6 "IF WE GET THE GIRLS, WE GET THE RACE" MISSIONARY EDUCATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN GIRLS Carol Devens When I saw the lonely figure of my mother vanish in the distance, a sense of regret settled heavily upon me. I felt suddenly weak, as if I might fall limp to the ground. I was in the bands of strangers whom my mother did not fully trust . I no longer felt free to be myself , or to voice my own feelings. The tears trickled down my cheeks, and I buried my face in the folds of my blanket. Now the first step, parting me from my mother, was taken, and all my belated tears availed nothing. -Zitkala-Sa Mission school education, with its wrenching separa- them. Moreover, the time in school deprived her of tion from family, had a profound impact on Native the continuing tutelage of her mother and other American girls and on their female Zitkala-Sa's female relatives-instruction that was key to assum- description of her departure for boarding school in ing her place as a woman within her own cultural 1884 characterized the experience of thousands of tradition. young girls in the nineteenth century." Most left no The history of mission schools is a troubling one written record of their years in school; Zitkala-Sa in which stories of benevolent, self-sacrificing mis- (Gertrude Bonnin), a Dakota (Sioux) writer and sionaries contend with accounts of relentlessly rigid activist on Native American issues, was unusual in discipline, ethnocentrism, and desperately unhappy that respect. She recorded both her own memories of children.4 Native Americans received their introduc- her school years and her mother's reaction to the tion to Anglo-American education at the hands of Western education of her daughter. British missionaries in 1617, following King James's Zitkala-Sa's mother, heartbroken by the child's advocacy of schooling Indians to promote "civiliza- departure, was convinced that someone had "filled tion" and Christianity. Dartmouth College soon was [her daughter's] ears with the white man's lies" to established to teach young Indian men, and both persuade her to leave for school. What else would Harvard College and William and Mary College induce an eight-year-old to quit her mother for the incorporated the education of Native youth into company of strangers? "Stay with me, my little one!" their missions. The Church of England's Society for she futilely implored the child, overwhelmed by anx- the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts also iety about her safety among white people?? The regularly instructed Indians until the American woman's fears were not unfounded. Her child's well- Revolution. Following independence, a host of mis- being at school was by no means assured, an exami- sionary societies was organized with the stated nation of the experiences of Ojibwa and Dakota girls intent of evangelizing Native peoples, among them suggests.? A girl's exposure to Anglo-American reli- the American Society for Propagating the Gospel gious, economic, and gender values often had a per- among the Indians and Others in North America manent effect on her, whether or not she accepted (1787) and the New York Missionary Society (1796). The founding of the interdenominational American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Carol Devens in American Nations: Encounters in Indian Country, Missions (ABCFM) in 1810 ushered in a new era 1850 to the Present, ed. by Hoxie, Mancall, and Merrell. Routledge, 2001, pp. 157–171. (Original source: Journal of World History, vol. 3, of missionary endeavor. The combined influences n. 2 (1992), pp. 219-237. A portion of the original article and the of the religious revival known as the Second Great endnotes have been omitted. Awakening and heightened nationalism following the 284 "IF WE GET THE GIRLS, WE GET THE RACE MISSIONARY EDUCATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN GIRLS 285 War of 1812 added a further goal to the missionary effort rescuing Indians from destruction by the inex- forcibly round up and remove Native American chil- orable march of Anglo-American progress. Numerous dren to schools as their government counterparts denominational organizations were formed, such as often did, it was a real challenge to enroll them. the Missionary Society of the American Methodist Zitkala-Sa was lured to the Quakers' Indiana Manual Episcopal Church in 1820 and the Presbyterian Board Labor Institute in Wabash by tales of lush, rich land of Foreign Missions (BFM) in 1837.6 bursting with sweet fruits for the child's taking, 10 Nineteenth-century missionaries and their spon- Charles Hall, a minister at the ABCFM's Fort sors firmly believed in the linear progression of his- Berthold mission in North Dakota (which served tory and in their own elevated place on the ladder mostly Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara rather than of civilization. They clearly understood their charge Dakota) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth to be the