The scholarship on Indian boarding schools is voluminous. Histories and memoirs document the abuse Native children suffered at the hands of federal officials and describe how Native children and their parents resisted dehumanizing practices meant to erase their cultures. Individual school histories and broader policy studies reveal a complicated story of colonialism and, to use Gerald Vizenor's term, Native “survivance.” Kevin Whalen's book builds on that scholarship and offers a new analysis that places “work” at the center of the boarding school historical narrative, indeed as a pivotal piece of early twentieth-century federal Indian policy.
Most studies comment on how boarding schools used a work-related curriculum, such as the outing program, to replace “traditional” practices and Native cultural values with behavior sanctioned by school superintendents. Whalen digs deeper and offers an important starting point for understanding the significant role boarding schools played in shaping Native American workers’ place in an expanding capitalist market, as both members of a racialized working class and as resilient people who negotiated the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) bureaucracy to improve their lives and communities.
Focusing on the students as workers, Whalen complicates our understanding of how the history of the boarding school was connected to the expansion of commercial agriculture and urban development in Southern California. Boys tended citrus fields and hog farms in the Inland Empire, and girls moved to Southern California cities to care for the homes and children of the growing urban middle class; however, their numbers were too small to be counted as a singular labor force for California capitalists. Yet, as Whalen demonstrates, the school received an initial boost because those employers recognized the students as an attractive labor source nonetheless.
Mining the Sherman Institute and the BIA archives, Whalen illustrates the role labor played in Indian policy's shifting assimilationist vision. By the early twentieth century, “work” was no longer part of the plan to “uplift” students, and the schools were no longer serving as launching pads for self-improvement. The school was now a terminal destination, where students were funneled into jobs that offered little promise for social and economic advancement. Sherman was functioning as a full-scale labor contractor for rural and urban employers and preparing students to take their place at the bottom of the racialized working class in Southern California.
Whalen's study complements the work of geographers and historians who have critically explored California's peculiar brand of urban development, where carefully crafted bucolic landscapes masked histories of racial and class inequality. Working alongside other people of color in orchards and farms, Native students performed the labor that made it possible for white residents of the Fontana Land Company's development who “lived out a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal to which [they] did not have access” (p. 63). While Whalen doesn't explore the cultural construct of whiteness, his narrative demonstrates how such privilege owed a great deal to American Indian (and Latino) labor.
Whalen's analysis of Fontana Farms offers a great example of how scholars might acknowledge Indigenous people's agency and make sense of their stories within the larger historical structures they inhabited. Their lives provided the “stuff” for structures. Native workers had little power to alter policy or to change the nature of the racialized economy. Colonial policies made their labor “cheap” and available to corporate farmers and urban middle-class households. Indian policy determined where they went to school, where they worked, how much they earned, even how they received their wages. Whalen balances his persuasive structural analysis with the stories of individuals who exercised their historical agency. They migrated, they worked, and they created their own urban communities. He might have elaborated a bit more on this point by including a few more stories or examples of Native people testing the limits of the school's authority. Perhaps the sum of those individual acts might explain why Indian policymakers remained perpetually frustrated and why Native American cultures persisted. In fact, efforts to assimilate Native people often backfired. According to Whalen, “The very labor programs that aimed to erase indigenous identities became tools they used to preserve their communities and cultures” (p. 9).
Whalen's research also yields important insight about Native American urban migration in the twentieth century. Since the outing program placed young women in domestic jobs and men in agriculture, women led the migration to urban areas, where they established social networks and learned how to navigate city life on their own or sometimes with the assistance of outing matrons. He also helps us understand how labor policies shaped the migration of Native Americans back to reservations during the Great Depression. The BIA's reversal of some of the more draconian assimilationist policies of the previous era, such as allotment and creating relief jobs on reservations, helped to lure Native Americans back to reservations, which policymakers hoped would fulfill mutually beneficial tasks: preserve American Indian culture by encouraging them to stay on reservations and keep them from competing with non-Indians for scarce jobs in urban areas.
The issue of class is well studied in the history of education. Many studies seamlessly connect schools to the story of industrialization in the United States. Colonialism is a key theme in boarding school literature, but few scholars have linked the story of Native American education to the larger economic history of the United States. Whalen bridges those scholarly gaps and challenges us to compare Native American boarding schools to other schools of the era to consider how colonialism complicates the history of public education in American history. Whalen's book compels us to place Native American education in a broader political and economic context and raises new questions about the role of schools in the development of capitalism in the United States.
