Two Native American Paths

"Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism versus Evolutionism" by Jacqueline Fear-Segal, in Journal of American Studies (Aug. 1999), Cambridge Univ. Press, 40 W. 20th St., New York, N.Y. 10011–4211.

In the latter decades of the 19th century, Christian reformers built an extensive network of boarding schools to rescue Indians from "savagery" and make them the equal of any white man. Only after the turn of the century, scholars have held, when pseudoscientific racism supplanted the reformers’ universalist ideas, was the goal of rapid assimilation forsaken. Fear-Segal, a lecturer in American history at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, begs to differ. The pioneering reformers were not as united on this goal as they have seemed.

In 1878, just two years after General George Custer and his troops were annihilated by the Sioux at the Little Big Horn, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong welcomed the first Indians to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, the Virginia school he had founded 10 years before for the education of blacks. (Booker T. Washington was an early graduate.) Armstrong, a missionary’s son who had commanded black troops during the Civil War, believed that Indians were at an earlier stage of evolution than whites. "The Indians are grown up children; we are a thousand years ahead of them in the line of progress," he stated. The process of guiding them up the evolutionary ladder, he was sure, would take generations.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania a year after Armstrong’s "Indian Program" began at Hampton, held a different view. He had no use for racial "types." As a young army officer, he had commanded both black soldiers and Indian scouts, and he had concluded that any apparent racial differences were due simply to environment, not to anything innate. He believed, writes Fear-Segal, that like immigrants, Indians just "needed to be absorbed into American society to achieve full participation." And the assimilation should be rapid.

Though the two schools had many similarities (including their emphasis on work and the military atmosphere), this was a clear difference. While Armstrong encouraged his students to write about their different tribal traditions, practice their native arts, and return to their reservations to live, Pratt encouraged his pupils not to go back to their reservations. "Pratt wanted to bring Indians into direct competition with [white] Americans and show they could win," Fear-Segal says. His Carlisle football team became famous (as did Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, a Carlisle graduate). Pratt was strongly opposed to what he called "race schools," which he believed were bound to fail because they ignored the individual, binding him instead to "race destiny."

Their debate—which Pratt effectively lost, even at his own school, particularly after the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890—seems to echo in today’s disputes about multiculturalism. On assimilation, Fear-Segal points out, "Pratt seems more ‘tolerant’ (as we might put it) than Armstrong; but in their attitudes to tribal cultures the position is reversed. Pratt’s ‘brotherhood of man,’ in its universalism, was not receptive to difference."

Ironically, the 19th-century Indian boarding schools turned out to have an effect that both men might have applauded (at least in part), Fear-Segal observes. By the early 20th century, boarding school attendance had become a common experience among Indians. While most students returned to their reservations, they did so as "Englishspeaking Indians whose identity was no longer exclusively tribal." And many were eager to find "a new place for the Indian" within the larger American society.