Kimberly Bingaman, Civilization out of Savagery: Construcions of Motherhood and American Indian Boarding Schools From 1879-1934 (2003)

  One of the enduring questions of the nineteenth century was how to deal with the Indian tribes who originally inhabited the continent. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the tribes mostly were militarily defeated and contained. The government was left with the question of how to effectively deal with them. The new goal was to successfully integrate the tribes into the dominant culture. Integration, however, was viewed as difficult because of the common perception that American Indians were uncivilized and savage. Education was seen as a means by which the American Indians could eventually be assimilated into society.

  In 1891 Congress enacted the Indian Appropriate Act making school attendance mandatory for American Indian children. Congress began withholding treaty benefits such as food and clothing from parents who didn't comply. Off-reservation boarding schools became the most approved method of education for Indian children, and were the most common method of education from roughly the 1880s to the 1930s. The reasoning was that the children had to be kept in a totally controlled environment where they were completely cut off from the influences of their traditional cultures. The government felt that day schools allowed the children to have too much ongoing contact with their parents and families--"contaminating" influences on childhood development.

  The academic standards in the off-reservation schools were low and conditions in the schools often were substandard. Many children were malnourished and overworked and the fatality rate from disease was high. Children generally were not sent home during the summers because of the distance and because of concerns about the impact of re-immersion in the unhealthy environment of native cultures. Instead they were sent to live with, and work for, non-Indian families in the vicinity of the school to practice the vocational skills they learned during the school year. The children were kept at the school for several years before finishing the curriculum. They then returned to families and cultures they barely remembered.

  What makes this story so interesting is that at the time the government was setting up these schools, the perception of women as embodying a particular conception of Victorian motherhood was dominant in American culture. White American women were seen as the embodiment of civilization and culture in American society. It was their duty to protect the race through moral persuasion and influence on their families. In contrast, American Indian mothers were seen as savage and uneducated--incapable of the task of raising civilized children. Thus, instead of being able to protect their children from the harshness of the outside world like white mothers, Indian mothers were seen as perils from whom their own children needed to be protected.

  One of the main goals of the schools was the education of American Indian girls to prepare them to serve as model Victorian mothers and housewives. While the boys were taught basic vocational and farming skills to prepare them for entering the workforce, the girls were taught cooking, sewing, housekeeping and other skills necessary to prepare them for their duties as civilized and Christian mothers of a new generation of Indian children. Only when the girls had been trained to meet as closely as possible the Victorian ideal of womanhood could they finally be entrusted with a woman's most important task: motherhood.

 

Revised July 23, 2003 (MD)