Education at the Edge of Empire

Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico's Indian Boarding Schools

John R. Gram

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295806051
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

For the vast majority of Native American students in federal Indian boarding schools at the turn of the twentieth century, the experience was nothing short of tragic. Dislocated from family and community, they were forced into an educational system that sought to erase their Indian identity as a means of acculturating them to white society. However, as historian John Gram reveals, some Indian communities on the edge of the American frontier had a much different experience—even influencing the type of education their children received. Shining a spotlight on Pueblo Indians' interactions with school officials at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools, Gram examines two rare cases of off-reservation schools that were situated near the communities whose children they sought to assimilate. Far from the federal government's reach and in competition with nearby Catholic schools for students, these Indian boarding school officials were in no position to make demands and instead were forced to pick their cultural battles with nearby Pueblo parents, who visited the schools regularly. As a result, Pueblo Indians were able to exercise their agency, influencing everything from classroom curriculum to school functions. As Gram reveals, they often mitigated the schools' assimilation efforts and assured the various pueblos' cultural, social, and economic survival. Greatly expanding our understanding of the Indian boarding school experience, Education at the Edge of Empire is grounded in previously overlooked archival material and student oral histories. The result is a groundbreaking examination that contributes to Native American, Western, and education histories, as well as to borderland and Southwest studies. It will appeal to anyone interested in knowing how some Native Americans were able to use the typically oppressive boarding school experience to their advantage.

CHAPTER 1

The Economics of Education

The True Cost of Keeping the Doors Open

The school needed scholars. And if we didn’t have an enrollment up to a certain number, they would take our money away. . . . You just had to bargain, almost.

—LISBETH BONNELL EUBANK, TEACHER, SANTA FE INDIAN SCHOOL, 1928–35

IN THE SUMMER OF 1924, SUPERINTENDENT JOHN DAVID DEHUFF OF the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) began his fall from grace; within two years, following strange and probably false accusations, he would be gone. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke was in the middle of a campaign against Native American culture. In 1921, Burke issued instructions to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to strongly discourage ceremonial dancing; two years later he released further instructions that virtually banned the practice. Burke saw such dancing as a dangerous obstacle to assimilation, believing it promoted, among other things, superstition and sexual immorality.¹ It was not long before the Pueblos, with their elaborate feasts and dances, landed in his crosshairs.

Imagine Burke’s surprise when he learned that DeHuff had authorized the performance of Indian dances in conjunction with the graduation ceremony at SFIS in 1924. DeHuff recorded the ensuing confrontation in his diary: “The Comm’s of Indian Affairs seems to be [angry] somewhat at me for having Indian dances in connection with my closing ceremonies. I inadvertently rubbed his fur the wrong way and it got under his skin. But he needed it, and if he knew how much it means to him for me to keep quiet, he’d go easy. The poor old broken-down missionary-ridden has-been politician. He ought to go home and stay there.”² It can be tempting to credit this entry to DeHuff’s somewhat oppositional personality. This was not his first dissatisfaction with the Indian Service, its leadership, or his post. Even a cursory reading of his diaries reveals a man who, like so many Americans during his time, fell in love with a romantic notion of the Southwest. And as with so many of his fellow westward travelers, what DeHuff really treasured about the cultures he encountered was not their inherent worth but the ammunition they provided for criticizing the dominant American culture. Perhaps in DeHuff the Pueblos found a sympathetic ear in an unlikely place during a difficult time.

Only a few years later, Pueblo culture found yet another sympathetic ear in the person of Superintendent Reuben Perry of the Albuquerque Indian School (AIS). In his 1928 annual report to Commissioner Burke, Perry stated, “It is my opinion that the authorities should ignore the dances [taking place in the pueblos] unless there are times when some vulgarities are indulged in.”³ The following year Perry felt the need to defend his position: “Pupils and returned students always observe and at times participate in the dances. I know of no way to prevent this. Neither do I believe it is desirable to issue orders and insist that school children do not observe and do not participate in such dances as long as their parents and other members of their tribe conduct the dances.”⁴

Unlike DeHuff’s diaries, Perry’s surviving correspondence gives absolutely no indication that he had caught the “Southwest fever” during his twenty-four-year tenure as superintendent at AIS. Nor do the records suggest that he often found himself at odds with the agenda of the Indian Service. DeHuff might represent no more than an anomaly, but Perry suggests a pattern. The ironic reality is that during a time of great persecution from top bureaucrats, Pueblo culture found advocates in the midst of the very institutions that were the vanguards in the effort to destroy it.

