Salvation and the Savage

An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862

Robert F. BerkhoferJr., Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780813151243
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813185828
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early American History

Chapter Two

NURSERIES OF MORALITY

A PRIMARY aim of American education in the nineteenth century was the conscious development of personal character through moral training. The inculcation of the virtues assumed to be based on the Christian religion constituted such instruction. Since missionaries were active participants in their culture with a particular emphasis on this phase, their approach to Indian education was dominated by this training. Their adherence to their culture also determined their use of contemporary pedagogical methods and curricula no matter how poorly suited to their immediate goals—let alone to the entire transmutation of Indian life. Their blind acceptance of their own culture also meant the translation of minor habits and even ridiculous practices into the Indian schools, as well as the more secular qualities generally known as the middle class virtues.¹

Missionary belief in the inferiority of aboriginal customs and morality only emphasized the necessity for the character training of the youth, for they aimed to revamp Indian life by raising a godly generation. The missionary hoped to snatch the children before their “habits of life” were formed and teach them to become “fluent readers, write a good hand,” and see them “well instructed in the arts and customs of civilization, refined and docile in their manners, [and] have their minds stored with considerable knowledge of Christianity.”² By thus instructing the untrained children the missionaries would, as Gideon Blackburn said, “not only rescue the rising race from savage manners, but also to light up beacons, by which the parents might gradually be conducted into the same field of improvement.”³

Such a child-training theory demanded close attention to every detail of an Indian youth’s life. Minor habits in this view were as important as primary habits. Of all habits, punctual and regular attendance was the most essential, for if there were no children in school, there could be no education. Besides, the missionaries considered a well-ordered life an intrinsic good.

Irregular attendance and tardiness were particularly the bane of the day school. In a detailed statement of Sioux attendance for three terms in an American Board school, Stephen Riggs presented the pattern in vivid statistics:

TERM	AVERAGE ATTENDANCE^4
First ..................	10-15 3/5 per week for 6 weeks.
Second ..............	12 1/5-33 1/2 per week for 12 weeks in morning. 4 2/5-8 1/4 per week for 3 weeks in afternoon.
Third ................	10-34 per week for 11 weeks in morning. 4 1/5-11 1/5 per week for 11 weeks in afternoon.

Not only were the scholars irregular in their day-to-day attendance but also in their attendance during the day. They cared little for punctuality or endurance. Thus the Quaker teacher on a Seneca reservation recorded how a child might drift in about ten o’clock and then more children would arrive until the greatest attendance occurred about noon. They would gradually leave until the last scholar departed about four o’clock.⁵ Even in boarding schools, turnover was high. In the first year of the Iowa school, only one boy of the twenty students admitted at the beginning remained after a year. The remainder spent nearly half the time at home.⁶ Letter after letter to missionary headquarters complained about attendance, regardless of the tribe or time. The parents in semiagricultural tribes claimed, just as rural white parents did and still do, that their offspring were needed at home.⁷ In the tribes of migratory habits, attendance was even more irregular.⁸

In addition to the economic reasons, disappointments and jealousies caused irregular attendance. Many parents and children expected much more concrete results from the “magic” of reading than mere literacy after attainment of such an arduous mystery. Some Sioux, for example, thought the mere writing of a request for a gift and the presentation of the slip of paper to the missionary would make him grant their wish. When the missionary paid no attention to the magic paper, they angrily denounced the school: “the book lies—the book is not WAKAN.”⁹ Many natives feared the missionaries would demand compensation for their teaching in the future. They preferred to retain their land and kept their children at home. If the teachers demanded no compensation, then reasoned the Indians, the schools must benefit the missionaries. Therefore, they asked payment for their children who attended school. Since the missionaries refused to pay, the parents withheld their children. Few Indian attitudes vexed the teachers more.¹⁰

The real cause of poor attendance at school was what the missionaries termed a lack of “family government.” The tribal cultures encountered by the teachers placed no value on prompt and steady attendance. In fact, little value was placed upon the schools introduced by the alien culture. Even the patient Quakers bemoaned the “unhappy” upbringing of the children, because the prospective scholars were “for the most part intirely [sic] left to act as the rude propensities of nature dictates, and accustomed to this un-subjected condition makes it very trying on them to be confined to learning.”¹¹ In this permissive environment the child left school after the novelty wore off. Children preferred to play rather than attend school.¹² The child-training theories of the Indians thus notably conflicted with those of the missionaries. For example, one Iowa Presbyterian missionary asked a hunting party to leave the children behind for schooling. The parents left the decision up to the children, and the missionary lamented that “the children would much rather travel over the prairies than up the hill of science.”¹³

