Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (review)

Essie's Story is a collaborative effort of the two authors, Esther Burnett Horne, a Shoshone teacher, and Sally McBeth, an anthropologist. As such, it is a unique life history that ties together the analysis and insight of an anthropologist with the taped and edited words of the subject. Esther Burnett Horne was born in 1909 in Idaho and died a year after this book was published, in 1999, at the age of ninety.

McBeth met Essie in North Dakota after having done research on Oklahoma Indians' perceptions of their boarding school experiences for her doctorate. Essie had retired from the Indian School at Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1965 and was widely known and recommended to McBeth as a teacher who went beyond normal expectations in caring for her students and enriching their school experience with pride in their Indian heritage. A graduate of Haskell Institute in 1929, Essie soon excelled as a master teacher whose philosophy of education was to bring together the best of Indian and American traditions. She met Robert Horne, a Hoopa from California, at Haskell, and the couple was married soon after Essie got her first position at the Indian School in Eufaula, Oklahoma, in 1929. Robert got a position in the physical plant at the Wahpeton Indian school, so the couple decided to settle there. Essie obtained a position there and remained for thirty-five years. The couple had two daughters.

Aside from its excellent introduction and discussion of the collaborative method, the most compelling aspect of the book is the development of Essie's Indian identity and her enthusiasm in encouraging her students to creatively construct positive Indian identities. Indian schools are unique, intertribal melting pots, where tribal traditions are shared and refashioned in the context of the dominant culture. Because Essie grew up in Idaho, away from the Shoshone people at Wind River (her mother was half Shoshone; her father, white), she was forced to construct a Shoshone and Indian identity without the benefit of living with Shoshone people in a Shoshone community. Her acquaintance with Shoshone language and culture was minimal, obtained through visits to the reservation, where her mother Mildred lived after Essie's father's premature death in 1922. Her father, Fincelius Burnett II (Finn Jr.), was the son of the boss farmer Fincelius Burnett and his Irish-American wife, Eliza McCarty Burnett. Burnett was hired by the government to teach farming to the Shoshone on their new reservation at Wind River in 1871 and remained there the rest of his life, respected by both Shoshones and whites. The couple had seven children; one daughter married William L. Simpson, a judge from Thermopolis and father of Senator Milward Simpson. An aunt married Paul R. Haas, a superintendent at the Wind River Agency in the 1920s.

Essie's mother and father had homesteaded in Idaho, but her father lost money and died at the age of forty-five in 1922, leaving six children. Their mother tried to work but was destitute, and with six children to raise, she needed help, which her relatives provided. Essie and two other older children were sent to Haskell in 1923; she and her brother stuck it out, while her sister Berniece returned to Wyoming to help raise the younger children. Essie clearly had the will to survive a strict boarding school regime, the guiding philosophy of which was assimilation into the dominant culture.

Her mother, Mildred Large, came from an ethnically mixed family; her father was Shadrack or Shade Large, a Missourian, and her mother, Maggie Bazil, was a daughter of the subchief Bazil, a close associate of Chief Washakie. The Larges had a ranch in the Green River country, miles from the Wind River reservation. Bazil's mother, Porivo (who died 1884), came...