Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900–1940 by Kevin Whalen (review)

kevin whalen’s study contributes to the large and growing field of boarding school scholarship by examining the “outing” student labor program of the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. Founded in 1902, Sherman was part of the network of off-reservation boarding schools run by the Office of Indian Affairs. Following the model of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Sherman instituted a program through which students were hired out to private employers across Southern California. Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900–1940 focuses on the ways Sherman students turned an often coercive and exploitative labor system to their own ends.

Whalen joins many scholars who have explored how Native students repurposed assimilationist boarding schools for the benefit of themselves, their families, and their tribal communities, earning needed income, acquiring new skills, sustaining languages and cultural practices, and forging intertribal relationships. Whalen’s intervention in this field is to examine labor in particular as a site of negotiation, agency, and opportunity for Native students and outing participants. Moreover, because the program placed outing workers around the city of Riverside and across the entire region, Native Students at Work expands the spatial parameters of “the study of Indian education,” which, Whalen contends, has “thus far been firmly rooted within the walls of the schools” (14). Whalen demonstrates that Sherman not only was a space of isolation and confinement but also often served as a vehicle for Native people pursuing mobility, wages, and familiarity with federal bureaucracy. Relatedly, Whalen makes a key claim about periodization and the “reservation era.” Sherman’s outing system, he argues, shows that urban migration, wage labor, and adept navigation of federal bureaucracy predated the relocation programs of the mid-twentieth century. Earlier in the century, student workers “used government bureaucracies to move beyond . . . reservations.” In following these workers’ movements, Whalen contributes to a larger scholarly reconsideration of the reservation era, questioning “the notion that the years between 1880 and 1945 saw Native communities trapped within the boundaries of reservations and the walls of boarding schools” (18).

The introduction situates Sherman within histories of labor, migration, and colonial education in Southern California. The first chapter describes the creation, promotion, and financial logistics of the outing system before turning to the experiences of Native workers who participated in, seized economic and social opportunities within, and pushed back against that system. In this chapter and others, correspondence between workers and school officials, as well as between administrators, provides essential archival evidence. Chapter 2 examines student labor in the nearby company town of Fontana. Young men from Sherman were hired out to the massive agricultural operation at Fontana Farms, growing citrus and raising pigs. While they “battled dangerous working conditions, suffered subpar housing, and struggled to communicate with fellow workers across linguistic and cultural barriers,” the Sherman laborers used the outing system to “earn more money than they could at home” and “engaged in outing labor in ways that strengthened their cultures” (59). Chapter 3 concerns women who worked as domestic laborers through Sherman’s outing program and focuses on Quechan and Mojave women sent by reservation agents to work in Los Angeles. These women were nominally supervised by outing matrons from the Sherman Institute and, later, from the Office of Indian Affairs. The isolation and lack of oversight made these domestic workers acutely vulnerable to labor exploitation and sexual abuse. Whalen also explores the benefits that Quechan and Mojave women were able to reap from their outing experiences, including English- language skills, access to local public schools, and connections to a developing urban Native social world—to “networks of kinship, friendship, and romance . . . dotting and crisscrossing the neighborhoods of the largest metropolis in the American Southwest” (111). The fourth chapter considers the closure of the Los Angeles outing center during the Great Depression and the opportunities for higher education that Natives...