To Earn Their Place in Society:
Student Scrip and a Capitalist Education at Sherman Institute
Name: Vincent Veerbeek Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Jan Kok Date: August 14, 2020
In the late nineteenth century, off-reservation boarding schools became the instrument of choice for the United States federal government to integrate Indigenous communities into the body politic. By separating Native American children from their communities and placing them in federally-operated schools, white officials hoped to transform them culturally, politically and economically. This policy was increasingly called into question during the 1920s and 1930s as cruel and counterproductive. Despite reforms, however, non-reservation schools continued to operate as instruments of assimilation for several more decades. A telling example is the use of substitute currency, or scrip, as a new form of economic training introduced during the 1930s. One of the first off-reservation schools to adopt a scrip system was Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. In November of 1933, school administrators introduced a system of paper money to teach the school’s Native American pupils about life in a capitalist society. For the next eight years, students received payment in so-called Sherman scrip for work done in their vocational classes. They could then use this scrip to purchase necessities like clothes, as well as luxury items from the school store.
The existence of Sherman scrip raises critical questions about what local and federal officials wanted students to learn about economic affairs at this particular point in time, and why they chose a participatory system. Starting from the understanding that scrip was created for specific pedagogical, ideological and assimilationist purposes, this thesis attempts to explain how staff used scrip to structure student behavior and with which expectations. Essentially, scrip was a new way to teach the behaviors and values of American capitalism that schools had taught for decades. By engaging with scrip on a daily basis, students learned to use money in a way that school officials considered appropriate to the United States economy. Scrip complemented the school’s overall training program by allowing students to gain direct experience with a simulation of the American market economy. In the process, students interacted with each other as consumers and learned about the values of money and commodities. Whereas white officials believed that capitalism would determine the economic success of Native Americans, students navigated the scrip economy creatively and attached meanings of their own to the currency they earned.
Keywords: Scrip currency, capitalism, Sherman Institute, off-reservation boarding schools,
Introduction 5
Historical Background Historiography
Studying the Scrip System Sources and Methodology
Chapter One. The Off-Reservation Education System 18
Colonialism by Other Means
Education Away From the Reservation Educated to Be Useful
An Economic Education The Outing Program
Chapter Two. Scrip as Educational Practice 35
The Scrip System at Work Small-Scale Macroeconomics (L)earning Their Place
“The Best Grading System We Have Yet Found”
Chapter Three. The Value of Capitalism 50
Saving In Order to Spend Possessive Consumerism The Self and the Other Student Approaches to Scrip
Chapter Four. Scrip’s Contribution to Assimilation 64
Scrip as a Sherman Solution Local Practice, Federal Policy The Meriam Report’s Diagnosis
Economic Assimilation in the New Deal Era Making It Useful to Be Educated
Conclusion 79
Summary of Findings
Suggestions for Future Research
Introduction
Driving along the scenic Magnolia Avenue from downtown Riverside, California, it is easy to miss the school campus located near the intersection with Jackson Avenue. Hidden among the palm trees is Sherman Indian High School, which has a long history of educating young Native Americans.1 Initially established over a century ago to teach students about American life at the expense of their cultural background, those cultures have been front and center since the school came under Indigenous leadership in the 1970s. The only building that remains of the original campus today is the old administrative building, which serves as a museum and archive housing historical artifacts that bring various chapters of Sherman’s past to life. Athletics and band trophies line the walls, and display cases are filled with photographs and letters. In the back is the vault where the school superintendent once deposited student earnings, which now holds the museum’s oldest records. In one display case adjacent to the museum’s entrance, visitors encounter a particularly intriguing trace of the past: a small green piece of paper that at first glance resembles a one-dollar bill. On closer inspection, it reveals itself to be “Sherman Scrip,” donated by a 1941 graduate of the school. Worth fifty cents in scrip currency, this bill was part of the school’s effort to familiarize young Native Americans with life in a capitalist society.
Figure 1. Sherman scrip on display at the Sherman Indian Museum. Photo by author, December 2019.
1 The terms “Native American” and “Indigenous” are used interchangeably throughout this thesis for
the sake of variation. “Indian” is used primarily in relation to government activity. Wherever relevant, for instance in relation to specific communities or individuals, the appropriate name is used.
Historical Background
The history of what is today Sherman Indian High School began in 1902 when Sherman Institute opened its doors as a federal off-reservation boarding school for young Native Americans. Located on Cahuilla land, the school was one of twenty-five such institutions that the US government created in the final decades of the nineteenth century. As a century of military territorial expansion drew to a close, the United States began looking for ways to assimilate the sovereign Indigenous nations that were now within its borders. Essentially, as various scholars have argued, their solutions gave new life to settler colonialism and internal colonialism.2 On the one hand, the United States continued their efforts to control Indigenous
land and wealth, and erase Indigenous populations as distinct groups, which is inherent to settler colonialism.3 On the other hand, new policies were different from previous military efforts in
their emphasis on the “imposition of Western ideals.”4 Because Indigenous communities were
now effectively domestic populations, efforts to control them took the form of internal colonialism. This shift led to new policies that white reformers championed as benevolent, but effectively worked toward Indigenous erasure all the same.5 The two main pillars of the government’s new approach were allotment and education.6 Allotment transformed communal
land into plots of private property in an effort to make Native Americans abandon their way of life, and open up land for white settlement.7 In the same vein, a white education could teach the skills and attitudes needed for maintaining a Western lifestyle.
Native American education in what is currently the United States obviously did not start in the late nineteenth century, but originates in Indigenous communities. In most Native American societies, education was not a separate activity that happened in a classroom, but an
2 See, e.g., Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Fear-Segal,
White Man’s Club; Surface-Evans, “A Landscape of Assimilation and Resistance.”
3 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 2-5; Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment, 2-3. See Wolfe,
“Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” on settler colonialism in the United States. See also Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonialism” for a general theoretical overview.
4 Surface-Evans, “A Landscape of Assimilation and Resistance,” 575. Cf. Fear-Segal, White Man’s
Club, 13. See also Chávez, “Aliens in Their Native Lands” for a discussion of internal colonialism.
