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Introduction As an Irishman specializing for over three decades in Native American studies , I have long felt strong “resonances” between Indian and Irish histories.1 These “problem peoples” experienced centuries-long military and cultural assaults by more powerful expanding states. They suffered massive land loss and demographic collapse through disease, famine, population movement, and emigration. In myriad ways they also demonstrated resilience, adaptability , and manipulative pragmatism. Moreover, for centuries they faced sporadic attempts by missionaries, sometimes state-supported, to wean them from their supposedly uncivilized or disloyal ways. Most significantly—and the subject of the present comparative study—from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries Indians and the Irish peoples confronted systematic , state-controlled, and assimilationist educational campaigns, as the United States strove to Americanize the Indians and the British government to Anglicize the Irish. These campaigns were designed to absorb supposedly deficient peoples into larger, dominant nations, leading not to cultural crossfertilization but to the erasure of minority cultures and identities.2 From the early sixteenth century, as white colonists spread onto tribal lands in what would later become the United States of America, Catholic and Protestant missionaries began the formal schooling of Indian children. Missionary societies back in Europe sometimes aided these ventures, and the imperial and colonial governments also saw the usefulness of education for the “civilization,” Christianization, and pacification of Indians. To achieve an acceptably humane solution to its “Indian problem,” the new United States immediately put its prestige, power, and increasing amounts of its money behind similar but far more ambitious efforts. In 1794 the nation made its first Indian treaty specifically mentioning education, and many more treaties would contain similar offers and even demands for compulsory schooling of tribal children. In 1819 Congress provided a specific “civilization fund” of $10,000 for the “uplift” of Indians, and the assimilationist campaign continued to employ legislation, treaty making (until 1871), and other expedients to achieve its goals. Initially the United States government, through its Office/Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia), depended upon Christian mission- introduction 2 ary societies, but by the later nineteenth century the government dominated the educational effort, having established a loose system of hundreds of day schools, on-reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools. bia and missionary schools together worked to Christianize, “civilize ,” and Americanize Indian children: the rigidly ethnocentric curriculum aimed to strip them of tribal cultures, languages, and spiritual concepts and turn them into “cultural brokers” who would carry the new order back to their own peoples.3 This approach persisted until the inauguration of more culturally sensitive Indian policies during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in the 1930s. If the assimilationist campaign began in earnest after 1819, the decade of the 1920s, then, marks a logical cut-off point for the American side of the present study. WhentheNormankingsofwhatwouldlaterbecomeEnglandfirstestablished a claim to Ireland in the twelfth century, the country was broken into many competing subkingdoms and overkingdoms. Even by early modern times no native national state had developed, and so the new centralizing English Tudor state (1485–1603) more easily achieved a military conquest. While England became predominantly Protestant, most Irish people remained Roman Catholic, adding a further and deeply divisive element to an already bitter conflict of politics and cultures. There followed major Protestant plantations , in Ulster especially; the dispossession of most Catholics of their lands; and the firm subjugation of Catholics (and dissenter Protestants) to a minority Anglican Protestant ascendancy—which in turn remained firmly under the domination of Westminster. By the 1780s the colonial elite in Ireland, as in the American colonies, was seeking greater freedom within the British Empire—and similarly ignoring the claims of “native” peoples. By 1787 American colonists had broken completely with the British Empire. After complex and bloody rebellions in 1798, however, Britain decided to solve its “Irish problem” by fully absorbing the country into the United Kingdom through the 1800 Act of Union. From the time of Henry VIII in the 1530s British governments had seen the potential of schooling for Anglicization of the Irish and their conversion to Protestantism, and later British governments gave some support to independent missionary societies. Yet by the early decades of the nineteenth century it had become obvious that a more systematic approach was needed to integrate a predominantly Catholic people into the Union. After a number of commissions reported during the 1820s, Parliament in 1831 agreed to fund an Irish elementary school system...

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