transformation of Native peoples into centuries, reported that "getting the children to go to Christian citizens. Admittedly, it was a monumental school was as delicate and cautious work as catching trout. To send a child to school meant, to the Indian, undertaking, "We cannot be too grateful that God did not make us heathens," observed Sherman Hall, of the giving up of all his distinctive tribal life, his ancestral customs, his religious beliefs, and sinking ABCFM's La Pointe mission in Wisconsin, in 1833. “It himself into the vast unknown, the way of the white is an awful calamity to be born in the midst of hea- then darkness."7 Heathenism seemed a surmount- man."l1 After several years, Hall developed a recruit- ment strategy that he later explained in a section of able obstacle, however, if children could be brought his memoirs entitled “Capturing Children": into the fold at a tender age and raised as Christians. As one missionary put it: “This can only be effectu- How to reach the children was a problem. They were ally accomplished by taking them away from the told by shrewd parents that owls and bears and white men would harm them, so naturally they ran and hid demoralizing & enervating atmosphere of camp life when we approached. ... White Shield, the old Rec & Res[ervation] surroundings & Concomitants." [Arikara) chief, said in regard to our problem, "If you Although bringing adults to knowledge of gospel feed the children, they will come to school like flies to truths was important, it was "the rising generation" syrup? His advice was taken, and a Friday dinner, in the who provided hope for the salvation of the Native manner of the white man, was provided. This was as attractive as ice cream and lollipops. The school became population a popular institution, especially on Friday, 12 Schooling became the primary means of enticing young Native Americans to reject tradition and seek Other missionaries reported similar use of food and conversion. To missionaries, the abandonment of other enticements, such as singing, to get the children native ways for Western ones was a creative rather into the classroom.13 than destructive process that made new Christian citi- Initially, mission schools concentrated on teach- zens out of savages. School, missionaries hoped, was a ing boys and men, with little emphasis on female way to change Indians from "others" to dusky versions schooling. By mid century, however, they had shifted of themselves. Rayna Green, a Native American their approach in response to the growing belief scholar, has offered this observation of a photograph of among Americans that women, as mothers, must be educated in order to raise virtuous male citizens.14 pupils at the Hampton Institute, a nineteenth-century boarding school in Virginia for African-American and According to Isaac Baird, who served at the Presbyterian BFM Odanah mission in Wisconsin, Native American pupils: "School put them into draw- "The girls will need the training more than the boys ing classes, where young Indian ladies in long dresses & they will wield a greater influence in the future. If made charcoal portraits of a boy dressed his Plains we get the girls, we get the race."15 ABCFM's Santee warrior best. These Victorian Indians look toward the Normal Training School in Nebraska, founded in camera from painting class, their eyes turned away from their buckskinned model."9 1870, exemplified this position in its annual bulletin, which stated that the school's purpose was the Missionaries worked diligently to gather girls "raising up [of] preachers, teachers, interpreters, and boys of all ages into day and boarding schools business men, and model mothers for the Dakota near villages and reservations, as well as at distant Indian schools such as the Hampton Institute or the Once the commitment to female education had Carlisle School in Pennsylvania (founded in 1879 to been made, however, missionaries faced low enroll- prove to the public that Native Americans were ments and high dropout rates. Presbyterian and educable). Because missionary teachers could not Nation."16 con 286 COMMUNITY WELLNESS: FAMILY, HEALTH, AND EDUCATION ABCFM missions to the Ojibwa and Dakota suffered a shortage of schoolgirls and, moreover, were dissat- isfied with the performance of the female pupils they did have. William Boutwell, ABCFM missionary at Leech Lake, Minnesota, reported in the 1830s that girls avoided him and refused to come to school; he was uncertain whether fear or shame motivated their response.!? At the Presbyterian BFM mission in Omena, Michigan, Peter Dougherty thought he could not go wrong with his female school; he had pro- vided women teachers to instruct girls in domesticity arid Christianity as well as same academic subjects. When the school opened in 1848, it had a fine enroll- ment of twenty-two, but this quickly dwindled, and by 1850 Dougherty was forced to close the school. The boys' school, however, flourished as fathers sent their sons to acquire reading and