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Intro
From Trout Creek to Gravy High:
Boarding School Experience at Wind River
by Peter Iverson |
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Introduction
It was 1879, three years after the fight with that man who had graduated
last in his class at West Point, General Gorge Armstrong Custer.
A Lakota youth who had some understanding of whit e public opinion
about that Indians of the West impulsively and perhaps against his
better judgment decided to attend the school in Pennsylvania. He
and other children boarded the train headed toward Carlisle Indians
School.
At one point the train stopped and the passengers were shepherded
off to get something to eat. A throng of non-Indians swarmed around
the children, giving mock war whoops, laughing and jostling. The
boy later wrote: “[We were] surrounded by a jeering, unsympathetic
people whose only emotions were those of hate and fear. The conquerors
looking upon the conquered, and no more understanding of us that
if we had suddenly been dropped from the moon.”
The boy was Luther Standing Bear and he was one of the early students
at Carlisle. This institution and its founder Richard Henry Pratt,
a former U.S. army colonel, cast a long shadow over Indian education
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Until he was removed
from his post at Carlisle in 1904, Pratt lobbied tirelessly for
doing things his way and as a result many of the boarding schools
established to that point very much mirrored what Carlisle had attempted
to do. Pratt’s methods included elements for which the schools
would be criticized at the timeand condemned in later years.
A good example of such condemnation may be found in the recent
public television program “In the White Man’s Image,”
aired nationally as part of “The American Experience.”
In watching this hour long overview, one is reminded of the wrenching
departures from home, the separation from family and homesickness
that would not go away. We see school uniforms, the haircuts imposed
upon the boys, the military drills, the denial of tribal languages
and the insistence on the English language, the denial of the legitimacy
of Native American values and traditions and the affirmation of
American nationalism. Even the names of the children were to be
transformed. Luther Standing Bear became Luther when he arbitrarily
picked a name from a list on the blackboard and pointed to it. One
name was as good as another. Luther he would be.
Without excusing the excesses of the boarding school system, these
educational institutions have to be understood in the context of
the era and the specific goals of federal Indian Policy. This period
following the Civil War and Reconstruction within the United States
marked perhaps an unprecedented degree of national self-confidence.
Most Americans were convinced that history had demonstrated the
validity of the American dream. Otherwise, why would so many immigrants
from around the world flock to our shores? The steely determination
to assimilate these newcomers carried over into assimilationist
efforts with America’s first residents. Regarding first or
more recent Americans, the conventional wisdom dictated that people
should fit into prevailing cultural patterns: use of the English
language, Christianity, private property, democracy, Anglo-American
names, and so forth, Indian families then were not alone in struggling
with cultural transformations and difficult choices about the directions
of their lives and the lives of their children. But what made the
matter all the more traumatic, of course, was that Indians had not
chosen to come. They were already here.
Not all immigrant children went to school. Others attended for
a time and then drifted on or were compelled to enter the world
of work. In the American South, Black students were kept out of
schools designated solely for White children; separate but hardly
equal facilities offered a more limited curriculum. In the guise
of offering practical training, schools channeled students toward
carpentry rather than chemistry. And while there was always a need
for a certain number of carpenters, there could be little doubt
that the Black physicians, attorneys, and other prospective professionals
were denied their futures.
Indian education of the time found itself shaped by a rarely questioned
perspective, echoed by the photographs of Edward Curtis. Curtis
took thousands of photographs of Indian subjects, working on the
assumption that Indians as Indians were about to disappear. The
course of American history seemed to show that would be the case.
The reservations would cease to exist. Resistance once again would
be proven ill-advised or worse. However, if native American children
could gain more schooling, then they would be better prepared to
make their way in that larger world that most assuredly awaited
them. Pratt summed it up with characteristically brutal directness:
“Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”
Curtis was wrong about the disappearance of Indians and Indian
communities. And Pratt’s words sound terrible to us today.
