In Teaching Empire, Elisabeth Eittreim provides a much-needed intervention in the historiography of education as a tool of US empire. Building on a rich literature analyzing US imperial efforts through schooling, Eittreim urges scholars to take the teachers who carried out these assimilationist goals in the classroom as seriously as the policymakers who drafted them. Putting the focus squarely on teacher experience allows Eittreim to complicate analysis of how education served as a tool of assimilation during the height of US expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Teaching Empire presents an innovative approach to the history of US imperial education built on painstaking research into the professional and intimate lives of teachers who worked at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and the US educational mission to the Philippines.
Eittreim's decision to juxtapose teachers at Carlisle with teachers in the US-occupied Philippines places two forms of US imperial expansion in comparison: the settler colonialism exerted against Native peoples in the United States and the administrative colonialism exerted against Filipinos in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Using federally administered schooling as a lens of analysis, Eittreim's work highlights the ways in which paying attention to the ground-level execution of US imperial ambitions can clarify how both forms of colonialism drew from the same ideological foundations but enacted imperial goals in different ways, differences that were deeply rooted in geographical and cultural context. Comparing teachers at Carlisle and the Philippines, Eittreim presents a study that emphasizes the complex and often futile mission to use classrooms to control students’ bodies and minds, even when those classrooms use violent force in an attempt to erase Indigenous identities.
While both education projects shared the expressed goals of bringing “civilization” to colonized people, the projects differed in significant ways. Carlisle, founded in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, sought to remove Native children from their communities in order to strip them of their Native identity entirely. Based on the principle to, as Pratt famously declared, “kill the Indian, save the man,” Carlisle removed Native students from the “wildness” of their homelands and offered “uplift” in the form of forced assimilation. Carlisle's story is well known thanks to scholarship like David Wallace Adams's landmark Education for Extinction (1995), and Eittreim uses that analysis as context for her focus on the school's teachers. Recruited from Pratt's personal network, Carlisle's early teachers were mainly women with primary or secondary teaching experience, many of whom knew each other before joining Carlisle's faculty. Those personal relationships shaped the school's culture and facilitated its curricular goals until later decades, when the Indian Service bureaucratized the faculty hiring process. Whereas other studies have focused primarily on students or administrators, Eittreim's work fills a crucial gap between policy-making and student experience through the diaries, letters, and evaluations of the teachers charged with carrying that policy out. While most teachers expressed their full support for Carlisle's mission of cultural genocide, Eittreim notes that the mechanics and limitations of the classroom as well as their own shifting sympathies created complicated liminal spaces that allowed students to resist and appropriate the education designed to redefine them.
Administrators of the US educational mission to the Philippines recruited a different pool of teachers. The Thomasites—known for the USS Thomas, the first ship to bring US teachers to the islands en masse in 1901—were predominantly men with degrees from prestigious universities. The program aimed to replace Spanish-administered Catholic schools across the archipelago with US schools that would use the existing educational infrastructure to Americanize Filipino children. With hostilities still active across the country as Filipinos resisted US imperial rule, program administrators favored young men who could teach in isolated regions still subject to violent conflict. Unlike Carlisle's teachers, many Thomasites met for the first time on the voyage and quickly scattered to isolated teaching posts across the islands. There they faced challenges ranging from language barriers and supply shortages to goats wandering into classrooms. These teachers reported their faith in the white supremacist mission of the schools as well as their despair at the racialized “backwardness” of their pupils. Some male teachers even went beyond their teaching duties and took up arms against Filipinos, proudly reporting the casualties of their “hunting” trips as an extension of their mission as teachers to “civilize” the islands. Unlike Carlisle, few Thomasites remained in their posts for long.
Despite the differences in the two projects, white teachers in both school systems reported similar methods and experiences. In both systems, teachers faced supply shortages, administrative challenges, and expressed both affection and antagonism toward students. Teaching Empire's most valuable contribution is Eittreim's examination of a handful of “crossover” teachers who taught in both systems. These teachers’ records confirm that firm belief in white supremacy, uplift through the classroom, and certainty in the unique difficulty of their work with Native and Filipino students were foundational backbones for both projects. Likewise, Eittreim's decision to follow teachers after they left their teaching positions serves to emphasize the importance of studying the individuals who enacted the US imperial system over decades of history. Thomasites and Carlisle teachers continued to shape both education and the Indian Service in their later careers, extending the reach of belief in white-led uplift into both school systems and social and economic programs targeting people of color long after they left their classrooms.
Eittreim is careful to note that her decision to highlight teacher experiences means that her work “does not interrogate the records of American Indian or Filipino peoples to a significant degree” and calls for further work in that area (p. 18). While the narrative includes testimony from Native students like Luther Standing Bear, Zitkála-Šá, and several Carlisle graduates who returned as faculty, the vast majority of the text focuses on white teachers’ expressed, often racist opinions about their students. In addition, Eittreim uses the word Sioux to refer to the students from Oceti Sakowin Oyate. The term means “enemy” and was weaponized against Lakota and Dakota peoples during the Plains Wars to present them as irredeemably fierce, whereas Lakota and Dakota mean “ally” and “friend.” The use of this term is unfortunate, since Eittreim shows throughout that she cares deeply about probing imperial narratives. However, the end result is imbalance. Without a significant counterbalance of student accounts, especially from Filipino students whose voices are entirely absent from their chapters, Teaching Empire tends to neglect the impact of institutional white supremacy teachers enacted against their students. Examining curricula used in these classrooms may have helped to shed further light on engagement between teachers and their students and given greater context to the claims teachers made about their work in their letters, diaries, and memoirs.
Teaching Empire makes a crucial contribution to the scholarship of empire and education history by putting its full analytical focus on the teachers who sought to enact US empire through their classrooms at Carlisle and in the Philippines. Scholars will find this book a useful framework from which to build deeper inquiry into these systems of erasure, the specific classroom materials and curricula that shaped those experiences, and the enduring legacy of late nineteenth-century paternalism in both education and policy.
