“Turning the Tables on Assimilation”

“The school bell did not have to be the death knell of Oglala culture,” historian Thomas G. Andrews writes of Oglala Lakota Sioux Pine Ridge Indian communities beset upon by on-reservation schools in 1890’s South Dakota.  In his article, “Turning the Tables on Assimilation: Oglala Lakota and the Pine Ridge Day Schools, 1889-1920,” Andrews explores the activities and results of government efforts to place schools directly on the Pine Ridge reservation in response to failures of off-site boarding schools.  The driving force behind these efforts, the “architects of assimilation,” were employees of the Office of Indian Affairs, and included Commissioner T.J. Morgan who “urged that the whole course of study for the schools ‘should be fairly saturated with moral ideas, fear of god, and respect for rights of others; love of truth and fidelity of duty; personal purity, philanthropy and patriotism.” However, the Oglala had a different methodology when it came to integrating these schools into their community and, to the dismay of officials, “managed to selectively adapt only those aspects of the manual training curriculum that helped them meet the exigencies of reservation life.” In effect, Oglala, with schools on the reservation where Indian children were still steeped in traditional lifeways, selectively leveraged specific aspects of the education in an effort to both adapt and to maintain a traditional culture.

For example, Three Stars, an Oglala Indian that also taught at an on-reservation Indian school, looked to mix traditional learning techniques with government proscribed English language lessons, “employing bilingual, bicultural techniques that contrasted sharply with his non-Lakota colleagues,” and “used [traditional] games to teach children hunting, housework, and other crucial skills.” White teachers Albert and Edith Kneale, after three years of meager success teaching Oglala children to assimilate by cutting their hair, changing their dress, and giving them European-sounding names, soon came to realize that the Indians’ success “rested upon their ability and willingness to compromise.” Andrews recognizes in these surviving accounts that “selective adaptation," and “not the lesson in detribalization and assimilation” that the architects envisioned, was instead a “lesson in how native peoples have struggled to balance cultural change with cultural continuity in order to persist.”

“The Allotment Period on the Nez Perce Reservation”

By the end of the 19th century, national Indian policy in the United States changed, as assimilation efforts such as on-reservation schools failed at turning Indians, confined to reservations, into agriculturalists.  In response, the Congress passed The General Allotment Act of 1887 providing for the allotment of acreage to heads of households with hopes that land ownership by allotment would spur Indians to take up the plow, and thus assimilate into white, American culture at a faster rate.  Historian Elizabeth James, in her article “The Allotment Period on the Nez Perce Reservation: Encroachments, Obstacles, and Reactions” from Idaho Yesterdays, documents how one tribe, the Nez Perce in Idaho, avoided disaster while deftly trying to adapt to overwhelming challenges, including problems with access to equipment and credit, trespassers and illegal settlers, “fractionated heirship, and BIA policies.”

Allotment of reservation lands began almost immediately after passage of The Dawes Act, as the Act is commonly known, when Anthropologist and special agent in charge of allotment Alice Fletcher arrived on tribal lands later that year.  She immediately confronted “a reservation surrounded by eager settlers, trespassers, and squatters.” Local newspapers were agitating for transfer of ownership of unallocated reservation lands to white farmers and livestock owners, and livestock had long been allowed to illegally graze there for years already, under the corrupt supervision of Indian Agents of the U.S. government.  As an advocate for allotment, Fletcher began a decades-long process that met with little success for the Nez Perce, “who did not want to become Anglo-Americans.” Due to these problems with government oversight and “the ruthlessness of [cattle herd] stock owners,” by 1893 “the reservation…contained only 1,300 Nez Perce residents – compared to 20,000 Anglos.”

As with education, attempts to turn Indian peoples into agriculturalists through allotment met with limited success and new attempts by the Nez Perce to deftly protect their cultural heritage and legal rights. Leasing of allotted lands and fractionated heirship contributed to Indians’ dissatisfaction with allotment, where the former discouraged farming by Indians living off lease income and the latter creating smaller and smaller plots for Indians to lease. By 1923, due to these issues, which had been compounded by the interruption to kinship patterns created by the checkboard landscape left behind by allotment, “the Nez Perce held 100,000 acres of allotted and tribal lands, but Anglo settlers owned 650,000 acres.” In the years that followed the tribe would assert their rights in State and federal court and form the Nez Perce Home and Farm Association (NPHFA) to collectively address deteriorating reservation conditions. And while the tribe finally fashioned a political and legal presence, protecting their remaining cultural heritage and traditional lifeways, many of these problems created by allotment including issues of land ownership among families impact the Nez Perce people today.

“More than a Game”

“Indian-white football was more that (sic) a game.  It counted for something,” notes Historian  David Wallace Adams in his essay “More Than a Game: The Carlisle Indians Take to the Gridiron, 1893-1917,” describing the “complex and multiple meanings” of attempts by turn-of-the-20th century American colonizers to showcase Indian student football players “to gain support for [racist] ideas on Indian progress.” As founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, William Henry Pratt, seeing an impending and inevitable defeat for the frontier Indian looked to “civilize” Indians and mainstream them as part of his philosophy that ‘civilized’ Indians would “shed their tribal heritage.” By leveraging football, Pratt and the Carlisle team exposed both the “latent narrative” in American society that revolved around the purported machismo of the “Frontier Myth” and its heart, “the heroic Indian war,” as well as “the symbolic and mythic dimensions of [the Indian players’] gridiron wars” for the Indians, themselves.

Despite racist characterizations by newspaper sports reporters and equally racist caricatures by cartoonists, the popular mythos associating sport with “dramatic, age-old encounters on the American landscape” persisted.  As a result, “Pratt’s grand scheme was not altogether unsuccessful…[and] lent proof to [his] philosophy that the race was fully capable of civilization.” By 1896 white fans were rooting for Carlisle Indian School players. In one letter to the New York Post a fan admitted that “not in one hundred of these ten thousand [fans] was not…in sympathy with the Indians.” And a general feeling of wrongdoing permeated the zeitgeist of American society, for its horrific crimes against the indigenous people perpetrated over the centuries since contact.

Nevertheless, Indian players often loved the game and appreciated the attention their athleticism brought.  Against a backdrop of systemic racism among the fan base and abuse by coaches and staff, by 1914 the Carlisle Indian football players had established themselves as both winners and outspoken advocates for protecting Indian history and culture, and many had finished school and returned to their tribes.  One Kiowa player, Delos K. Lone Wolf, “[revealed] a willingness to transfer his legendary skill at defending Indian turf on the gridiron to the real contest for Kiowa land on the Southern Plans.” In this way, Indians across the expanding U.S. at the turn of the 20th century confronted issues of assimilation by adapting, taking racism in stride and bringing back new skills that would aid in retaining tribal cultural heritage. In effect, the Carlisle Indian football players were “forging identities – Pan-Indian identities at that – defying the simplistic and dichotomous categories of cultural essence in which Pratt or others might wish to consign them” as one survival mechanism for their people. 

References

Nichols, Roger L. The American Indian: Past and Present. 6th ed. Norman, Oklahoma. University of Oklahoma Press. 2008.