Native Americans in the American West in the 19Th Century

Native Americans in the American West in the 19th Century

Questions:

Directions: Pretend you are an Indian during the late 19th century to answer the questions below.

Primary Source 1: Quote from Richard H. Pratt

1. What do you think Richard H. Pratt means when he says, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”?

Primary Source 2: Indian chief’s speech to his people

2. Pretend you are an Indian parent. After listening to this speech would you or would you not send your child to this school. What part of the speech convinced you to make your decision?

Primary Source 3: Photo of Carlisle Indian students

3. Describe the photo including the clothes, hair, and emotions. What idea or message does this photo convey?

Primary Source 4: Photo of the same Carlisle students from document 2 four months later.

4. Describe the clothes, hair and expressions in this photo and compare them to the previous document. What changed and what idea or message would this photo convey to the white population and to the Indian population?

Primary Source 5: Report of Forest Grove School

5. After reading this document, describe how this school is different from your school. Use 3 pieces of evidence from the text to support your answer.

Primary Source 6: Political Cartoon

6. How were the children’s experience in this cartoon like that of the main character in Cheyenne Again?

Primary Source 7: Wild West

7. Why do you think that Pratt felt the Wild West Shows exploited the Indian rather than showing off their achievements learned at the Carlisle School?

Document 1: Interactive map of diminishing Indian tribes in the United States

8. What conclusion would you draw if you were an Indian in America?

Document 2: Excerpt of School life at Charlisle

9. How would school life be different from the Indian’s daily life with his tribe?

Document 3 : Essie’s Story

10. How did Essie and many students like her survive and even succeed in the Indian

Schools?

Primary source 1: Exerpt from Richard H. Pratt

Doc“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/

Primary Source 2: Speech from Indian chief to his people

Cheyenne Transporter, Vol. 2, Darlington, I.T., Feb. 25,1881, No.13.
AN INDIAN ON EDUCATION
The following is a speech of Etahdleuh Doanmoe, a Kiowa, at Carlisle just before the holiday vacation. He is one of the Florida prisoners who voluntarily went to Carlisle to school after he was released. The speech is taken from a paper published at the school: " Many people are asking what is best for the Indians and what to do for them. I think that education and learning how to work will help us most. We see the whites all over the country, some in towns and big cities, trading in stores, working in shops, some are lawyers and some are doctors and preachers. And they have many other occupations. And then some white people live in the country and have large farms and houses and barns. Every white man does something and so he gets money and has a good house. Then I ask how does the white man know so much when the Indian knows so little, and I try to find out, so I may tell my people. Then I see that the white man makes his children go to school while they are growing up, so they may have good minds full of knowledge, and I see too that he teaches his children to work, so they may have good bodies and muscles ready and strong to do something. The Indians do not know how to work the white mans way, and they have few men among them who have knowledge to teach their children. When I was a boy the Indians did not want education, and they lived in their camps and hunted the buffalo, and ran horse races, or went off to fight the other tribes or the whites, and many went to Texas to steal horses. The children ran about the camps without much clothing summer or winter. Their mothers never washed them or combed their hair, and they were very dirty. Most of the Indians are that way now, but I know now that they want education and to learn how to work. They want to become civilized, and if our good friends among the whites will not get tired of trying to educate us and teach us something, I think we may become good, civilized men and women and take care of ourselves."

http://home.epix.net/~landis/etadleuh.html

Primary Source 3 : Photo of Carlisle students as they arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/chiricahua.pdf

Primary Source 4: Photo of the same Carlisle students from document 2 four months later.

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/chiricahua2.pdf

Document 1: Interactive map

Interactive map

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/native_american_map

Primary Source 5 : Report from Grove School

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/forest_grove.pdf

Document 2: Excerpt from Carlisle Indian Industrial School article

Upon arrival of the second wave of Cheyenne and Kiowa children, the requested provisions had still not arrived but for the least important item - an organ. The children were housed in dormitories and classes began immediately. The school was structured with academics for half day and trades, the other half. Half the group learned reading, writing and arithmetic in the mornings, and carpentry, tinsmithing, blacksmithing for the boys, or cooking, sewing, laundry, baking, and other domestic arts for the girls in the afternoons. The other half learned their trades in the mornings and academics in the afternoons.