Why, then would so many Indians (although by no means all) respect,
and even admire Pratt? The answer lies in the fact that Pratt, unlike
most others, believed in their potential and their promiseeven
if his vision of their future seems with hindsight to have been
incorrect. At a time when many other Americans saw Indians as beings
with no promise, Pratt had been impressed with whom they could become.
At a time when public schools were either distance from native
communities or their doors not open to them, or both, was the right
answer simply to deny education to Indian children? And once they
went to school, however reluctantly, did their experience remain
exactly the same in 1920 or 1930 as it had been in 1890? Once they
came back to school after making it through their first year, did
they all dread every part of everyday? Did it make a difference
whether they made that long journey to Carlisle or attended school
near their homes?
These are complex questions and the answers to them vary considerably
from one individual to another, one reservation to another, and
from one decade to another. It is very easy to fall into a kind
of trap and only portray the story of schooling in this era as an
unrelentingly negative chronicle. The television program ³In the
White Manıs Image² essentially presents the message of the Indian
as victim. Again, this is not to argue that mission schools or government
schools were necessarily appropriate avenues in every way. Far from
it. We know they had biases, shortcomings, problems. They hardly
embraced cultural pluralism. They often suffered from limited funding,
poorly paid and poorly supervised staff, and a variety of other
liabilities. Nonetheless, given the context of the age, one must
try to look beyond the obvious and think more clearly and fully
about what happened in these schools. When we begin to do that,
we may recognize that not every last person who worked for one of
the schools was a bad person or even a bad teacher. Not all Indian
children hated all aspects of the schools. The legacy is mixed.
The oral history interviews that form the basis for ³From Trout
Creek to Gravy High² suggest that a number of variables affected
how particular Shoshone children as well as their families might
have responded to their education experiences. The Shoshone Episcopal
Girls School, or Robertıs Mission (as it is often labeled because
of the central role of missionary John Roberts), and the Fort Washakie
Government Boarding School (or Gravy High, or the Industrial School)
were located close to the homes of most Shoshones, on the Wind River
reservation itself. But Shoshone students attending either school
still faced the trauma of involuntary attendance. Marie Washakie
thus remembers policemen taking her to school because her grandmother
did not want her to go there. She remembers, too, that children
did run away. On the other hand, families could visit on the weekend.
The local nature of the experience and the fact there were few
children from different tribes attending the Wind River schools
proved significant. If you had to go to Carlisle, or even as did
Eva Enos, to Rapid City, you confronted a kind of detachment that
could be threatening.
At any of the schools, the personality of the principalcombined
with his priorities and actionsmade a crucial difference in the
overall character of the institutional environment. The smaller
the school the larger one such figure could become.
Decades later, students from the Wind River schools have some vivid
memories of particular individuals. It is not surprising that Reverend
Roberts and his daughter Gwen emerge as important persons, Orlean
Ute, with many others, acknowledges that John Roberts knew some
of the Shoshone languagehardly enough to be confused for a native
speaker, but enough so that he could have some understanding of
general conversations. Given the significance of the language at
the time in the working of Shoshone culture, any knowledge of it
allowed a person outside of the tribe to transcend, even if partially,
what anthropologists call an ethnic boundary.
Orlean Ute also recalls that Gwen Roberts could be strict. She
would scrub out the mouths of the children who ³talked dirty.²
³That taught us,² Ute notes.
One would imagine it would.
The harsher discipline one hears so much about at the boarding
school appears, however, at Wind River to have been especially evident
in the first years of the Government School. As Dorothy Peche put
it. ³Theyıd round the kids up, the Indian kids and make them go
to school whether they wanted to go or not....They just took them
down there.²
Suzette Wagon remembers having to kneel down on a broom as punishment
and several men recalled whippings with a rubber hose. Staff members
clearly could rule with an iron hand. And some did.
But there is also evidence from the oral history interviews that
things became considerably more lenient in the 1930s and 1940s.
