The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools by Cynthia Leanne Landrum (review)

WHEN CYNTHIA LEANNE LANDRUM attended a powwow at Flandreau Indian School as a graduate student in 1994, she was struck by the seeming irony of the situation: Dakota Sioux men, women, and children were celebrating their culture at a federally run, off-reservation boarding school, the embodiment of the government’s centuries-long campaign to forcibly assimilate Native peoples into the “mainstream” Euro-American culture. Yet as she dove into the history of Flandreau and its neighbor, Pipestone Indian School, Landrum realized that the powwow’s setting was not as ironic as she had initially thought. As she recounts in The Dakota Sioux Experience at Flandreau and Pipestone Indian Schools, the Dakota people have always used these institutions as a means to an end—whether that end was to gain an education that would help them navigate non-Native society, hold the government accountable for treaty provisions regarding education and health care, or maintain their proximity to sacred sites in the face of federal removal policies. By so doing, the Dakota transformed these schools into community centers that reinforced rather than undermined their tribal identity and autonomy and that served as points of contact in the ongoing cultural and diplomatic exchange between Native and non-Native peoples.

The Dakota Sioux Experience works well as a case study of federal Indian boarding schools and their impact on Native communities. Drawing from archived government reports, as well as personal correspondence, memoirs, and oral history interviews from former students, Landrum presents a detailed, balanced history of the schools’ construction, recruitment strategies, academic curricula, and vocational opportunities. She connects these factors to broader changes in federal Indian policy, from the early missionary era to the Indian New Deal to termination and eventually self-determination. While Landrum does not shy away from recounting the darker side of this history—from white bureaucrats’ ethnocentric views about Natives’ intelligence to the beatings they administered if they caught students speaking in Native languages—the picture that emerges of these schools and their role in the Dakota Sioux community belies generalizations. Many alumni, for example, recalled their time at Flandreau or Pipestone as a positive experience that allowed them to stay close to their families while gaining the education and training to pursue successful careers; others credited their school experiences as helping them develop close-knit bonds with fellow classmates and a sense of pan-Indianism that they later manifested in political activism. Landrum makes no attempt to resolve differing viewpoints on the schools’ legacy, emphasizing instead the need to consider each person’s experience individually. Yet she does stress the active involvement of parents and community members—some serving as school employees themselves—in shaping school administration and policy toward community needs. Whether parents were writing to Pipestone officials to demand that their children receive better nutrition or community members were expressing concern to Flandreau officials about diversion of resources to white students in the school’s vocational program, parents and community members did not hesitate to challenge unfavorable policies at these schools.

As a larger commentary on Native diplomacy in the face of European colonization, however, The Dakota Sioux Experience works less well. Landrum attempts to compare the Dakota Sioux’s approach to non-Native education systems in the nineteenth century with Eastern Woodlands nations’ approach to diplomacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contending that these communities all chose to accept select aspects of non-Native culture as part of their overall strategy for ensuring peace. But these comparisons are underdeveloped and too often relegated to throwaway comments at the beginning or end of chapters. In the preface, for example, Landrum mentions that the College of William and Mary was established in 1693 to serve the sons of white planters and Chesapeake Bay tribal leaders, who “were, in many ways, a blended population in terms of cultural nuance, blood lines, and marriage ties” (xi). At the end of chapter 2, she specifically references the Powhatan...