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137 chapter 6 A Curriculum for Social Change: The Special Navajo Five Year Program, 1946-1961 Jon Ille During the period from 1946 to 1961, the United States government altered the flowofresourcesrelatedtoAmericanIndianeducation,increasingtheproportion directed to boarding schools while cutting funds to reservation day schools. This dramatic policy reversal occurred due to the purported ineffectiveness of the Indian New Deal and the tenure of John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Rather than continuing to allow tribal governments to exercise a limited degreeofcontroloverresourcesatthelocallevelinthewayCollierhadadvocated, conservatives in Washington, D. C., launched an assault on tribal governments that lasted until the early 1960s. Termination of the trust relationship between the federal government and Native people formed one tenet of the post-World War II policy of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), while the relocation of individuals from reservations to urban areas created another policy that would ultimately undermine tribal entities. The reallocation of resources to boarding schools from reservation day schools fit within the relocation paradigm, as the BIA moved young Native men and women away from their families and prepared them for lives as workers in urban areas. While boarding schools saw a resurgence in importance among policy makers generally, the most ambitious project during this period was the Special Five Year Navajo Program, which the Bureau claimed would address the dire situation faced by uneducated reservation Navajos between twelve and eighteen years of age.1 Beginning in 1946 Navajo students, along with a small contingent of Tohono O’odhams (Papagos), began arriving at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. Eventually ten Indian boarding schools from California to Kansas participated in the program. The Special Five Year Program sought to teach the Navajo students academic subjects and a trade— but also the refinements of “civilization.” After completing the plan of study, the government predicted that graduates would enter the workforce away from the reservation and become productive members of the dominant society. 138 The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue Behind the noble proclamations made by the Bureau of Indian Affairs lay the real agenda of the Special Five Year Program—the government of the United States wished to relocate Native Americans to urban areas, further destroying Indian cultures, and effectuate “assimilation” through a covert plan cloaked as a “new policy.” By teaching students trades inapplicable to the Navajo home economy, graduates had little reason to return home, because they had no hope of finding gainful employment on the reservation. Furthermore, graduates employed in urban areas found themselves in the lower echelons of the working class. Rather than bringing about the cultural assimilation of the Navajo into mainstream America, the real goal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was to create a labor pool for employers away from the reservations. As anthropologist Alice Littlefield has noted with regard to boarding schools in general, “proletarianization better characterizes the efforts of the federal Indian schools than assimilation.”2 The mantra of assimilation masked the ultimate aim of the BIA, whose officials desired to create a stratum of workers who toiled at menial jobs and did not achieve equality with their Euro-American counterparts. This process had a long history in boarding schools dating back to the late nineteenth century, when critics of the earlier assimilationist policy, such as Estelle Reel and Francis Leupp, decried the hopeless optimism of Superintendent Pratt of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Pratt believed that Native Americans could be fully assimilated as equals into mainstream society (which did not happen, was nevertheless Pratt’s promise). The new reformers of American Indian policy believed it was futile to include advanced studies in the boarding school curriculum, because environmental or biological constraints limited Native Americans’ ability to comprehend complex ideas. Teaching students academic basics, along with work skills that could gain them employment, were the mainstays of educational ideology at the Education Department of the BIA from the early twentieth century until the 1930s. Despite modest changes implemented during the Great Depression and so-called “Indian New Deal,” low expectations dominated the mindset of the bureaucrats who administered all aspects of Indian education right up to the establishment of the Special Five Year Navajo Program. And this program continued the process of proletarianization by offering training only in industrial fields, neglecting advanced academic subjects that could lead to college or white-collar careers. While the research here focuses on the program as it was implemented at Sherman Institute, examples from other institutions [13.59.236.219] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 08:42...

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