5 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 150. See also Wolfe, “After the Frontier,” 14. 6 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 41-42; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 84. 7 See, e.g., Hoxie, A Final Promise; Holm, The Great Confusion.
ongoing process that occurred through everyday experience.8 This way, children learned the values of their community, as well as the skills necessary to make a living. More than a preparation for adult life, education was a process of cultural transmission that was violently interrupted when the federal government removed children at a young age.9 Colonial authorities had obviously interfered with Indigenous knowledge systems well before the 1870s, but not on the same scale.10 Under the auspices of the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA),11 the federal government quickly moved from schools on and near reservations run by missionaries to institutions far from Indigenous communities run by government bureaucrats. The first such school was Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania, which opened in 1879.12 Here, Superintendent Richard Pratt immersed Native American children in American society in an ill-fated attempt to erase their cultures and transform them into white citizens. To this end, students were made to wear uniforms and march to classes in which they learned labor skills and rudimentary academics. Although they faced beatings and imprisonment for speaking their own languages or practicing their cultures, students found ways to maintain ties with their communities and make life in this foreign environment tolerable if not pleasant.
By the time Sherman Institute opened, the government operated a network of schools modeled after Carlisle across the American West that would remain in place until well after the Second World War. Over time, however, the system underwent several key transformations. The first shift came around the turn of the century, as optimism about the possibility of Indigenous integration into mainstream US society faded.13 Increasingly skeptical about the possibility of full assimilation, government officials closed several off-reservation schools and reduced the budgets of those that remained open. As a result, a system that had already cost the lives of many children was increasingly characterized by overcrowding, disease, and food shortages.14 These problems did not affect all schools equally, and Native Americans continued
8 See, e.g., Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 27-39; Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club,
49-54;Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues, 5-6.
9 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 248-249.
10 See, e.g., Connell-Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies;Reyhner and Eder, American
Indian Education, 14-58; Whalen, Native Students at Work, 22-25.
11 Called the Bureau of Indian Affairs today, this agency of the Interior Department was formally named
the Office of Indian Affairs until 1947, alternatively known as the Indian Service or the Indian Office.
12 Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Industrial School; Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club. 13 Hoxie, A Final Promise was among the first to address this development. 14 See, e.g., Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 404-406.
to use those same institutions to their advantage. Some students attended voluntarily because they wanted to learn certain skills, while others were sent by their families to be fed and clothed, or to learn about white society.15 Overall, however, negligence characterized off-reservation boarding schools, which led to a second transition in the 1930s. After the publication of a scathing report on Indian policy in 1928, and the appointment of activist John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933, the OIA changed its approach to assimilation once again.16 For the first time, Indigenous youth formally had a choice between life in their own communities, or life according to the citizenship that the United States had formally extended to all Native Americans in 1924.17 Even so, children continued to attend schools with a Eurocentric curriculum at great distances from their families until the late 1960s.
Historiography
The history of the American off-reservation boarding school system has increasingly been the subject of study since the 1970s, resulting in a rich body of literature. Early accounts by Margaret Connell-Szasz, Francis Prucha and Frederick Hoxie provided insight into the institutional structures of assimilation policy and federal education.18 In the 1990s, scholars such as David Wallace Adams and Michael Coleman used student narratives to complicate these early institutional histories.19 More recent work has further advanced academic understanding of government policy, such as Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s research on the role that ideas about race played in the development of off-reservation schools, and Cathleen Cahill’s study of federal employees in the field, including Native personnel.20 Aside from Connell-Szasz’s early work, however, most scholars focus on the heyday of the boarding school system. Two notable exceptions are books by Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder on the one hand, and K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa McCarty on the other, which have explored the history of
15 See, e.g., Child, Boarding School Seasons, 14-25; Gram, Education at the Edge of Empire, 151-156;
Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 63-76; Whalen, “Finding the Balance,” 139-140.
16 See, e.g., Holm, The Great Confusion, 182-198 on the New Deal era in Indian affairs.
17 See Bruyneel, “Challenging American Boundaries” on the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and its
implications for Native Americans. See also Steinman, “Sovereigns and Citizens?”
18 Connell-Szasz, Education and the American Indian; Prucha, The Churches and the Indian Schools;
Hoxie, A Final Promise.
19 Adams, Education for Extinction; Coleman, American Indian Children at School. 20 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club; Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers.
Indian education into the present.21 In the process, historians have begun to deconstruct the progressive façade of the 1930s to present a more complex story in which assimilation briefly subsided but did not cease until several decades later. Lomawaima and McCarty for instance argue that despite growing tolerance for Indigenous cultures, white officials still viewed certain cultural practices as a threat to American society.22 Finally, scholars have studied the off-reservation school system in a comparative context, comparing boarding and residential schools in the United States and Canada; analyzing child removal in the United States and Australia, and drawing parallels to British schools for the Irish.23
In addition to these studies of federal policies on schooling, scholars have looked at individual institutions and specific themes within education history. Among the first were Robert Trennert’s history of Phoenix Indian School, K. Tsianina Lomawaima’s oral history of Chilocco Indian School, and Brenda Child’s analysis of letters from Ojibwe students at Flandreau, Haskell and Pipestone.24 In recent years, scholars have provided new insights into
other off-reservation schools, including Carlisle, Haskell Institute, as well as the institutions in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.25 Others have studied reservation schools and other schools with a
more local character.26 In addition, scholars have addressed specific themes in the context of one or several schools, such as sports, music, and art.27 The school that has received perhaps the most attention is Sherman Institute, which has been the subject of multiple books, essays and dissertations.28 In particular, historians have looked at such topics as the school’s health conditions, the experiences of Hopi students, and efforts to market assimilation to local
21 Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education; Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian.” 22 Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 4-7. Cf. Bahr, The Students of Sherman, 6-7. 23 Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Coleman, American
Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling.
24 Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School; Lomawaima, They Called it Prairie Light; Child, Boarding
School Seasons.
25 Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Industrial School; Vuckovic, Voices from Haskell; Gram, Education at
the Edge of Empire.
26 Ellis, To Change Them Forever; Burich, The Thomas Indian School.
27 See Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do; Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart; Lentis, Colonized
through Art respectively.
28 Recent works include Bahr, The Students of Sherman; Trafzer, Sakiestewa Gilbert, and Sisquoc, The
audiences.29 Most relevant for the purposes of this thesis, Kevin Whalen’s work on student labor offers insight into the way Indigenous people approached Sherman’s vocational training and work programs.30 Together, these studies of individual institutions demonstrate that assimilationist policy manifested itself differently in local contexts, and that its impact on the lives of students and their communities was rarely straightforward. This way, scholarship continues to untangle the complex patchwork of strategies that made up federal education, alongside the diversity of responses it evoked from those who navigated the school system.