ciphering skills that allowed them to deal with Anglo-Americans on their own terms.18 The manual labor boarding school Dougherty opened in 1853 had similar problems, attracting only five girls out of twenty-seven stu- dents. The Presbyterians were even more discour- aged by the situation at Middle Village, a satellite mission of Omena, where women refused to send any children to school. Their action led to the school's closing in 1858, despite the village men's petition to the BFM to keep it open.19 At Sisseton agency in the Dakota Territory, the local U.S. Indian agent, J. G. Hamilton, was shocked by how tenaciously Dakota women clung to their old ways. He urged the Women's Board of Missions (affil- iated with the ABCFM) to send a lady to teach the Native women. "I was struck, upon my arrival here some two months ago," he wrote to the Women's Board in 1875,"with the vast difference in the general appearance of the men & women. Contrary to the usual rule, the men of this tribe have made far greater progress & have yielded more readily to civilizing forces than the women have."20 He hoped that female teachers might be able to reach them. His comment suggests that, like the Ojibwa, Dakota women sought to keep distance between themselves and whites and were reluctant to adapt to Anglo-American customs or values. Susan Webb, a missionary teacher at Santee, reported that "the older women could not read and the younger women would not."21 The female aversion to interaction included an unwilling- ness to have their daughters involved in mission schooling. When Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, visited Fort Berthold in 1878 to recruit Dakota children for the Hampton Institute, he had a difficult time securing students, especially girls. "The people feared to give up their girls," Charles Hall explained, "not trusting the white people'n One teacher contemplating the enrollment pro lem suggested that the Ojibwa, at least, saw no pot in educating girls. Revealing his poor understanding of Ojibwa gender roles and cultural values, he explained that women were destined for a life of servitude. A more likely explanation, however, came from a perceptive missionary who suggested that close ties between mothers and daughters were to blame that women who maintained a traditional way of life were loath to relinquish control of their daughters' upbringing. It was with tremendous reluctance, for example, that Zitkala-Sa's mother allowed her to go to school. She eventually sented only after concluding that Western education would provide her daughter greater protection against the growing number of Anglo-Americans settling an Dakota lands than traditional training Much like their Ojibwa counterparts, those Dakota girls who did enroll seldom seemed to con- form to the missionaries' expectations, Susan Webb commented that her female students always seemed the opposite of what she hoped they would be. She saw her work with them as a lesson in the depths of the human condition: "I think as I work for these girls I am learning the weakness and depravity of our own human natures,"24 Despite women's traditionalism and their suspi- cion of missionaries, many girls did end up attending school for at least short periods of time.25 Once there, they immediately began the physical transformation that missionaries hoped would be a catalyst for their intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis into Christian citizens. A young girl, whether faced with the total immersion of boarding school or the less comprehensive indoctrination attempted by day schools, was presented with an alien world view, behavior code, and language to which she was quickly expected to adhere. It was a confusing and frightening whirlwind of strangers, journeys, hair- cuts, and loneliness. Zitkala-Sa again provides a win- dow on the experience of starting school: "My long travel and the bewildering sights had exhausted me. I fell asleep, heaving deep, tired sobs. My tears were left to dry themselves in streaks, because neither my aunt nor my mother was near to wipe them away. She recalled how humiliating the mandatory haircuts were for Native American children. "Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. "IF WE GET THE GIRLS, WE GET THE RACE: MISSIONARY EDUCATION OF NATIVE AMERICAN GIRLS 287 Among our people, short hair was worn by mourn- ers, and shingled hair by cowards!" She had to be towels, and 80 pairs of socks. They also spun and dragged out from under a bed before she submitted wove 100 pounds of wool and 40 yards of rag carpet, to having her long braids snipped off. Charles Hall churned 800 pounds of butter, made 600 pounds of remembered the children's horror of losing their cheese, 2% barrels of soap, and 100 pounds of candles. long hair at his school, and the Indian agent, In addition, they did daily housekeeping, laundry, J.C. McGillycuddy, reported that when new Lakota cooking, and cleaning. The girls worked in groups, students at Pine Ridge reservation