interlinking systems that created the Indian Schools. The gift that is this book allows us to think about the schools more holistically as a created ecosystem of colonization.

Lawrence gives us a socio-historical and legal history of Indian education from 1902 to 1907 in this fascinating work about northern New Mexico at a pivotal moment in U.S. Indian education policy and U.S. Indian policy. From Lawrence we learn that localized control is always the reality for schools, even in the face of large-scale national changes. We learn also that change rarely happens without an understanding of cultural, historical, and political motivations—and if it does happen separate from these things, the change is likely going to be flawed or impractical.

Too rarely do scholars remember that the American West is not west for everyone. Lawrence starts her work pointing out that, for many people, New Mexico territory was either home (in the case of Pueblo people) or north (in the case of many of the Hispanos who found themselves in the New Mexico territory as a result of changing geopolitical events) (p. 19). By starting with the premise that there were Native people already in the area—as well as peoples of Spanish ancestry—when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, Lawrence then has to deal with the complicated changes of property and land ownership that came when the new government of the United States was juxtaposed onto two separate and distinct groups of people. As she deals with the land-ownership issues that shaped the policies of Pueblo peoples’ lives, Lawrence also must consider the adjudication of water rights. With anthropological accuracy, Lawrence is able to think carefully about the ways in which water creates sociopolitical alliances (pp. 27–29).

Following in the good work of Keith Basso, Lawrence delineates the roles of storytelling in a particular land to make space for her own story; the story of policy shifts as a changing colonial force comes to the Santa Clara Pueblo people and all the Pueblo peoples of northern New Mexico. So it is not surprising that, when school children were forced to go away from home to school, their families would be heartbroken. The place, the water, and the community are all essential, as the stories of the community were based at home—none happened at boarding schools, such as the Santa Fe Indian School. Thus, the day school was a much better option for students’ families.

With colonization always comes disease, and in the shift to the American government came new diseases. In 1903, a deadly diphtheria outbreak impacted the Pueblos and, of course, also the schools. It quickly became clear that neither the schools nor the U.S. government had a comprehensive health-care policy for American Indians (p. 67). People died, and schools served as incubators for disease among people who had little immunity to the germs that were brought down the Santa Fe Trail by colonizers. Teacher Clara True, one of the main actors in Lawrence’s work, serves as a vehicle for exploring the past in this period, as she regularly negotiates the role of a foreigner in a changing land. With the diphtheria outbreak, “in this health crisis, Santa Clarans learned at least two important lessons: True would meddle in internal Pueblo affairs in order to do what she thought was right and that outsiders might have viable treatments for illness” (p. 95...