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6. Richard Henry Pratt: National Universalist
- University of Nebraska Press
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6. Richard Henry Pratt: National Universalist Richard Henry Pratt judged any effort to translate the Bible into an Indian language to be seriously misguided. The complex motivations driving Alford’s project were of no consequence to Pratt, who believed white-educated Indians should look forward to their American future rather than hanker after their Indian past. Harsh in his condemnation of white missionary translations—be they the contemporary endeavors of the Riggs’ at the Dakota Mission or the historical work of John Eliot—he was adamant that “Indians could learn to read and understand English just as quickly as their own language.” Vernacular translations were redundant, because they encouraged Indians to live in “communities by themselves.”1 Pratt’s aspiration for all Indians was that they should abandon their tribal communities and integrate into mainstream white society. He was convinced that Indians only needed a “broad and enlarged liberty of opportunity and training to make them, within the short space of a few years, a perfectly acceptable part of our population.”2 Triumphant when he secured official permission to conduct an educational experiment to prove this theory, he dedicated the Carlisle Indian School to a dual mission. First, to eradicate native tribal cultures and instruct Indians in white ways to equip them for citizenship in the United States; second, to demonstrate to white Americans that this transformation was both possible and desirable. Pratt spent the next twenty-five years shaping, nurturing, expanding and commanding the Carlisle Indian School as well as defending its program and philosophy . The school was a living experiment, which became a monument to him and the mission he championed. The experiment, as we have seen, had begun in St. Augustine. Those three years at the old Spanish fort had given Pratt the confidence of his convictions and would also have a powerful formative impact on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School 160 program as well as campus design of the Carlisle Indian School (more on this in chapter 7). The year Pratt spent at Hampton also proved decisive . Witnessing the organization of Armstrong’s school, as well as the daily activities of its dynamic, college-educated, senior-ranking principal, was very instructive to an army captain who had benefited from only a few years of elementary schooling. This Pratt openly acknowledged: “I had obtained many practical ideas in regard to industrial training during my boyhood days and in my experience in Florida, and to these I had added much from being at Hampton a year.”3 Ambitious and with a taste for command, Pratt had rejected Armstrong ’s invitation to run Hampton’s Indian program. “I plainly told the General that I could not bring myself to become satisfied with such a detail.”4 He had instead set himself the task of winning government support for his own institution, exclusively for Indians and located in the midst of an industrious white community. The character of the host white community was paramount to Pratt’s scheme, because he was concerned that Armstrong’s Indian program was fatally compromised by its location: “I pointed out that the woods were full of degraded Negroes . . . and that the remoteness from the observation of our best people was a fatal drawback.” More fundamentally, Pratt was dubious about Armstrong ’s tenacious commitment to “racial education.”5 As a young army officer in the Tenth Cavalry on the Plains, Pratt had commanded both African American soldiers and Indian scouts. These close personal contacts, as well as encounters with friendly and warring tribes in the West, led him to “pondering much over the race question.”6 Early on he arrived at the unequivocal conclusion that the apparently glaring differences between the races were the product of environmental factors, not innate differences. Observing how a clutch of wild turkey eggs, which he carried home and placed under a barnyard hen, hatched and became “in all respects” just as amenable as the best domesticated members of the turkey tribe, he concluded that a direct analogy could be drawn with Indian tribes, all of whom needed only “the environment and kind treatment of domestic civilized life to become a very part of it.”7 Pratt fought any suggestion that Americanizing the Indian would be a long and arduous process . Dismissive of the social evolutionary ideas of his day, he insisted that “my deductions are from practical and not theoretical knowledge.”8 [52.86.227.103] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 15:12 GMT...