caught a glimpse rotating jobs every two weeks in order to learn all of teachers giving haircuts, they feared that he aspects of housekeeping 32 Martha Riggs Morris at intended to disgrace them, and all fled in alarm.27 ABCFM's Sisseton (Dakota) mission, explained the The school world was tough and confusing. rationale for this approach, which still held sway in Mission schools' programs for girls were intended to 1881: "The book learning is after all not so important indoctrinate them with the ideals of Christian for them, at least after they have learned to read and womanhood-piety, domesticity, submissiveness, write fairly well. But to take care of themselves--to and purity. By the missionaries' Victorian standards, learn to keep body and mind pure and clean, to learn to keep house comfortably--these are most impor- Native American women were careless, dirty, and tant for the advancement of the people."33 unfamiliar with the concept of hard work Indian Ideally, the missions' female teachers were to be girls, they complained, were woefully unfamiliar role models for appropriate gender activities, values, with the lore, paraphernalia, and routines of female and work, showing Native American girls through domesticity 28 Schools therefore trained girls in daily example both the techniques of household sewing, knitting, cooking, and other domestic skills economy and a womanly demeanor. In reality, how- and tasks, as well as in academic subjects, such as ever, the teachers were overworked and often ill. history, natural sciences, arithmetic, and spelling. 29 Furthermore, rigid schedules and overcrowding The content of the curriculum bore no relationship to often made the situation impersonal and miserable. the intellectual, social, or philosophical constructs in At the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society's which the girls had been raised. Indeed, the schools' Aldersville School in Ontario, Canada, a report of the underlying principle was that Anglo-American his- girls' schedule in 1841 indicated their rigorous life. tory, morality, and health were inherently superior to The children (mostly Ojibwa) arose at 4:30 A.M. in and should replace those of their students' cultures. summer, a lazy 5 A.M. in winter. Between rising and This perspective was reinforced by typical text- 9 A.M., the girls did the milking, prepared the school books, such as Webb's Readers, Webster's Spelling breakfast, attended prayers and a lecture, made Book, Greenleaf's Intellectual Arithmetic, and Colbun's cheese, and did housework. They then spent six Mental Arithmetic, used by Ojibwa children in the hours in the classroom, with a break for lunch, fol- 1860s at ABCFM's Odanah Manual Labor Boarding lowed by needlework, supper, evening milking, School.30 These books unabashedly proclaimed the prayers at 8 p.m. and bed at 8:30.34 Anglo-American vision of progress and morality Throughout the 1880s, Martha Riggs Morris subscribed to by the missionaries. Even texts written complained that her twenty-eight Dakota students specifically for Native American pupils (ABCFM were crowded into two tiny buildings measuring 10 X 24 feet and 17 x 24 feet. At the Santee Normal teachers usually taught in their students' language) tended to be literal translations of standard class- Training School, the Bird's Nest, a boarding home room lessons, that teachers applied to their pupils for small girls, was more spacious, having two with little or no regard for context and appropriate- kitchens, a dining room, teachers' sitting room and bedrooms, sick bay, laundry room, and three dormi- ness. The sailboats depicted in Stephen Rigg's Model tories for the girls. Still, both teachers and students First Reader (1873), for example, were a world away felt cramped and hurried.35 Zitkala-Sa's account of from the experiences of the Dakota children learning the Wabash school once again personalizes the to read out of this book at the Santee Normal depressing impact of frantic school regimes on Training School.31 pupils and teachers alike: The curriculum often placed an even heavier emphasis on vocational instruction for girls than for A loud-clamoring bell awakened us at half-past six in the cold winter mornings ... There were too many drowsy boys. The thirty-six girls at the Shawnee Quaker children and too numerous orders for the day to waste a School, for example, in 1827 alone produced 400 moment in any apology to nature for giving her children pieces of student clothing, 50 sets of sheets and 288 COMMUNITY WELLNESS: FAMILY, HEALTH, AND EDUCATION such a shock in the early morning.... A paleface woman, with a yellow-covered roll book open on her arm and a gnawed pencil in her hand, appeared at the door. Her small, tired face was coldly lighted with a pair of large gray eyes. She stood still in a halo of authority... It was next to impossible to leave the iron routine after the civi- lizing machine had once begun its day's buzzing. 