White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation

Introduction

Introduction There was a feeling among our people that some of our young men should be educated so that they could read and write and understand what was written in the treaties and old documents in our possession. . . . Or, as one chief put it, “it would enable us to use the club of white man’s wisdom against him in defense of our customs and our Meesaw -mi as given us by the Great Spirit. —Thomas Wildcat Alford, Civilization This old Shawnee chief, optimistic about the advantages to be gained from white schooling, uses “club” unambiguously. For him it is a weapon, a means to power he would like his people to acquire. Today , the reader of “white man’s club” inevitably perceives it as a racial enclave, with implications of self-definition and self-assertion gained through restricted access and privilege. Nor is it inappropriate to read these implications back into the nineteenth century, where they serve as synecdochic representations of larger, national concerns; the ‘club’ extends to a society and a culture and access appears as acculturation with its own agendas and prohibitions while exclusion carries singular penalties. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the federal government enrolled thousands of Native American children in white-run schools in a campaign to eradicate native cultures and communities and incorporate all Indians, as individuals, into the United States. This book explores how these schools, supposedly established to educate native children for citizenship, became arenas where whites debated the terms of that citizenship and where native peoples, struggling in this convoluted context against the total erasure of their cultures, claimed, adapted, or xii deflected the “white man’s club” and in the process, realigned and rede fined tribal and Indian identities. American nation building necessitated and justified Indian territorial and also cultural dispossession. The United States was by now technologically and demographically dominant and well positioned forcibly to incorporate Indian lands. Asymmetries of power underpinned all aspects of Indian-white relations—military, economic, legal, social, cultural , and linguistic. Reluctant to embark on an open policy of genocide , white Americans instead organized to incorporate the surviving remnants of Indian tribes into the nation through cultural reeducation . For contemporaries, the ethnocidal task of the schools was sanitized by being narrated within the ideological frame of national expansion or “manifest destiny.” The process was not always cold-blooded or undertaken at a deliberate, conscious level, but neither does it have to have been. As Foucault makes clear, any analysis of power relations “should not concern itself with power at the level of conscious intention or decision”; rather, “what is needed is a study of power at its external visage, at the point where it is in direct and immediate relationship with that which we can provisionally call its object, its target, its field of application . . . that is to say—where it installs itself and produces its real effects.”1 The construction of American nationality involved the destruction—geographical, legal, political, and cultural—of Indian nationalities. But the prospect of an Indian U.S. citizenry raised thorny problems. For whites, it meant contending with the issue of Indian difference and the place Indians could and could not occupy in the American nation. The school was the institution recruited to accomplish this task. For Indians, it meant positioning themselves, both as individuals and communities, where they could best ensure that inclusion did not entail obliteration. Schools inevitably had a powerful impact on native lives and also purloined a place in native agendas. White-run schools for Indians were institutions where American history and Indian histories converged. Monuments to the white educational campaign they spearheaded, they embroiled Indians and whites in two separate yet interlocking dialogues driven by very different motivations and supported by unequal power. The strands of this asymmetric interaction provide a frame for this book, enabling me both to Introduction xiii interrogate the overt and covert agendas of white educators and to uncover some of the actions and reactions of the Indians who were made the targets of these programs. Today, the blinkered ethnocentrism of white educators and the corrosive long-term legacy of the schools are generally acknowledged.2 But the complexity of their professed goal—to rapidly assimilate Indians and absorb them into the mainstream—and its engagement with issues centering on race has not been fully unpacked. The issue of race lies at the...