Growing interest in reconstructing the student perspective has also inspired debate surrounding questions of agency and memory. As new details emerged of the suffering students endured in boarding schools, so did accounts of their ability to make their experience into something positive. Specifically, the Indigenous notion of “turning the power,” which was first introduced to the scholarly debate by Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, has come to denote cultural resilience.31 Students made the most out of their time in school, and used their training in ways
that ran counter to federal intentions, for example to ensure the continued survival of their cultures. In order to account for student agency without disregarding the harm inflicted upon Indigenous peoples, Whalen suggests that the framework of cultural genocide can help contextualize student memory.32 Native Americans continuously found new ways to use the boarding school program to their advantage, but they always did so in the context of colonial structures intended to erase their identities.33Despite the centrality of cultural genocide to the boarding school past, scholars have only begun to incorporate it into their analyses relatively recently.34 The present study is in dialogue with these debates and indebted to the work of previous scholars, even if themes of cultural genocide and settler colonialism are not always at
29 Keller, Empty Beds; Sakiestewa Gilbert, Education Beyond the Mesas; Medina, “Selling Indians at
Sherman Institute.”
30 Whalen, Native Students at Work.
31 Trafzer, Keller, and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues, 1. As explained in Trafzer and Loupe, “From
Perris Indian School to Sherman Institute,” 33: “In the 1950s, Mary Lou Henry Trafzer used this term to describe the way Indian people turned negative power into positive means.”
32 Whalen, “Finding the Balance,” 137-140. Cf. Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment, 8-9. 33 See Davidson, Cultural Genocide for an analysis of cultural genocide in the American context. 34 See, for example, Katanski, Learning to Write Indian; Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Indian School,
4-7; Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 107; Trafzer, Smith, and Sisquoc, Shadows of
the forefront. What this research does contribute is insight into lived realities at Sherman Institute during the 1930s, which may allow for more precise discussion about these themes.
Another area of inquiry that is relevant to the boarding school past is the history of Native American economies. In recent decades, scholarship of Indigenous economic history has primarily focused on labor, inspired in large part by the work of Martha Knack and Alice Littlefield. In the introduction to their 1996 collection Native Americans and Wage Labor, they argued that most historians had overlooked and misrepresented Indigenous uses of wage labor.35 Since then, scholars have explored Indigenous engagements with the capitalist labor market in a variety of case studies.36 William Bauer and Cathleen Cahill have for instance demonstrated how communities on the Round Valley and Hoopa Valley reservations of northern California incorporated off-reservation agriculture and federal service work into their economies.37 In relation to the study of wage labor, historians have also explored how
Indigenous communities adapted their understandings of domesticity and the division of labor as they engaged with Western influences.38 As scholars have gained insight into these issues,
there has also been a theoretical shift. Specifically, there is an increasingly nuanced understanding of the co-existence of different economic systems beyond the binary categories of tradition and modernity.39 While the economic practices of white and Indigenous communities obviously have distinct historical roots, they are not mutually exclusive in the present.40 Finally, because ethnocentric ideas about economic modernity inspired the white officials responsible for Indian education, scholars have also explored the place of labor in off-reservation boarding schools.41 After all, one way in which Indigenous people learned about capitalist practices and values was through education in white institutions.
35 Knack and Littlefield, “Native American Labor,” 3-6; 25-28.
36 See Harmon, O’Neill, and Rosier, “Interwoven Economic Histories” for an overview. Notable works
include Hosmer and O’Neill, Native Pathways; Williams, Indigenous Women and Work; Usner, Indian
Work.
37 Bauer, We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here; Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 170-206.
Children from both communities attended Sherman Institute in the 1930s.
38 See, e.g., Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers; Piatote,
Domestic Subjects; Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light.
39 See, for instance, O’Neill, “Rethinking Modernity,” 3.
40 O’Neill, 12. Cf. Usner, Indian Work, 145; Whalen, Native Students at Work, 15.
41 See, for instance, Whalen, Native Students at Work; Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light,
Despite the growing scholarly interest in Indigenous engagements with capitalism, key areas remain understudied. Most notably, studies on wage labor rarely address how Native Americans learned to use money or spent their wages.42 Although there is a general understanding that consumption was a key part of the federal vision for Indigenous families, how Native people entered the public sphere as consumers has not been explored in detail.43 Likewise, the Indigenous adoption of Western forms of currency and its impact on relations between Indigenous communities and the state has been explored for Canada but not the United States.44 While the present study may not provide insight into Indigenous money use as such, it does add to the conversation by illustrating how boarding schools used money for educational purposes and trained Native Americans to be consumers. The latter is particularly relevant considering that scholars have focused on the ways in which schools trained students to become laborers rather than consumers. While historians have investigated labor programs in detail, they generally touch upon the question of how students learned to spend only in passing.45 As
such, it is clear that capitalism was a pillar of federal education, but how it shaped everyday life in schools has barely been investigated. One specific way in which white officials introduced capitalism to young Native Americans was through scrip, the educational substitute currency that Sherman Institute and other schools used during the 1930s. Although an image of Sherman scrip has been featured in two recent publications on the school’s history, its place in that history has not been analyzed.46 This in spite of the fact that scrip presents an intriguing case where the school’s ideological framework was given material form.
Studying the Scrip System
The first off-reservation school to establish a simulation economy on their campus was Salem Indian School in Oregon, introducing a system of credit for students to acquire government
42 Harmon, O’Neill and Rosier, “Interwoven Economic Histories,” 707. Most scholarly works that do
analyze patterns of consumption are concerned with the colonial period.
43 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 47-50; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 128; Piatote,
Domestic Subjects, 111.
