Historical Overview
Before Columbus and the invasion of Europeans, North American Indian education was geared to teaching children how to survive. Social education taught children their responsibilities to their extended family and the group, the clan, band, or tribe. Vocational education taught children about child rearing, home management, farming, hunting, gathering, fishing, and so forth. Each tribe had its own religion that told the children their place in the cosmos through stories and ceremonies. Members of the extended family taught their children by example, and children copied adult activities as they played.
The European invasion that began in the 15th century brought tremendous changes to the life of Indians. Even more damaging than the aggressive warfare of the Europeans was the introduction of new diseases, such as smallpox and measles, for which the indigenous Americans had no immunities. Another element of the invasion was the missionary impulse of both Catholic and Protestant Christians. Missionaries did not recognize Indian beliefs and cast the Indian religions as the work of the Christian devil. Thus early efforts by Europeans at Native education by Europeans focused on converting Indians to Christianity.
The missionaries' demand for total rejection of traditional practices was too much for most Indians to accept unless disease and war shattered their traditional lifeways. In addition, the Europeans' racism and ethnocentrism were too ingrained for them to accept the Indians as equals, even if the Indians spoke, dressed, and acted like European colonists. Thus one answer to the "Indian" problem was to eradicate them through wars and to push any survivors westward.
With the establishment of the United States, the federal government was faced with the "Indian problem." To deal with Indians, the government established the Indian Bureau in the War Department in 1824. This office was moved to the newly established Department of Interior in 1849 where it continues today.
Because most pioneers saw Indians as an impediment to progress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) became a tool to allow more rapid westward expansion. For example, under President Andrew Jackson, the government established the Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Through what is now being called "ethnic cleansing," the federal government forced the Cherokee and other southeastern tribes to leave their ancestral homes and to walk a "Trail of Tears" to a new homeland that they were promised they could have forever. However the westward movement of settlers quickly ended this "final solution" of the Indian problem.
If Indians could not be eradicated or isolated in an Indian Territory, then they would have to be civilized. Of some 400 treaties negotiated between tribes and the government before such treaty-making ended in 1871, 120 contained educational provisions to move Indians towards "civilization." Many of those provisions focused on making them farmers. Article 7 of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux and their allies was typical of the provisions in later treaties:
In order to insure the civilization of the Indians entering into this treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially of such of them as are or may be settled on said agricultural reservations, and they pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school; and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with; and for every thirty children between said ages who can be induced or compelled to attend school, a house shall be provided and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher.Schools promised by treaties were often slow in coming, and the quality of those schools that were established was poor. Indians sometimes argued that the schools were only set up to tap into their treaty money. The spoils system of the time led teachers to being hired for their partisan political connections rather than their educational qualifications. Even after Civil Service reforms in 1892, hiring officials did not see that any knowledge about Indians was important, since BIA schools were designed to perform cultural genocide. In the words of Carlisle Indian School founder Captain Richard Pratt, such schools were to "kill the Indian and save the man."
There was a naive belief in the late 19th Century that if Indian youth were removed for just a few years from their parents and placed in boarding schools, they could be assimilated into white society, thus solving "the Indian problem." Indian Commissioner Thomas Jefferson Morgan wrote in his 1889 annual report to the Secretary of the Interior that "the Indian must conform 'to the white man's way,' peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must."
Initially the U.S. government funded missionaries to educate Indians, mostly using funds promised by treaty to Indians for land cessions. After the Civil War the Catholic Church developed the largest number of mission schools by using government funding. Protestants saw the Catholic effort as anti-democratic and they fought successfully to end all government funding of mission schools by 1900.
The federal government developed its own, Protestant-influenced school system of day and boarding schools. An off-reservation boarding school system was also started 1879 with the famous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The education program in boarding schools consisted of one-half day vocational instruction and one-half day academic instruction in English and the "three R's." The vocational instruction involved the students growing their own food, making their own clothes, and generally maintaining the boarding schools. The goal of Carlisle was for students to permanently leave their reservations and assimilate into white society. However, instead of melting into white society, most Indians left from boarding school ill-prepared to live in either white or Indian society.
A government-commissioned study in the late 1920s, the Meriam Report, found many problems with the government's handling of its "wards" and concluded:
The philosophy underlying the establishment of Indian boarding schools, that the way to "civilize" the Indian is to take Indian children, even very young children, as completely as possible away from their home and family live, is a variance with modern views of education and social work, which regard the home and family as essential social institutions from which it is generally undesirable to uproot children.The inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 ushered in an era of change. President Roosevelt appointed the BIA's most vocal critic, John Collier, as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Collier questioned the materialism of modern American society and valued Indian traditional religions to the chagrin of Christian missionaries. Collier battled BIA bureaucracy and his critics for 12 years with modest success. Unfortunately, after his departure toward the end of World War II, a conservative reaction set in and the federal government tried to terminate Indian reservations and finalize the cultural assimilation of Indians. Many were relocated to cities on the assumption that jobs were available. But, like the students of earlier generations sent off to boarding schools, many of these Indian workers later returned to their reservations.
Some of those who stayed in cities, as well as some who returned to the reservations, were radicalized in the urban experience. The American Indian Movement began in the 1960s in an effort to stop police brutality in Minneapolis and other cities. An Indian takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969, a march on Washington and takeover of the BIA headquarters building in 1972, and a 71-day stand-off and shoot-out with the Federal Bureau of Investigation at Wounded Knee in 1973, were all part of the radical Indian movement before it subsided in the mid-1970s. The end of the radical period was brought about partly through the concerted and sometimes legally questionable efforts of law enforcement agencies to subvert or imprison the movement's leaders.
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