Those familiar with U.S. Indian policy know that few elements of it have generated as much controversy as education. Until
recently, schools for Native Americans were almost exclusively run
by whites, who sought to turn Indian children into Anglo children.
Boarding schools like Carlisle Indian School, with their uniforms and short
haircuts, their military-style drill and ban on Native languages, sought, in
the words of Carlisle's founder, to “kill the Indian and save the man" - the normative man being, in this case, a white one. Earlier
missionary-run academies had similar goals, though they pursued them without the
same level of military discipline. Only a few Indian nations, like the Cherokees,
maintained control over their own educational system prior to the late
twentieth century.
The early years of American Indian educational policy have
received less attention from scholars, though Margaret Szasz has written
thoughtful monographs on colonial Indian education, Bernard Sheehan and William
McLoughlin have noted the obvious cultural imperialism in early
nineteenth-century “civilization” policy, and Christina Snyder is completing
what will surely be an exciting and thought-provoking study of Richard Johnson's Choctaw
Academy. Here I want to add just a small observation on the earliest years of
U.S. Indian schooling, more specifically the era of the American Revolution and
the quarter-century following it: even before it began paying
missionaries to set up Indian schools, the federal government had been placing
Native American leaders' sons with white families who took charge of their
education. During the Revolutionary War Congress paid Indian agent George
Morgan to board and train the sons of prominent Delaware chief White Eyes, and
in the early 1790s Secretary of War Henry Knox placed about twenty Iroquois,
Creek, and Cherokee children with Pennsylvanian Quaker families,
who agreed to train the boys as farmers and the girls in home economics. While
I have not been able to determine if all of these children came from prominent
families, at least a few of them, including the nephews of Creek "Beloved Man" Alexander McGillivray, did. Knox's
successors continued the practice into the early nineteenth century, when
Secretary Henry Dearborn, for instance, took charge of educating the sons of Chickasaw magnates
William and George Colbert.
I want to suggest here that this policy grew not out of
cultural imperialism (though there was some of that), nor
benevolence, but rather out of an old imperial custom: taking the children of
conquered peoples' leaders as hostages. Education allowed empires to impress
their customs and values on those who would eventually grow up to govern
subordinate nations, and it also gave them an excuse to hold children whose
vulnerability would deter their parents from rebelling. Twenty-seven hundred
years ago, the Assyrians took “aristocratic children” from conquered provinces
to Ninevah for schooling, and the Romans and Byzantines educated elite youths,
like Herod Agrippa (well known to fans of I, Claudius) and the Gothic
princeling Theodoric*, in their capitals. I suspect medieval courts followed
the Roman example, and when the English began colonizing Ireland in earnest,
they on at least one occasion (1615) took hostages from the children of
northern Irish landowners and brought them to England for indoctrination. The American Revolutionaries recognized the political value of the
practice, and when the United States' demands for adult hostages from the Great
Lakes Indians (1784-86) generated hostility, officials like Henry Knox switched
to a subtler approach. The War Department never acknowledged it was essentially holding
chiefs' children as hostages, but a Spanish observer in New York City suggested
Knox was doing something of the kind when he took custody of Alexander
McGillivray's nephews.
By the early nineteenth century missionaries were beginning
to establish schools in Indian communities – at Spring Place in the Cherokee
nation, for example – and the War Department provided these schools with
subsidies, at first sporadically and then to the amount of $10,000 a year under
the Civilization Act (1819). Prominent Native American parents
supported these schools because they taught some skills, like textile-making
and English literacy, that they considered valuable. They also gave them more
control over their children, whom they could more easily bring home than if
they had moved to Pennsylvania. I also suspect many had come to recognize the
implicit danger in allowing federal officials to take their children away,
however willingly, for education and training, though some allowed their older
children to attend boarding schools like Choctaw Academy and the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' school in Cornwall, Connecticut. If the War Department no longer placed Indian children
with white families in the east, it was because officials recognized the United
States' growing power lessened the need for hostage taking, and because they
now primarily valued the cultural-imperialist aspect of education. The
militarized boarding-school era lay several decades in the future, but one
could by the 1820s begin to perceive its outlines.
Sources: On Assyrian, Byzantine, and English
education of hostages, see Simo Parpola, “Assyria's Expansion in the Eighth and
Seventh Centuries and Its Long-Term Repercussion in the West,” in William Dever
and Seymour Gitlin, eds., Symbiosis, Symbolism, and the Power of the Past
(Eisenbrauns, 2003), 99-111, esp. 101-102**; Peter Heather, The Restoration
of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders (Oxford UP, 2014),
471-475 of 9215 (Kindle); Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain's First Stuart
Kings, 1567-1642 (Oxford, 2014), p. 163. I discuss Knox's placement of
Indian children with Quaker families in Red Gentlemen and White Savages
(Virginia, 2008), pp. 122-123, 178. For the War Department's education of the
Colbert brothers' children see Henry Dearborn to William Claiborne, 6 Dec.
1802, and Dearborn to George Colbert of 24 Sept. 1805 and 17 Sept. 1807, all in
War Department, Letters Sent, Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Natl. Archives
Microfilm M-15), 1: 297, 2:110-111, and 2:307. Rowena McClinton has translated
and published two volumes of diaries on the Moravian mission and school at
Spring Place: The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees
(Nebraska, 2007).
* Theodoric's case also suggests one of the dangers of
educating potential enemies: they might acquire skills that make them
a potent threat in the future. As an adult Theodoric returned to Constantinople
with an army and threatened the city's aqueducts, whose importance he had
learned during his “internship.” The emperor became so eager to get rid of him
that the Byzantines cleared the way for Theodoric to invade Italy and establish
his kingdom there. (Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome,
985 of 9215.)
** My thanks to Corinna Nichols for this source.