Sympathy for Native Americans was beginning to grow during the 1920s among Indian educators, but its effects would not be felt fully until the 1930s. At any rate, clearly it was yet not affecting other important off-reservation boarding schools. The superintendent of the Phoenix Indian School, during these same turbulent twenties, refused to allow traditional dance ceremonies to take place at his school, or any other “old-time Indian entertainment,” even though the school was “being criticized because [it] attempted to destroy Indian culture.” As Trennert, Jr., argues, “Phoenix Indian School was unwilling to make any concession to reform demands as long as it seemed possible to continue with the assimilationist policies that had long been in effect.”⁵

So why did the Phoenix Indian School toe the line, while the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools offered sympathy toward and even a refuge for the very culture they were supposed to help eradicate? Were the superintendents of these two schools merely more progressive than their counterpart in Arizona? Perhaps, but in truth the leniency granted by the superintendents of AIS and SFIS toward the Pueblos in the midst of Burke’s crusade could be traced all the way back to the founding of the institutions themselves.

Because of difficult economic realities, neither the Albuquerque Indian School nor the Santa Fe Indian School were able to establish power relationships favorable to themselves with the nearby Pueblos during the early years of their existence. While the superintendents believed that the Pueblos desperately needed the “civilizing” influence their schools represented, in truth it was the schools that, early on, were desperate for Pueblo children, and that drove them to make many surprising concessions in order to secure enough students. These concessions, in turn, provided the Pueblos with avenues through which to influence the operations of the boarding schools and, ultimately, the educational experiences of their children.

We will never truly understand the world of government boarding schools like AIS and SFIS until we understand just how desperately they needed students. At the time that AIS and SFIS came into existence, government boarding schools received an annual allowance of $167 per student—determined not by actual attendance but rather by the official carrying capacity of the schools. The difficulty was that this amount was far less than what the schools needed to function. Congress did eventually increase the amount, but only in small increments—seemingly never accounting for inflation or the actual costs of running a school. By 1926, adjusting for inflation, the government boarding schools should have been receiving $375 per student. At the time they were receiving a little less than $200. The operational costs of the cheapest private boarding school just a year later was about $700 per student, and that school did not have to pay the transportation or clothing costs that burdened the budgets of schools such as AIS and SFIS.⁶

The paltriness of support was but one facet of the constant economic crisis facing schools such as the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools. Not only was the funding insufficient, it was undependable. Schools received consistent levels of funding only as long as superintendents could prove they could maintain the same carrying capacity for students. The only way to increase funding was to convince government officials to increase the official capacity of the school. Indeed, most government boarding schools enrolled a number of students significantly higher than their capacity in their efforts to demonstrate that the capacity should be increased.

Thus, students were not only the raison d’être for the schools, but also the region’s greatest resource in the schools’ quest for survival. Students meant continual funding, however inadequate it might be. More students meant more funding. Unfortunately, students were not so easily managed as other “resources.” They had freedom of movement and of will, meaning the student rolls at the beginning of the school year might look nothing like the rolls at the end of the school year, even if the overall number of students enrolled was basically the same. In response, schools had to overrecruit and overenroll, sometimes in drastic numbers.

For the 1904–5 school year, twenty of the nation’s twenty-five off-reservation schools enrolled students over their official capacity, and thirteen schools had an average daily attendance in excess of their capacity. The Sherman Indian School had an official capacity of 400, yet enrolled 722 students for that school year. Despite this large enrollment, Sherman had an average daily attendance of 492 students—almost 25 percent above its capacity but drastically lower than its enrollment. The Haskell Indian School had an official capacity of 700 yet enrolled 1,127 students, with a daily average attendance of 781. That same year, AIS and SFIS each had an official capacity of 300 and enrolled 369 and 376 students, respectively, with an average daily attendance of 344 students and 321 students.⁷

These numbers illustrate the desperation for students in the earlier years of these institutions. The superintendents had to worry about recruiting not only the capacity of his school but also another forty to fifty percent more. The boarding schools quickly found themselves saddled with two daunting missions: educating Indian youth and perpetuating their own existence. At times it is difficult to tell which was more important.

So, where could AIS and SFIS find students? The obvious places to start were the nearby Pueblo communities. From 1881 to 1928, the population of Pueblo children in the various communities stayed well in the thousands—more than enough to populate two federal boarding schools. In addition, the proximity of the pueblos meant that the schools would incur little expense in transporting Pueblo students. Since all transportation costs had to come directly from the schools’ already strapped budgets, that made the Pueblo communities attractive recruiting areas. However, the simple availability of students hardly solved the problem. One further difficulty was the competition for students from other educational institutions both in and out of state. Even more difficult was convincing parents and community leaders to patronize the boarding schools. Quite simply, how does one convince a community to support an institution designed to extinguish its traditions and values?