More recent research shows that even by the end of the 1920s the
military drills were becoming less characteristic of the off-reservation
boarding schools. Changing times and slowly changing sentiments
were beginning to take hold. In a new study of the Albuquerque Indian
School, for example, Penny Quintana discovered such a transition
not only in discipline, but also in curriculum and in extracurricular
opportunities for the students.
At the larger off-reservation schools, but also at the Wind River
schools, sports emerged as a major attraction for both boys and
girls. The boys competed with neighboring public schools in football,
basketball, baseball, and track and field. They also competed with
teams from other Indian schools. The biggest schools, such as Carlisle
or Haskell of Kansas, even took on area colleges and universities.
The Haskell football schedule in 1928 included West Virginia University
and the University of Minnesota. Such extraordinary athletes as
Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox from Oklahoma who attended Carlisle, gained
national acclaim for their abilities. Yearbooks from other schools
demonstrate a growing range of clubs and interest groups for students
by the 1930s.
“The Navajo Trail” of the Charles Burke School (later
Fort Wingate High School) at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, includes
photographs of the school band, orchestra, boy and girl scouts,
home economics club, travel club, and student council, as well as
sports teams. Such activities often drew students from nearby and
more distant reservations. Eva Enos’s memory of the Rapid City
school as a place with better food, more teachers, and more to do
is hardly a unique recollection. Equally normal is her observation
that it was not as hard to return to a school in the fall once you
knew the people there. The initial tripit almost always was
remembered as one of the longest journeys the person had madecontained
difficult moments. The second trip usually was not equally troubling.
Of course it varied and even a more familiar environment did not
necessarily erase homesickness and separation from loved ones.
Smaller reservation-based schools, such as Roberts’ Mission
and Gravy High, thus sometimes lost students to bigger schools such
as Haskell or Chilocco in northern Oklahoma. Family tradition sometimes
played a role in where or how long a student attended a particular
school. The smaller schools often struggled with inadequate finances
and that, in turn, affected a number of dimensions. Such places
had gardens, for example, not only to demonstrate the value of hard
work and to reinforce the agrarian ideals of the time. Gardens also
provided food that students could eat and the school did not have
to buy. At Roberts’ Mission, the reverend demonstrated the
right way to peel potatoes so that not too much would be wasted.
Marjorie Tillman observes the mission garden also included onions
and parsnips. Mrs. Tillman never liked parsnips and “that’s
why I remember it.” For others, the culprit was spinach, oatmeal
or other unfamiliar foods. Mrs. Tillman remembers Sundays, the one
day in the week when whole milk was available. And it almost goes
without saying that gravy, gravy, and more gravy in the school diet
gave the Fort Washakie boarding school its rather unenviable nickname.
Gravy High had its own smokehouse and its own chickens. It is not
clear whether its garden also could boast of parsnips.
Limited funding also influenced the kind of work the students did
on the campus. Although school officials liked to contend that experiences
within the school were directly linked to vocational training, it
is clear that in many schools, students—especially the older
ones—performed many of the necessary daily chores that allowed
the schools to operate. As Suzette Wagon comments, the other name
for the Fort Washakie School was “the industrial.” She
remembers the laundry, the cooking, and the baking as an integral
part of life in school. Many places dedicated about half of the
day to classes and the other half to work.
Especially in the first years of the off-reservation schools, students
participated in what Pratt called the “outing system,”
through which they were placed for a time with White families. There
they worked and, so the theory went, absorbed the values and daily
routines of such households. Other students, including some at Gravy
High, worked on western farms as laborerssometimes instead
of returning home in the summer to their families.
Students did not always fit in easily to the world of their reservation
if indeed they returned home, but they were not necessarily prepared
either to take part fully in the rapidly changing economy of the
larger society.
