To Win the Indian Heart

The last twenty years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on the history of American Indian institutional education. The field is enriched by macrolevel education policy studies, microhistories of individual schools, and tribal-specific studies on the impact of state- or missionary-sponsored educational initiatives. In To Win the Indian Heart Melissa D. Parkhurst provides the first comprehensive overview of one school’s musical complex, from the original design of western Oregon’s Forest Grove Indian and Industrial Training School in 1880 through its continued existence, under very different circumstances, as the present-day Chemawa Indian School. Parkhurst sheds new light on the changing uses of music in boarding schools, as well as on the significant changes in curriculum, student demographics, and purpose that have defined the existence of one of the few remaining American Indian boarding schools in the United States.Forest Grove represented one of the earliest efforts by the US government to remove native children from their communities and place them in off-reservation boarding schools. School officials quickly aligned music instruction (and prohibitions) with the assimilationist fervor that guided federal Indian policy in the late nineteenth century. As part of their comprehensive attack on tribal culture, they sought to silence tribally derived music and enforce a regimen of training in marching bands, choirs, and other musical clubs that celebrated Anglo musical traditions. Parkhurst begins her study by recounting how such “compulsory hegemonic devices” (65) generated unforeseen results, as students variously took interest in the musical life enforced within the school, but none did so at the expense of their tribal and/or native identities. The school’s staff was not unique in asserting a relationship between “civilization” and marching bands, orchestras, and choirs, however, and Parkhurst devotes significant attention to other schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, to tell this story. (In fact, the book’s cover features an image from a music class at Carlisle.)As the book progresses, however, Parkhurst reveals the recently renamed Chemawa school’s unique characteristics: by 1920 one-third of the students hailed from Alaska; from 1925 to 1960 Alaska Natives could no longer enroll, with few exceptions; beginning in 1957 and for the next several years, Chemawa came almost exclusively to serve Navajo students; Alaska Natives once again enrolled beginning in 1960; and today more than four hundred students representing seventy Nations are enrolled in the school. Just as student demographics changed dramatically, representing a series of lurches in policy making endemic to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the musical culture shifted dramatically as well. Early on Alaska Natives took prominent roles in campus musical organizations, as many of them had already received training in playing European instruments in missionary schools and in their community-organized brass bands. Large-scale pageants became the order of the day at Chemawa in the early twentieth century, with students often collaborating in off-campus productions with non-Indian organizations. Parkhurst uses the 1928 Meriam Report, critical of the BIA, and the following appointment of reformer John Collier as commissioner of the BIA, to mark a distinctive break in the tenor of Chemawa’s musical productions. Parkhurst demonstrates that after Collier’s appointment pageants originally scripted to celebrate the assimilation agenda transformed into celebrations of Indianness. Other chapters reveal the blossoming of students’ heterogeneous musical tastes. One student, Cherokee vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Clyde “Spade” Cooley, cultivated smashing success as a western swing and television personality before his life unraveled in tragedy. Garage bands became popular in the 1960s, with faculty serving as de facto managers and booking agents for off-campus gigs. Campus powwows with large regional draws gained centrality in the ensuing years. Today, relatives and members of the local native population donate regalia for the dancers, while both male and female students sit behind the drums. Their Chemawa, Parkhurst writes, and their music instruction are now “tenacious and Indian oriented” (171). Because many current students come from challenging backgrounds that include gang affiliation and addiction, the healing power of music and dance that Chemawa’s campus now generates could not come soon enough. Parkhurst’s focus on musical performance at Chemawa provides a unique view into a long century of dramatic change in American Indian education

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