Aside from prayers for change or toleration of bad attendance, several avenues were open to the missionaries to secure the desired punctuality and regularity. The simplest method to bring order from aboriginal chaos was the declaration of vacations at times of sickness, feasts, or hunting expeditions.¹⁴ Inducements were also offered. During times of famine or severe cold, a little food and a heated house were sufficient to fill the school.¹⁵ One young woman visited from hut to hut in a Wea village with a few picture books and dried fruit in an attempt to gather scholars for a school. To encourage attendance, she offered dinner. Eight children came for this bait. Corn planting intervened and other children demanded three meals; so she abandoned her efforts.¹⁶ Others distributed clothing.¹⁷ Many missionaries opposed such lures. They did not believe in catering to the Indians’ demand for compensation for the services for which the beneficiaries really should feel obligated.¹⁸ To secure greater control over pupil attendance, the missionaries frequently resorted to the boarding school.¹⁹ In some ways this was the largest bribe of all, since the children received gratuitous clothing, board, and lodging.

Even boarding schools suffered from the parents’ arbitrary removal of their children, and so the missionaries resorted to contractual obligation backed by legal force to secure steady attendance. Gideon Blackburn, who established the first boarding school in an Indian tribe in 1803, set one pattern. He persuaded the Cherokee chiefs to rule that any child leaving school without permission or remaining home beyond ten days after vacations forfeited any clothing given him by the station. Furthermore, the chief of the child’s district bound himself to return the delinquent’s clothing to the school, or Blackburn had the privilege of deducting the clothing’s value from such chief’s share of the annuities.²⁰ At the later insistence of the American Board missionaries, the Cherokee Council enacted a law in the fall of 1820 requiring all parents to return their children to school promptly after vacations or pay all the expenses incurred for their education,²¹ and Choctaw missionaries of that society persuaded the tribe’s chiefs to enact a set of rules governing attendance.²² The superintendent of the board’s Mackinaw Mission relied upon an act of the Michigan Legislative Council which provided for binding the children to him by legal indenture so that they could not be removed before coming of age or their education completed.²³

Essentially, regular attendance was not a matter of legal indenture or inducement but of educating the parents as to the value of schooling. Thus the children most prompt in attendance were those of parents who attended church most regularly.²⁴ For the same reason, children of halfbreed parents or mixed marriages had better attendance records than those of fullblooded parents. In fact, the early schools in each tribe were almost entirely composed of halfbreed scholars. Frequency of attendance increased as the Indians’ values changed due to acculturation. Thus in the Civilized Tribes of the South, schools were established from the beginning of the mission. In 1827 the Cherokee chiefs incorporated a provision into their constitution which showed the value transformation: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government, the preservation of liberty, and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged in this nation.”²⁵ Yet even in these tribes attendance never was as regular as the missionaries desired.

Luring the Indian youth into the schoolrooms was a far greater problem for the missionaries than developing a curriculum for their would-be scholars. Bound by their culture, the missionaries assumed that the subjects taught white children were best for red children too. While the emphasis and level were altered to fit the particular circumstances of “savage life and mentality,” the curriculum for day or boarding school was much the same as for schools among the whites. As textbooks changed and newer methods were invented, the missionaries attempted to introduce them into their classrooms.

The few records that do exist as to the texts and practices used in the missionary schools in the years immediately following the Revolution indicate that the teaching was probably similar to the white common schools of the time. In these small schools a teacher heard each pupil individually say his lesson, and knowledge was chiefly acquired by rote. Scholars ranged from “A-B-C-darians” to the more advanced. All busily m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. The Grand Object
• II. Nurseries of Morality
• III. Temples in the Forest
• IV. An Industrious Citizenry
• V. Other Whites
• VI. Jehovah’s Stepchildren
• VII. Christians versus Pagans
• Epilogue. The Harvest Unreaped
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index