At times the schools fostered developments that were different
from what they hoped to achieve, and that mitigated against total
assimilation of Indian students into American society. Just as with
the very existence of reservation emphasizing separation and lack
of integration, the reality of separate schools for Indians, regardless
of who taught or what was taught, suggested a different and special
identity. One may view this as segregation, but it could also serve—consciously
or unconsciously—to underscore for students the things they
had in common with each other. Friendships formed, often to endure
for a life time. If you attended an Indian school as a teenager,
you might meet the person you would marry. Anna Moore, a Pima student
at the Phoenix Indian School, became high school sweethearts, as
she put it, with Ross Shaw. They later married and lived happily
together. Phoenix Indian School became in Mrs. Shaw’s memoir,
A Pima Past, in part a place where she had met her husband.
Other consequences emerged over time. At schools where only members
from one tribe were enrolled, membership in that particular community
could often be strengthened. But at schools where people from a
number of different Native American communities attended, students
discovered they had things in common with each other as Indians.
Such a discovery could lessen old tribal antagonisms and could promote
a second layer of Indian identity in addition to that of tribe.
This development promoted participation in all-Indian activities,
including the pow-wow, which would grow dramatically in popularity
in the years following the World War II. Another significant example
came with the growth of the Native American Church, which stressed
brotherhood and a unique form of Indian worship. The boarding schools,
ironically, were prime recruiting ground for the church. Bureau
of Indian Affairs boarding school graduates frequently found employment
in the bureau itself. There again they faced a recognition of commonality.
By the late 1920s federal policy toward Indians began the transition
that would be realized more fully in the days of the New Deal. More
students began to enroll in day schools rather than in boarding
schools. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier and his associates
in the New Deal era encouraged Bureau Of Indian Affairs schools
to take a less antagonistic stance toward native cultures and traditions.
Although it is apparent that not all bureau teachers necessarily
got the message, one starts to see some real variations from past
patterns.
In the 1930s written forms of Indian languages were developed with
active participation by bureau personnel, followed by use of these
forms in school primers. Moreover, such bilingual primers presented
traditional tribal life in a positive way, depicting Navajo sheepherders,
Indian family life, and appreciation for a particular land. Indian
arts and crafts were introduced in many classrooms. Such a transition
was often incomplete, but its partial existence reminds us that
we cannot freeze our image of Indian schools at any one point and
assume that they remained exactly the same for decades on end.
In the years after World War II, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began
a slow but steady movement to encourage Indian children to attend
public schools. New highways, passage of legislation to provide
funds for reservation public school construction and operation,
and other events allowed for the beginnings of reservation public
schools. The old boarding schools did not fade away overnight, and
even today a few remain in particularly isolated areas of Indian
country. But by the time Gravy High closed down in the mid-1950s,
a movement had begun that would eventually claim nearly all of the
reservation and off-reservation boarding schools.
When Chilocco shut its doors in the 1970s, many of its alumni protested
the action. This protest provided a poignant commentary on the mixed
legacy of the institution. The old schools had been part of a common
experience, even if it may well have been time to move on to other
forms of education. New schools would still confront continuing
as well as new problems. There would be no easy answers. The schools
would continue to reflect the challenges of Indian life-at Wind
River and elsewhere.
Epilogue
St.Stephen’s was the first Wind River Boarding school to convert
to a day school. The Fort Washakie Government School followed one
year later.
The Shoshone Episcopal Girls School closed its doors in 1949. Rev.
Roberts was by then partially blind, elderly, and frail. Although
the Shoshones petitioned the church to keep the mission open, there
were not even enough funds to operate the school’s furnace
In 1956, a fire destroyed the boys’ dormitory at St. Michael’s.
The mission could not afford to rebuild, and so the entire school
was closed down. St. Michaels had added high school years to its
offering in the 1930s. The Shoshone Mission never went further than
the 8th grade.
An improved reservation road system and better transportation gave
students the option of going to nearby Lander. In 1933 and 1934,
two or three Indian children attended the town’s public school,
and their numbers gradually increased as time passed. It was 1955,
though , that marked the end of the an era. In that year the Fort
Washakie Government School transferred its lands and buildings to
public School District #21.
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