School life was modeled after military life. Uniforms were issued for the boys, the girls dressed in Victorian-style dresses. Shoes were required, as no moccasins were allowed. The boys and girls were organized into companies with officers who took charge of drill. The children marched to and from their classes, and to the dining hall for meals. No one was allowed to speak their native tongue.

Discipline was strictly enforced - military style. There was regular drill practice and the children were ranked, with the officers in command. A court system was organized in the hierarchical style of a military justice system, with students determining the consequences for offenses. The most severe punishment was to be confined to the guardhouse. The old guardhouse, built by Hessian prisoners during the Revolutionary War, still stands.

http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html

Primary Source 6: Political Cartoon

Caption reads: “Now children, you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not…”

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/school.pdf

Read the document excerpt below:

Of the 10,000+ Indian children who attended the Carlisle school over its 39 year life span, most returned to the reservation. Some of the returned students, much to Pratt's dismay, joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Pratt disliked the Wild West shows and was upset that he was forced to share exhibition space with Cody at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Proud of the fine displays recognizing the stellar accomplishments of his Indian students, Pratt railed against the exploitation of Indians for show.

http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html

Primary Document 7: Letter

My Dear Capt. Penney

I am having 500 of the contracts printed. I am going to try and come up and have a talk with you about the first of April. I will not take the Indians till about the 27th of April. Many thanks for letting Shawgrass have permission to select the Indians as it will give the Indians time to fix up their own affairs before leaving home. Of course this is not final. As I will fix all bonds & contracts with you before taking them.

In regard to Mr Wm. Brown wishes to go as [unintelligible] interpreter, I think I have promised John Shawgrass to take his brother. But if its your wish what her brow should go. Please tell Shawgrass and I think it will be all right with the Shawgrasses.

I will be in Omaha for the next five days at the Merchants Hotel. Can I ask anything for your store.

Very kind wishes
Yours truly
W. F. Cody

http://segonku.unl.edu/~jheppler/showindian/archive/letters/bbww.letter.codytopenney.1894.03.17.php

Document 3: Taken from oral story

Essie’s Story

Sally Hyer's history of the Santa Fe Indian School reveals another way in which Indian people have used boarding schools to subvert the federal government's goal of cultural assimilation. In One House,

One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa FeIndian School, she presents the results of an oral history project documenting the place of the Santa Fe Indian School within New

Mexico Indian communities from 1890 to 1990. The chronological scope of Hyer's study allows her to trace the school's evolution over time and its shifting meaning for Indian people. From its founding

in 1890 to 1930, the school advanced federal assimilation policy and repressed traditional culture; as in other boarding schools, however, Native students resisted cultural annihilation and institutional control. From 1930 to World War II, facilitated by the educational reforms of Indian Commissioner John Collier's administration, the school created programs that supported cultural distinctiveness and pride. The school was closed in 1962, but in 1981, the All-Pueblo Council of New Mexico reopened it as a truly Indian, community controlled school. Through years of cultural adaptation and persistence, and their eventual exertion of administrative authority, Indian people transformed Santa Fe Indian School from a tool of assimilation into an institutional embodiment of political and cultural self-determination.

In Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher, we find an individual perspective on the complex meaning of boarding school education for Indian people's lives and cultural identities.

Through this collaborative project, anthropologist Sally McBeth and Shoshone educator Esther Burnett Horne tell Horne's life story as both a student at Haskell Institute and an instructor in several Indian

boarding schools. Despite Haskell's regimentation and discipline and its goal of Americanization, Horne remembers her time there as a largely positive period in which she gained leadership skills, experienced a sense of community, met her husband, and discovered role models in Native teachers Ruth Muskrat Bronson and Ella Deloria, women who supported the retention of tribal identities. Horne devoted her own career to nurturing Indian cultural identity within the boarding school system, as a teacher at Eufala Creek Girls' Boarding School and the Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota. Thus Horne's life reveals, on an individual level, how Native people perpetuated cultural traditions within institutions originally intended to effect cultural assimilation.

http://maghis.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/2/20.full.pdf