44 Gettler, Colonialism’s Currency.
45 See, e.g., Adams, Education for Extinction, 154; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 82.
46 Trafzer, Sakiestewa Gilbert, and Sisquoc, The Indian School on Magnolia Avenue, 40; Trafzer, Smith,
and Sisquoc, Shadows of Sherman Institute, 35. Both texts offer general comments on the school’s economic training, but do not provide information on the scrip system itself.
supplies around 1932. Officials at Sherman Institute implemented their currency system, known as scrip, in the fall of 1933.47 For the next eight years, the school’s vocational students received payment in Sherman scrip for the work they did in their classes. This money could then be used to pay for necessities like room and board, as well as luxuries like haircuts and tickets to social events. In subsequent years, several other off-reservation schools established similar programs of their own. For example, Albuquerque Indian School was planning its own scrip system as early as 1934.48 Initially, school superintendents communicated among themselves to exchange ideas about scrip. Nevertheless, the federal government soon encouraged other schools to look into scrip, as is evident from correspondence between Sherman Institute and some of the other schools.49 In February of 1937, local and federal officials came together at Chilocco Indian School for a special conference “to discuss the use and extension of use of scrip among Indian school children.”50 Overall, Sherman Institute provides a useful starting point for investigating
the way that scrip changed capitalist education in off-reservation boarding schools. In 1936, the OIA described the school’s scrip economy as “the most complete system in force of anyone in the Service.”51 Clearly, Sherman’s scrip system, in addition to being one of the first, also
developed into one of the most elaborate.
With its scrip system, Sherman Institute essentially created a microcosm of American consumer society on its campus, which draws attention to a number of important issues. For one, it provides a uniquely visible example of the way that school officials taught abstract values
47 It is worth addressing at this point that despite its name, Sherman scrip bears little resemblance to
other currency systems of the same name. While potential parallels in both motivation and execution warrant closer investigation, the present study does not explore them further for reasons of scope and space. For a discussion of other scrip systems see, e.g., Lurvink, Beyond Racism and Poverty; Schussman, “Making Real Money.”
48 “Program for the Coming Year,” Narrative Report, 1933-1934, Albuquerque School: 1910-35,
Superintendents’ Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, 1910-1935, Record Group 75, National Archives Building, Washington DC (hereafter Superintendents’ Reports, RG 75, NAB).
49 See, e.g., Haskell Institute Boys’ Adviser Robert King to Donald Biery, March 20, 1936, General
Correspondence, 1933-1948, Box 101, Records of Sherman Institute, Record Group 75, National Archives and Records Administration Pacific Region, Riverside (hereafter RSI, RG 75, NAR).
50 “Oklahoma Personnel Holds Series of Meetings,” Indians at Work 4, no. 14, March 1, 1937. See also
“Indian Service Meetings,” Indian Education, no. 7, Feb. 1, 1937.
51 Lawrence A. Correll to Donald Biery, April 3, 1936, General Correspondence, 1933-1948, Box 99,
and attempted to encourage certain patterns of behavior. Unlike earlier efforts to inculcate students with a capitalist worldview, scrip permeated every aspect of school life. In the process, the school transformed everyday interactions into performances of capitalism. This way, school administrators hoped to teach what they perceived to be the correct use of money. Because most students came from communities that had adopted wage labor, school administrators assumed they were familiar with the market economy and the use of cash money, but had not fully embraced capitalist values.52 Furthermore, the system’s emphasis on capitalism raises questions about the expectations that both school and government officials had of Native American communities in the 1930s. In particular, scrip illustrates Andrew Woolford’s point that processes of settler colonialism occur on both the federal and the local level, and through interactions between human and nonhuman “actors.”53 Whereas federal policy determined the course of Indian education, it did not prevent local employees from executing that policy as they saw fit.54 To gain a better understanding of what scrip was and why school administrators
introduced it, this thesis will address the following central question: How did the scrip system that Sherman Institute implemented during the 1930s function as a pedagogical tool, an ideological tool, and to what extent was it an assimilationist tool?
This question will be answered over the course of four chapters, which are structured as follows. First, chapter one will outline in greater detail the history of the off-reservation boarding school system in the context of changing expectations about the future of Native Americans. It will also locate Sherman Institute within that history, and describe the economic training that schools offered. Next, chapter two will address how scrip changed life at Sherman and was supposed to affect student behavior. As a pedagogical tool, scrip encouraged a specific set of behaviors in the context of an educational environment modeled after the American economy. In this manner, scrip complemented classroom education by offering practical experience, and shaped student expectations of their life under capitalism. Chapter three will then ask what values school administrators wanted students to internalize through their use of
52 John Collier, “Circular No. 3081,” June 28, 1935, General Correspondence, 1933-1948, Box 104,
RSI, RG 75, NAR. With this circular, the OIA restricted Sherman Institute’s enrollment to California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Idaho and Arizona. Soon, the vast majority of students came from reservations in California, most of which had limited cash economies by this time. See, e.g., Whalen,
Native Students at Work, 21-22 on the experiences of southern California communities with wage labor.
53 Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment, 3-5. 54 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 258.
scrip. As an ideological tool, scrip reconceptualized values of thrift and possessive individualism in the context of changing ideas about ethical consumption and economic citizenship. At the same time, students approached scrip with an ideological framework of their own and used it in ways that ran counter to school expectations. Chapter four situates scrip in its historical context to see whether the system’s approach to capitalist behavior and values made it an assimilationist tool. School administrators and federal officials had their own reasons to embrace the scrip system, and then abandon it in the early 1940s. Knowing more about those motivations can shine light on the development of the scrip system and its relation to a federal education policy in transition. The conclusion, finally, offers a summary of the findings from this research and potential avenues for future research.
Sources and Methodology
This investigation of Sherman scrip is based on historical documents from the Sherman Indian Museum and the US National Archives location in Riverside, California, as well as digitized material from those and other archives available online. The most important sources in these archives include letters, reports and school newspapers. First, correspondence from Sherman Superintendent Donald Biery, although incomplete, contains important clues about the officials involved in the scrip system and their perspectives. Second, annual reports from this period indicate how school officials evaluated the scrip system, and how it fit the larger goals of both the school and the federal government. Lastly, school newspaper the Sherman Bulletin and yearbooks provide glimpses of scrip’s everyday use and student experiences with the system.55
Together, these sources offer an impression of the past that is inevitably fragmented and informed by the interpretations of white authorities. Although sources like the school newspaper occasionally contain traces of student perspectives, the nature of the available source material makes an in-depth analysis of student agency difficult. Student testimony in the form of letters or other personal accounts such as memoirs and oral history are necessary to tell a more complete story. Even in the absence of such sources, however, it is safe to say that students used scrip for their own purposes, the same way they made other aspects of the boarding school
55 See, e.g., Katanski, Learning to Write Indian; Bahr, The Students of Sherman, 28; Lentis, Colonized
through Art, 168-169 on boarding school newspapers. The Sherman Bulletin printed writing by students,
but their comments mostly echoed school rhetoric. Nonetheless, the newspaper is useful as a source of practical information about the scrip system and offers glimpses of everyday life.
curriculum their own.56 Overall, by bringing these disparate sources into dialogue with one another, they can begin to offer valuable insights about the way the scrip system functioned.
