In his foreword to Larry Skogen’s To Educate American Indians: Selected Writings from the National Educational Association’s Department of Indian Education, 1900-1904, the late David Wallace Adams asserts that the edited collection makes a “monumental contribution,” closing a significant gap in the historical record on the federal Indian education system by “documenting how leading educators of the day viewed the proper ends and means of Indian schooling” (xiii-xiv). Skogen’s valuable addition to the literature demonstrates that although whites involved in federal Indian education shared assumptions drawn from scientific racism regarding the superiority of Anglo-American culture, they disagreed over the implications this had for Indian education.
As Skogen makes clear in his introduction, it was superintendent of Indian Education Estelle Reel’s advocacy that led to the formation of the National Education Association’s Department of Indian Education in 1899. She envisioned the Department as a vehicle for professionalization of the educators in the Indian service, and her influence shaped the direction of the annual meetings. This first of Skogen’s two-volume collection includes thirty-four of the papers delivered as part of the Department of Indian Education programs at the NEA’s annual meetings between 1900 and 1904. The volume’s introduction and conclusion frame the meetings within the context of NEA’s involvement with Indian education and the debates between federal Indian employees regarding whether full assimilation into American society should be the goal of Indian education. Skogen provides separate introductions for each year’s meeting, expertly situating the papers into the educational and physical landscapes in which they were delivered. Skogen also precedes each document with a detailed note providing background on the author and further contextualization on the ideas presented in the source.
Skogen’s painstaking reconstructions of the papers presented at each conference are one of the most valuable contributions of this volume. The Journal of Proceedings and Addresses of the National Education Association reproduced edited versions of the papers, referred to as “abstracts” and often shortened for space. Reel dominated the process of selection and editing the pieces. “What readers see in the NEA Proceedings today,” asserts Skogen, “is what Reel wanted them to see” (p. xxiv). To gain a fuller understanding of what audience members may have heard at the meetings, Skogen has compared the published abstracts with original drafts in the NEA archives and assembled versions of the pieces from varied sources, including the Southern Workman, Chilocco Farmer and Stock Grower, newspapers, and other archival collections. His notations delineating NEA edits and how versions differed between audiences offer readers a nuanced picture of the diverging views on Indian education within the federal service.
Skogen’s framing of the documents highlights the debates over Indian education during this period between the “old assimilationists,” led by Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s Richard Henry Pratt, and the “progressives,” led by Reel. The former “believed Native Americans eminently capable of achieving full citizenship in the United States,” but only if they shed all aspects of their Native cultures and identities. The latter “believed that American Indians, as a ‘child race,’ lacked the innate intellectual capacity to be any more than a laboring class,” but concurrently emphasized the preservation of some Native arts, histories, and languages as part of their educational project (p. xxi). Both approaches ascribed to scientific racism’s conviction of Anglo-Saxon dominance. This first volume, covering 1900-1904, illustrates the clash of these philosophies in the early years of the Indian Department, while the second volume, covering the years 1905-1909, demonstrates the ascendancy of Reel’s progressive approach, including a growing emphasis on Native arts and music and increased support for reservation-based day schools.
While the broad strokes of this shift will be familiar to scholars in the field, Skogen’s selections illustrate important nuances among Indian educators during this period of transition. The first three years of the Department’s participation in the NEA meetings clearly highlighted federal emphasis on practical and vocational curriculum in the Indian schools, while also suggesting the growing popularity of reservation day schools. They also demonstrated the institutional and ideological connections between education for Native people and education for Black Americans. Educators from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute authored five of the seven papers Skogen recovered from the 1900 meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, including three by Hampton’s principal, Hollis Frissell. Skogen’s contextualization of Detroit’s 1901 meeting and Minneapolis’s 1902 meeting underscore Reel’s focus on Native arts, as she introduced her Course of Study in the month following the Detroit meeting and expanded the displays of student work each year, simultaneously commodifying the Native culture that she integrated into the curriculum.
Key shifts emerge in the subsequent two years. Documents from Boston’s 1903 meeting offer insight into the ways in which educators believed Indian schooling experiences might inform the education of immigrants, with the theme of citizenship central to many of the papers. Speakers emphasized acquisition of English, living in “dwellings,” and citizen dress as key measures of the progress of citizenship. Work habits also served as clear evidence. Amid the fervor of the Klondike Gold Rush, Alaska’s general agent of education Sheldon Jackson contended that Native Alaskan boys “manifested the progress they had made towards citizenship by being the most reliable packers that in those days of great excitement could be found” (p. 221). And yet, the contours of this citizenship had moved away from what Pratt’s assimilationists had envisioned. Natalie Curtis’ paper, given at the 1904 meeting in St. Louis, underscored the transformation. Curtis was a concert pianist who had shifted to collecting and preserving Native music and African American music. “It is for the Indian schools,” she asserted, “to help fulfill America’s duty of preserving for the world the striking and beautiful features of Indian life, Indian character, and Indian arts” (263). Curtis’s presentation, which Skogen describes as “serendipity” as she was not on the official program but had traveled to the St. Louis World’s Fair as part of her own research project, challenged educators to value Native cultures on their own ground. But when paired with the ongoing emphasis on practical education and Reel’s efforts to commodify the products of Native students by showcasing and selling their projects at the meetings, these efforts reinforced the white supremacy embedded in progressives’ approach.
Given Skogen’s careful consideration of Reel’s influence on the perspectives conveyed in the published NEA Proceedings, it is somewhat perplexing that he does not provide a specific discussion of his own document selection process. Presumably not all papers were reprinted elsewhere or exist in extended form, and Skogen does delineate which papers were or were not included in the published NEA reports. But it is not clear why he chose to include the papers that he did, which leaves readers to wonder what was left out and why.
Ultimately, Skogen concludes that integrating Indian educators into the NEA provided them the professional development opportunities that Reel sought. Participating in NEA conferences drew them into the national educational landscape, allowed them to exchange ideas with other educators working with immigrants and colonized groups, and facilitated the dissemination of strategies developed by Indian educators for “uplift” and assimilation through “practical” and vocational lessons. To Educate American Indians reminds us that the multiple actors shaping federal Indian education in the early twentieth century often disagreed with each other. The volume is an important resource for scholars of American educational history and Native history, as it makes key documents easily accessible and situates them within a deeply researched context. In doing so, Skogen also provides us with a model of primary source analysis, framing the words and ideas of the past so that readers might better analyze them in the world in which they were spoken.
