Refashioning Indigenous Identities and Making the American Self: Native American Voices from Haskell and Yale

In the late nineteenth century, the federal government took on an ambitious and misguided plan to educate American Indian children in large off-reservation boarding schools in order to transform their indigenous tribal identities into American identities shaped by white, Anglo-Saxon Christian values and concepts of work, personhood, and nation. Among these institutions, Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas (established in 1884) was at the forefront of these transformative efforts, reflecting the missionary-like zeal of the federal government to solve its perceived "Indian Problem" by converting as many young Indians as possible to the values of individualism, industry, and progress that characterized late nineteenth–and early twentieth-century notions of the ideal American citizenry. Halfway across the country, in New Haven, Connecticut, students (mostly white) at Yale were learning some of the same lessons about American selfhood during this period, and the higher education they received focused as much on the creation and maintenance of their elite class status and its concomitant cultural capital as it did on conveying a classical education or professional skills. Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) student, Henry Roe Cloud, who was born the year that Haskell was established, became the first full-blood American Indian person to receive an undergraduate (1910) and graduate (1914) degree from Yale.¹ Roe Cloud's groundbreaking solitary journey as a privileged Yalie may, at first glance, appear to be far from the shared experiences of younger Indian boarding-school students at Haskell. However, authors Joel Pfister (The Yale Indian) and Myriam Vučković (Voices from Haskell) show us that, at both Yale and Haskell, indigenous identities and values were being consciously and unconsciously reshaped into European American notions of selfhood. Yet, their respective projects do not end here; Pfister and Vučković each attempt to bring Native American voices to the historical forefront, articulating what Roe Cloud and Haskell's young Indians thought and felt about their educational experiences.

Vučković's Voices from Haskell is the more conventional of the two histories of American Indian education. It offers an accessible and competent treatment of student experiences at that school, and it is the only book-length examination of Haskell as an institution. For this reason, it is an important addition to the literature on the history of American Indian education. In fact, Vučković treats Haskell during the period from 1884 to 1928 as a "total institution," channeling, in her introductory remarks, Michel Foucault, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Antonio Gramsci (among others); and her interest in cultural theory clearly influences her organization of chapters by theme. The chapters "Living by the Bell," "Health and the Body," and "Accommodation and Resistance" resonate with what we already know from other histories of American Indian education: that the government's boarding schools for Indians had as much to do with reshaping Indian minds, bodies, and values (teaching hidden curricula) as they did with offering any kind of official classroom curricula.² However, to develop complex theoretical interrogations is not really Vučković's intent here. Her project is more straightforward: to illuminate complex student experiences at Haskell by showcasing the writings of students and alumni of the school, making their voices heard. In so doing, Voices from Haskell paints a picture of what Vučković calls "ethnic resilience" (p. 3) in the face of the institution's attempts to assimilate Native American students to European American values. Indeed, the history of Haskell, as Vučković tells it, points to "the irony of the boarding school experience … in the fact that the very institutions trying to destroy Indian cultures and identity also contributed to their strengthening and survival" (p. 14).

By the mid-1890s, Haskell had an annual enrollment of approximately 660 students from...