Although the present study is therefore primarily an institutional history of Sherman scrip, it does not ignore student agency entirely. To the contrary, because school officials created the system with specific expectations as to how students would use scrip. To understand those expectations, Robin Bernstein’s theory of “scriptive things” offers a useful methodological framework.57 This method starts from the assumption that it may not be possible to determine how individual historical actors used an item, but that things always come with certain expectations of how they are to be used. Scriptive things are created with a particular set of behaviors in mind, even if those do not preclude users from engaging them in a creative manner.58 The creator’s intentions thus translate themselves into a series of prompts or scripts that a person engages with when they use an item. Whereas some prompts are “determined” and unavoidable, like reading to a book, others are “implied” and expected but ultimately inessential, like feeling a certain way about a book’s content.59 Significantly, such
an analysis does not ascribe agency to objects, nor does it deny agency to human beings. In Bernstein’s words: “agency emerges through constant engagement with the stuff of our lives.”60
Because scriptive things exist in a specific context and are created to be used a certain way, they invite users to engage them in a particular fashion without direct intervention from an item’s creator. Originally used to study race in nineteenth-century children’s culture, scholars have applied Bernstein’s framework to a variety of case studies, demonstrating its broader relevance.61
In the context of Sherman scrip, this methodology can illustrate how the use of substitute currency restructured school life. By implementing a monetary system, school officials created scripts for everyday interactions according to the logic of American capitalism. Nevertheless,
56 As Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, 29 asserts: “Much of student life was unobserved by
and unknown to school staff or administrators,” and went unrecorded as a result.
57 R. Bernstein, Racial Innocence. 58 R. Bernstein, 8.
59 R. Bernstein, 74. 60 R. Bernstein, 12.
61 For instance, Trudeau, “An Indigenous Woman’s Perspective,” analyzes theatrical representations of
violence against Indigenous women; Druker, “Play Sculptures and Picturebooks,” studies play sculptures and picture books; and Walser, “Under Description” examines fugitive slave advertisements.
in doing so, they inevitably left room for students to use scrip creatively and subversively. In a sense, the scrip system bears some resemblance to the plays and pageants performed in boarding schools, which John Gram argues constituted a type of interactive education.62 In both cases, “students might not understand or agree with the worldview that school officials held,” but for the duration of their performance, they acted according to its basic principles.63 As discussed in chapters two and three, students adopted the roles of employees and consumers when they used scrip. Seeing scrip as a scriptive thing makes it possible to understand those roles, and use the available source material to study the currency’s “documented, probable, and possible uses.”64
Such an investigation may not provide concrete evidence as to how students acted, but it demonstrates the context in which their agency manifested itself, highlighting the centrality of performance to capitalist education. Crucially, despite being part of the school’s economic training, scrip had deep cultural significance that can only be understood by exploring the intersections between its material and ideological dimensions. Such an investigation may in turn shine new light on the place of capitalism and consumerism within Sherman Institute.
62 Gram, “Acting Out Assimilation.” 63 Gram, 257.
Chapter One. The Off-Reservation Education System
Although home to more than a thousand students from dozens of Indigenous communities by the early 1930s, Sherman Institute was only one cog in the vast machinery of federal education. By the time the Indian Wars came to a symbolic end when the United States massacred three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890, a new type of assault on Native American ways of life was already spreading across the nation. Starting in 1879, Indigenous children were taken far from their communities to live in schools run like military institutions. This education system was designed to “kill the Indian and save the man,” as Richard Pratt infamously summarized his misguided ambitions.65 Although subsequent generations of white reformers
had different ideas about the future of Native Americans and the significance of federal education, off-reservation schools continued to operate in a similar fashion into the 1930s. In order to understand the context in which Sherman officials created scrip, it is crucial to address how changing expectations of Indigenous peoples shaped the boarding school system. Section one describes how white policy makers first conceptualized these schools in the late nineteenth century. Section two then explores how these schools functioned, paying particular attention to Carlisle Indian School and Sherman Institute. Section three discusses how changing perceptions of Native Americans affected federal education in the early decades of the twentieth century. Section four addresses the changing place of economic training within the boarding schools over time. Section five, finally, describes the history of the outing programs, which were an integral part of that training.
Colonialism by Other Means
The off-reservation boarding school system originated in the decades after the Civil War, when ideas about the place of Indigenous peoples in the American nation began to shift. Initially, the Grant administration’s Peace Policy allowed Indigenous communities to exist as distinct entities within the United States as long as they stayed on reservations.66 By the end of the 1870s, however, this policy became difficult to maintain due to Indigenous resistance and an increasing demand for land.67 At the same time, discussions about the future of Native
65 See Momaday, “The Stones at Carlisle,” 45 for a discussion of Pratt’s use of this phrase.
66 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 18-19. See Keller, American Protestantism and United States
Indian Policy for an analysis of the Peace Policy and its ideology.
Americans became tied to ideas about the United States as a white nation.68 Conflating civilization with Americanization, many white reformers believed that if Native Americans adopted US culture, they could become “civilized” by white standards.69 Particularly influential in these debates were white middle-class organizations like the Indian Rights Association, the Lake Mohonk Conference for the Friends of the Indian, and the Women’s National Indian Association.70 Despite ideological and strategic differences, reformers generally agreed that the government had an obligation to help Native Americans become civilized and self-sufficient. Hence, they conceptualized social programs as a way to repay national debts to Indigenous communities while simultaneously assimilating them into white society.71 Underneath the grand rhetoric of civilization and assimilation were more practical concerns, however, as reformers considered Indigenous land ownership a “barrier to prosperity.”72 Allotment broke up reservations and forced Native Americans to live like white Americans. In the process, they might come to understand the value of private property, while the next generation learned it in government schools.73 Humanitarian rhetoric thus cloaked agendas of settler colonialism and
nation-building in which education came to play a pivotal role.