Other superintendents had a powerful carrot and stick: treaty arrangements. Most tribes subjected to government boarding schools had a treaty relationship with the United States, obligating each party to perform certain duties. Although under the best of circumstances many Indian communities never saw much of the supplies and resources promised them in treaties—corruption and incompetence were rife in the Indian Service—agents and superintendents could refuse supplies entirely if they felt that a community was not cooperating with the educational process.⁸ In other words, the greater the dependence on the federal government, the less overt resistance to the boarding schools a community could exercise. In addition, the laws of territories and states in the trans-Mississippi West required that Indian children attend school.

The relationship between the United States and the Pueblos was fundamentally different, however. The United States recognized each individual pueblo’s ownership of its land based not on a treaty relationship but on land grants given by the Spanish monarchy during the eighteenth century.⁹ In addition, Pueblo communities had been sedentary and agricultural for centuries. Many other western and southwestern tribes were adjusting to postnomadic or seminomadic reservation life, leaving them much more dependent on the supplies and resources offered by the United States government.¹⁰ Though the Pueblos experienced significant challenges during this period as well, they remained relatively self-sufficient.¹¹ All of this translated into fewer carrots and sticks for the superintendents of AIS and SFIS.

Confusion surrounding Pueblo citizenship further complicated the situation. The founders of the nation of Mexico had designated as citizens those descended from European immigrants as well as from the various indigenous populations. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the war between the United States and Mexico and granted the United States control of the territory that included the Pueblo communities, stated that Mexican citizens living in the region that had just become the US Southwest would become US citizens.¹² This made the exact status of the Pueblos somewhat confusing for personnel in the Office of Indian Services. Superintendents and other officials made quite clear in the official correspondence that they saw a real distinction between the Pueblos and other nearby tribes, admiring what they saw as superior cultural advances by the Pueblos and approving of their sedentary agricultural lifestyle. However, these officials did not view the Pueblos as equal to Anglo-Americans. So the Pueblos existed as a strange in-between people—clearly not the same as other Indians, but clearly not yet “civilized” in the same sense as the dominant society.

On a practical level, school officials and Indian agents were therefore not entirely sure what they could and could not enforce with the Pueblos. Were they citizens of the territory or wards of the national government? Did school attendance regulations apply to Pueblo communities or not? If so, which ones—the territory’s or the Indian Service’s? Exactly what and how much force could be brought to bear on the Pueblos to convince them to patronize the new federal boarding schools? Mounds of correspondence from superintendents, agents, and officials in Washington demonstrate that these questions remained unclear until well into the period under study here. Even when the law was somewhat clearer, superintendents resorted only rarely to the enforcement of attendance laws. Indeed, the practice seems to have been used more as a demonstration of power against certain communities and parents than as an effective tool to maintain school attendance.

What this ultimately meant was that the Pueblo communities were able to wrest unusual concessions from the boarding schools in exchange for their patronization—concessions that, at times, did not even extend to students from other tribes at the same schools. The schools, at least in the beginning, needed Pueblo students in order to remain viable. The Pueblos understood that and used it to their advantage. Despite attempts by successive administrations at both schools to eliminate them, these concessions continued with little modification. In fact, new concessions joined the older ones over time, especially at the Santa Fe Indian School, where the percentage of students who were Pueblo was almost always above 75, and often above 90.

One of these concessions allowed Pueblo students to go home during the summer months. Summer vacations were rare at off-reservation boarding schools. Several other scholars do mention summer vacations eventually taking place at their schools, but not as early as at AIS or SFIS, and certainly not from the very beginning of the institution’s life, as happened at SFIS for certain, and presumably AIS, as well.¹³

The Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools were off-reservation boarding schools, institutions that stood at the top of the federal Indian schooling system. Off-reservation boarding schools existed in part to provide higher levels of education for promising Indian students from lower schools, but also to overcome an aspect of day schools and reservation boarding schools that reformers and officials found unattractive, namely regular interaction between students and their home communities. Students at day schools returned home at the end of each school day, while students at reservation boarding schools spent the summers at home. Officials worried that the constant exposure to the “negative” effects of home would either delay or derail the “civilizing” process taking place at the government schools. At off-reservation boarding schools, students were supposed to stay for a minimum of five years, completely isolated from their home communities and, most importantly, their culture and traditions. The off-reservation schools were thus the highest hope that officials and reformers held for the eventual “redemption” of the Native American population.¹⁴

Both the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools operated as off-reservation boarding schools for many of the tribes that enrolled students there, but for the Pueblo students, they were much closer to a reservation school experience. At SFIS, where the ratio of Pueblo to non-Pueblo students grew over time, the identity as a Pueblo reservation school grew stronger. Superintendent Clinton J. Crandall of SFIS wrote the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1902 (the school had been in ex...