36 was Susan Webb's comments about her pupils indicate that the schooling process alienated and confused the girls. "When I look about me," Webb wrote in 1881, "and see how helpless and indifferent apparently are the young women I long to help arouse them to a sense that there is something for them to be doing. I cannot endure the thought that our girls will leave us to settle down with no weight of responsibility."37 Zitkala-Sa's experience confirmed this: "The melan- choly of those black days has left so long a shadow that it darkens the path of years that have since gone by. These sad memories rise above those of smoothly grinding school days."38 Stories of her grandmother's experiences in a turn-of-the-century mission school prompted Mary Crow Dog (Lakota Sioux) to write: "It is almost impossible to explain to a sympathetic white person what a typical old Indian boarding school was like; how it affected the Indian child suddenly dumped into it like a small creature from another world, help- less, defenseless, bewildered, trying desperately and instinctively to survive at all."39 Some young girls at the school killed themselves or attempted suicide to escape an unhappy situation beyond their control. The demoralizing effect of school programs was often rivaled by their futility. Most of the domestic instruction that girls received was virtually useless when their schooling ended and they returned to the village or reservation. Only if a family had made the transition from tipi or lodge to frame house, as Zitkala-Sa's had, were the girl's Western housekeep- ing skills applicable-unless she worked as a domes- tic servant for local Anglo-Americans or at the mission itself Native American girls' servitude filled a perceived need for trained household help; girls at the government's Phoenix Indian School were pres- sured to become servants, and this may have been the case at mission schools as well.40 The conditions that children reported enduring in school led many Native American parents to become firmly entrenched in their opposition to Anglo- American education. Other factors influenced them as well. The loss of the children to school was, in a way, like death in the family and community. “Since you have been here with your writing the place has become full of ghosts," one person told Charles Hall. In fact, schooling often did end in death, as Hall observed, especially for children at boarding schools, where infectious diseases took a high toll 41 The schools' threat to family well-being heightened for mothers and grandmothers. A girl's participation in mission school undermined the assure that she would take her place as a woman within the tribal tradition. "The grandmothers and many of the parents, reported Eda Ward, a teacher at Fort Berthold, "with their children to be wholly Indian."42 Female kin were responsible for instruct that would shape her life as an adult within the com- ing the child in both the practical and ritual activities munity. Schooling removed a girl from the warmth of her kin's care, left her with no one to teach, comfort, or guide her as they would at home. Zitkala-Sa's mother had warned her departing child that "you will cry for me, but they will not even soothe you."43 Overworked, ill, and ethnocentric teachers were no substitute for the female network on which a girl's emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development depended. Although many missionary teachers were well intentioned and some really enjoyed their small charges, all were put off by the unfamiliar habits and values of the girls, and by the physical setting of their new environment. After nine years with the Ojibwa around the La Pointe mission, the ABCFM mission- ary Sherman Hall told his brother that "it is difficult to reach their hearts, or even their understandings with the truth. They seem almost as stupid as blocks. Yet they are far enough from being destitute of nat- ural endowment. Most of them have superior minds by nature but they are minds in ruins."44 Hall lasted a long time in the missionary field and was seemingly better able to adjust to his surroundings than many of his peers, yet he described his pupils as "ragged, dirty, lousy and disgusting little objects trying to learn to read their own language.' ...45 His attitude was more positive than that of one of his coworkers, how- ever, who complained bitterly about "the effects of crowding from 40 to 70 dirty vicious Indian children" into a small schoolhouse.46 Not all teachers were so intolerant; most of the women at ABCFM's Dakota missions, for example, expressed real fondness for their students and jobs." However, their commitment to "civilizing" their pupils precluded any real understanding of or com cession to those pupils' culture or values. Most tried to treat their charges as they would Anglo-American youngsters.48 By regarding their students simply as children rather than as Indian children, teachers essen tially denied their very identities. This lack of cultural
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