Because of the connections between nationalism and civilization, the new education campaign involved an unprecedented effort to recreate Indigenous people in the American self-image. By this time, the North American continent had a long history of attempts by colonial powers to replace Indigenous education systems.74 Unlike previous generations, however, policy makers now created schools not just to convert Native Americans to Christianity, but to have them become US citizens.75 White officials generally believed that by learning values of capitalism, republicanism and Protestantism, Indigenous people could assimilate into the
68 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 63-65.
69 Adams, Education for Extinction, 12-16; Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 35-37; Holm, The Great
Confusion, 14-17; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race 73-77.
70 See Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 25-32; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 29-31;
Fear-Segal, 34-41; and Adams, Education for Extinction, 7-12 for details on these organizations.
71 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 30-32. 72 Hoxie, A Final Promise, 47.
73 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 53-54; Piatote, Domestic Subjects, 101-102.
74 See, e.g., Connell-Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies;Reyhner and Eder, American
Indian Education, 14-58; Trafzer, Kellen, and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues, 7-11.
United States.76 Nevertheless, their status within the nation was the source of significant debate.77 Many white Americans viewed Indigenous people as racially distinct, and some reformers doubted whether they could reach the same standard of civilization. Others believed that Indigenous peoples were different primarily because of their environment and could under the right circumstances achieve cultural and economic equality within a generation.78 What they generally agreed on was the power of education to bring change and exert control over Indigenous communities. Hence, the Indian Office developed a network of schools on and off the reservation. Because reformers considered children’s proximity to their communities an impediment to the civilization process, boarding schools far away from Indigenous communities soon became the method of choice.79 One notable proponent of these ideas was Thomas Jefferson Morgan, who became Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1889. Under his leadership, the OIA expanded the off-reservation school system that had begun to take shape over the course of the previous decade.80 In these institutions, children could live in an
environment shaped entirely according to American values.
The off-reservation school was first conceptualized in the late 1870s, when army captain Richard Pratt founded the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Pratt was among those who firmly believed in the possibility of total assimilation, and he thought the best way for Native Americans to become law-abiding members of the American middle class was through “a combination of labor and immersion within White, protestant culture.”81 According to Pratt,
Indigenous people should enter United States society in order to learn from it. He began developing his vision of Indian education while overseeing seventy-two prisoners of war from the Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Caddo nations at Fort Marion in Florida in 1875.82 Pratt used the opportunity to teach the prisoners English and inculcate them with a Protestant work ethic. When their sentence ended three years later, he convinced twenty-two of
76 Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 54. 77 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 31.
78 Fear-Segal, 33.
79 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 30; Adams, Education for Extinction, 35-36.
80 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 73-77; Adams, Education for Extinction, 161-163; Reyhner and Eder,
American Indian Education, 89-91.
81 Whalen, “Finding the Balance,” 29.
82 See Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club for a detailed discussion of Pratt’s military career and the Fort
them to continue their education. Seventeen of them, as well as fifty newly recruited Native children, were enrolled at Hampton Institute, a boarding school for African American freedmen in Virginia.83 Not entirely satisfied with the arrangement, Pratt continued to lobby for his own school exclusively for Native American children.84 In 1879, he received funds to transform a complex of old army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, into the first off-reservation boarding school. Its first year, the Carlisle Industrial School enrolled an initial cohort of 150 students between the ages of eight and ten, mostly from the northern plains.85 Within ten years, the school enrolled over a thousand children from across the continent.
Education Away From the Reservation
A closer examination of life at Carlisle provides an impression of the way the boarding school system initially operated. Upon arrival, the first step in the civilization process was an outward transformation: staff cut children’s hair and replaced their clothes with military uniforms.86
These uniforms were an indication of what their life would be like for the next five years.87
Carlisle was run like a military institution: children marched everywhere, lived according to a strictly regimented schedule, and were grouped in companies by age and gender.88 Those who transgressed Pratt’s rules faced corporal punishment and imprisonment.89 These disciplinary measures were intended to control student behavior, shape their views on sexual morality, and to prevent children from engaging with their cultures. Nevertheless, students found ways to resist the school’s control over their minds and bodies, ranging from disobedient behavior to
83 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 103-135 discusses the significance of Hampton Institute for federal
Indian education. See also Adams, Education for Extinction, 44-48.
84 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 25.
85 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 31. Although this was the average age the government had in
mind for boarding school students, the actual age of pupils varied considerably. Reyhner and Eder,
American Indian Education, 138 point out that the average age at Carlisle was fifteen by 1887.
86 See, e.g., Adams, Education for Extinction, 100-108; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 230-240. 87 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 39, and Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 283 both mention the
program length. Much like the average age, however, students’ time in school varied considerably.
88 See, for instance, Adams, Education for Extinction, 118-119; Fear-Segal, 171-172.
89 See, e.g., Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 185-188; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark
escape attempts.90 As for the school’s curriculum, children took vocational and academic classes, so that they could in theory devote half their time to each.91 The vocational program consisted of classes like carpentry, agriculture, and laundering; academic courses included elementary subjects like reading, arithmetic, and history. Students often spent most of their time working, however, as they were responsible for the bulk of the school’s upkeep, including cooking, cleaning, and construction work.92 Once pupils had learned sufficient English, they were also sent to work for local families through the outing program, as discussed at the end of this chapter. Finally, students took part in a range of extracurricular activities like music and debating, which offered enjoyment and escape but were just as integral to assimilation.93
During the 1880s, Pratt’s work at Carlisle inspired the federal government to support the creation of two dozen off-reservation schools in the western United States. Pratt had used photographs and carefully staged events highlighting the transformation of students to sell the off-reservation school as a viable assimilation strategy.94 The first western school to open was
the Forest Grove Indian School in Oregon in 1880, which later relocated to Salem and was renamed the Salem Indian School.95 Over the following two decades, similar institutions opened
throughout the American West. Schools in the Midwest included Haskell Institute in Kansas (1884), Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma (1884) and Mount Pleasant in Michigan (1894). In the Southwest, some of the notable institutions included Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico (1890), Phoenix Indian School in Arizona (1891) and Perris Indian School in California (1892).96 By the turn of the twentieth century, there were twenty-five of these schools in total, as well as almost two hundred reservation schools.97 Because the off-reservations schools generally followed the Carlisle model, there were important similarities between them. All schools for example implemented a strict English-only policy, a military culture, and a
half-90 Adams, Education for Extinction, 222-238 lists various forms of resistance. See also Trafzer, Keller,
and Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues, 22-24; Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 162-170.
91 See, e.g., Whalen, Native Students at Work, 13.
92 Whalen, Native Students at Work, 36; Adams, Education for Extinction, 149-152; Child, Boarding
School Seasons, 69-81; Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 112-114.
93 See, for instance, Parkhurst, To Win the Indian Heart, and Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do. 94 Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 166-168.
95 See Collins, “The Broken Crucible of Assimilation” for a history of the Forest Grove School. 96 Adams, Education for Extinction, 57 presents a complete list of schools and their opening dates. 97 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 31.
half curriculum with a strong emphasis on labor training.98 Nonetheless, despite their shared commitment to the assimilation campaign, each institution has its own unique history. In their day-to-day operations, schools were influenced by such factors as the views of the school superintendent and other staff members, the vicinity of Indigenous communities, and the nature of the local economy.
The last non-reservation school to open was Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, which first started teaching students in 1902. This new school took the place of the off-reservation school that had been established ten years earlier in the nearby town of Perris. The reason for the move cited at the time was an inadequate water supply at the Perris site, although scholars have argued that the business interests of Superintendent Harwood Hall and his associates were perhaps an equally important motivation.99 The establishment of an Indian school, which was connected to downtown Riverside by tram, was certainly beneficial to the local economy. An experienced member of the Indian Service, Hall used his experiences as superintendent of the Phoenix Indian School to attract local and foreign visitors who wanted to witness Indian education first-hand.100 In the earliest years, Sherman students came mostly from
Indigenous communities in southern California, but enrollment quickly expanded. By 1909, the school enrolled 550 students from forty-three different communities and the student body continued to grow until the early 1930s.101 Their life was not unlike that of Indigenous youth at other schools, as they marched to class, joined music clubs and went outing on local farms. Its education program was similar as well, with rudimentary academics, but an overall emphasis on vocational work.102 Although Sherman Institute was located close to rapidly industrializing Los Angeles, the school offered training in both industrial and agricultural work.103 In characteristic fashion for the early twentieth century, school administrators placed particular emphasis on manual labor.
98 Archuleta, Child, and Lomawaima, Away from Home, 33.
99 Whalen, Native Students at Work, 29. See also Trafzer and Loupe, “From Perris Indian School to
Sherman Institute,” 22; Sakiestewa Gilbert, Education Beyond the Mesas, 35-37.
100 Medina, “Selling Indians at Sherman Institute,” 112. 101 Bahr, The Students of Sherman, 20.
102 “Historical,” Narrative Report, 1932, Sherman Institute: 1921-33, Superintendents’ Reports, RG 75,
NAB. As was true at Carlisle, the average education at Sherman initially lasted five years. Between 1916 and 1926, grades were added so that the school eventually offered eight years of total education.
103 Sakiestewa Gilbert, Education Beyond the Mesas, 44-45 describes the role of the Sherman Farm in
Figure 2. Students marching on the parade grounds of Sherman Institute, circa 1905. Photograph courtesy of the Sherman Indian Museum.
Educated to Be Useful
Around the turn of the century, a combination of practical concerns and changing expectations led to a gradual shift in perspective on federal education. For one, the schools did not live up to their promise of complete assimilation. Despite Pratt’s best efforts to prepare students for life in white communities, surveys revealed that most graduates returned to reservations.104 Back
home, they often found limited job opportunities and work that involved skills and technologies that were different from the ones with which they had become familiar in school.105 To make matters worse, early generations of returned students in particular faced cultural alienation, feeling out of place in both Indigenous and white communities. Overall, schools contributed to processes of acculturation rather than assimilation, bringing Native Americans closer to white society but failing to transform them completely.106Moreover, enrollment figures far exceeded
104 Adams, Education for Extinction, 287-290; Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Indian School, 24. 105 See, for example, Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 178-184; Reyhner and Eder,
American Indian Education, 193-199; Gram, Education at the Edge of Empire, 66 on the difficulties
that returned students faced.
graduation rates at most schools, indicating that few students actually completed their training.107 Because the Carlisle system was not delivering model citizens, some reformers looked for alternatives. Several off-reservation schools closed between 1905 and 1925, while new day schools were opened and more Native American children attended public school.108 At the same time, however, the enrollment at the remaining off-reservation institutions increased. This discrepancy was caused in part by the absence of high schools on reservations, and by the fact that white Americans did not always want to open their public schools to Native Americans.109 Despite renewed debate over the right course of action, policy makers agreed that some form of government education was still necessary.
What that education could achieve was less clear, however. As initial optimism about rapid assimilation dissipated, the ideologies behind Indian policy began to shift as well. Some white reformers adjusted their expectations of what assimilation could achieve, but remained cautiously optimistic that Native Americans could reach a level of civilization in due time.110
Others felt vindicated in their belief that Indigenous peoples were racially distinct and incapable of achieving full equality. In their mind, assimilation could only prepare Indigenous peoples for life on the socio-economic periphery alongside other ethnic minorities.111 Government officials also became preoccupied with the extent to which education could make Native Americans not only self-sufficient, but useful to white society, especially in an economic sense.112 Even though questions of usefulness and dependence had informed the debate over Indian education from the beginning, they now became the sole focus for some officials. Foremost among them was Estelle Reel, who oversaw the education system as the Superintendent of Indian Schools between 1898 and 1910.113 In this capacity, she created a guideline for school curricula, the 1901 Course of Study for the Indian Schools, which reflected the belief that Native Americans
107 Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Indian School, 2: “Only 758 of over 10,500 students who were enrolled
at Carlisle ever graduated.” Graduation rates at Sherman were likewise low in the early years.
108 Adams, Education for Extinction, 319-321 offers a detailed overview of the number of schools in
operation during this period, as well as enrollment statistics for each type of institution. See also Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club, 99-100; Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 151.
109 See, e.g., Bauer, “Round Valley Indian Families at the Sherman Indian Institute,” 403-404. 110 Adams, Education for Extinction, 309.
111 Hoxie, A Final Promise, 209.
112 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 81.
were capable of limited intellectual achievement.114 These guidelines primarily suggested activities like sewing and gardening, which would serve a practical purpose but required little mental effort. Even for supposedly academic subjects like history, Reel encouraged discussion of such topics as agriculture in Indigenous and white societies.115 Ultimately, the Course of
Study displays a pragmatism rooted in racial bias that was far removed from the high-minded
aspirations of Pratt’s generation.
Although off-reservation schools certainly adopted parts of federal curricula like Reel’s, policy changes did not always have an immediate impact on everyday life. Numerous scholars have for instance pointed out that the life of a student in 1890 would have been similar to that of a young Native American attending the same school three decades later.116 As such, the ideological shifts of the early twentieth century only gradually affected everyday life in off-reservation schools. Sherman Institute presents an intriguing case in point, because the school first opened during Reel’s tenure as Superintendent of Indian Schools. The priority of manual labor is perhaps the most telling reflection of this fact. Even so, the school also boasted a rapidly expanding extracurricular program of sports clubs, literary societies and volunteer organizations. Musical skill in particular served as a marker of assimilation and was used to highlight student progress to white audiences.117 Discrepancies between policy and practice are not particularly surprising given the diversity of perspectives among the hundreds of Indian Service employees. Moreover, employees often stayed in the service for most of their careers, and were able to exert considerable influence on the course of federal policy.118 Although the relation between federal and local initiatives was not always straightforward, changing attitudes among Washington officials had major consequences for schools across the country. Most significantly, the growing pessimism about the effectiveness of off-reservation schools was translated into budget cuts.119 To make ends meet, schools eliminated parts of their curriculum, rationed food, and relied even more heavily on student labor for school maintenance.
114 Lomawaima, “Estelle Reel,” 12-15; Fear-Segal; White Man’s Club, 122-123; Reyhner and Eder,
American Indian Education, 96-99; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 75.
115 Reel, Course of Study for the Indian Schools, 143.
116 See, e.g., Adams, Education for Extinction, 318; Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 47;
Gram, Education at the Edge of Empire, 16; Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 107.
117 Medina, “Selling Indians at Sherman Institute,” 108. 118 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 258.
While local officials could run their schools with relatively little federal interference for almost four decades, growing criticism eventually made reforms inevitable. In 1928, an independent committee that had been appointed by Congress two years earlier published their findings on the state of Indian policy. The Problem of Indian Administration, commonly known as the Meriam Report, painted a picture of bureaucratic incompetence, which had increased poverty and government dependence among Indigenous communities.120 In response, the committee presented ways to make federal policy more efficient, reforming rather than renouncing assimilation.121 At the same time, however, the survey team placed the individual choice of Native Americans front and center.122 While unprecedented, this new approach was not unconditional: Indigenous people could choose not to become part of white society as long as they adopted a certain standard of “health and decency.”123 Concerning off-reservation schools, the investigators listed various problems, including disease, child labor and inadequate training.124 In light of this criticism, off-reservation schools began to improve their programs to
serve the needs of individual students better. At Sherman Institute, student councils replaced military companies, and the lower grades were phased out until the school formally became a vocational high school teaching grades seven through twelve by 1934.125 The curriculum was updated to include industrial and agricultural trades like auto-mechanics and cosmetology.126 Although Sherman’s new education program initially followed the old half-half model, classroom education was now explicitly in service to vocational training.127 Despite progressive reforms, Sherman employees continued to educate students in the understanding that the majority of young Native Americans were best suited for manual labor.
Additional changes to Indian policy followed after John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. Having called for reforms throughout the 1920s, he was now in charge of implementing new policies. Ideologically, Collier represented a generation of white
120 See, e.g., Burich, The Thomas Indian School, 7-13; Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education,
207-208, and Adams, Education for Extinction, 331-333 on the contents of the Meriam Report.
121 Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 249; Adams, Education for Extinction, 333. 122 Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 65-66.
123 Meriam et al., The Problem of Indian Administration, 86-90.
124 Meriam et al., The Problem of Indian Administration, 11-14. Cf. Child, Boarding School Seasons,
40-43; Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 406-407; Burich, The Thomas Indian School, 10-12.
125 Narrative Report, 1934, Sherman Institute: 1934-36, Superintendents’ Reports, RG 75, NAB. 126 Bahr, The Students of Sherman, 44.
reformers who wanted to protect Indigenous ways of life and steer policy away from unconditional assimilation.128 These ideas were at the core of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which ended allotment and granted limited sovereignty to Indigenous nations who adopted constitutions.129 In the realm of Indian education, Collier closed several smaller off-reservation schools, hired Native teachers, and encouraged superintendents to offer bilingual and bicultural education.130 In line with his belief that the future of Native American communities was on reservations, he also urged schools to focus on agricultural training relevant to the area in which they were located.131 Sherman Institute’s enrollment area was reduced in 1935, although the school did not adopt a reservation-centered program until the early 1940s. While the New Deal era certainly constituted a historic shift, Collier’s legacy is complicated. Federal officials were less interested in making Indigenous people useful to the general economy, but they sought to incorporate their communities into the American nation all the same. As such, the OIA still made policy in the understanding that they knew what was best for Indigenous communities, economically as well as culturally.132 Moreover, contrary to
the Meriam Report’s call for decentralized authority, the federal government continued to exert considerable influence over school curricula and budgets.133 As a result, neither assimilation nor off-reservation education disappeared under Collier but they did take new forms, and economic training was no exception.
An Economic Education
A key component of the boarding school system was an introduction to the American economy, which involved practical as well as ideological training. In line with their views on assimilation, late-nineteenth-century reformers also developed distinct ideas about the place of Native Americans in the US economy. As Margaret Jacobs points out, many imagined civilization in
128 See Whalen, Native Students at Work, 128-135, and Holm, The Great Confusion, 182-189 for recent
discussions of Collier’s views and policies. See also Kelly, The Assault on Assimilation, and Philp, John
Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform.
129 See, e.g., Whalen, 143-144; Holm, The Great Confusion, 188-189; Reyhner and Eder, American
Indian Education, 209-210; Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers, 257-259.
130 Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race, 407; Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 73. 131 Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 71.
132 Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 229-230; Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an
Indian,” 69-73; Wolfe, “After the Frontier,” 34-39.
