Unless They Are Kept Alive

Federal Indian Schools and Student Health, 1878-1918

Bibliographic Data

ID3203886
AuthorsDavid H Dejong (corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume31
Issue2
Pages256-282
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe American Indian Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0095-182X • E-ISSN: 1534-1828
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1353/aiq.2007.0022
OpenAlexW2140781229
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited9

Unless They Are Kept Alive":Federal Indian Schools and Student Health, 1878-1918 David H. DeJong (bio) Prelude During the first decades of the federal government's Indian boarding schools, stories of morbidity and mortality among students were prevalent. Don't Know How, a Lakota father, shared an all-too-common experience. Anticipating the return of his daughter from Hampton (Virginia) Institute, Don't Know How constructed a new house, purchased a store, and adopted—to the extent he could—the trappings of white America. His daughter, meanwhile, returned from Hampton suffering from consumption. Within days she succumbed to the scourge of Indian Country: tuberculosis. Soon thereafter, Don't Know How's other daughter departed for Hampton, where in a few years she followed her sister "to the little cemetery on the hill."1 In Hampton's first ten years of educating American Indian students, one of every eleven students died (31 of 304) at school and one of every five died—as did Don't Know How's daughters—soon after returning home.2 In August 1915 Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells arrived in San Francisco to address the Congress of Indian Progress, an organization dedicated to the social advancement of American Indians. Waxing poetically about the duty of the Indian Service to protect the well-being of the American Indians, Sells noted it was the government's "chief duty to protect . . . the health and constitution of Indian children." The following January, the commissioner went a step further by writing a circular letter read by every Indian Service employee, stressing: "There is something fundamental here: We cannot solve the Indian problem without Indians. We cannot educate their children unless they are kept alive."3 Read within the context of twenty-first-century realities, Sells's statements [End Page 256] appear to be simplistically benign. Understood in light of turn-of-the-twentieth-century realities, however, the commissioner's comments struck at the fear that many American Indian parents experienced. Parents who, willingly or under the threat of coercion, enrolled their children in federal Indian schools were painfully aware that in so doing their children could be subject to deadly contagious diseases, as the superintendent of the Fort Hall (Idaho) Industrial Boarding School made clear in a letter to Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan. The "great deal of sickness" and the "large number of deaths" at the school, Superintendent George Gregory explained, made Indian parents hesitant to enroll their children.4 Sells's remarks evoke two related but distinct challenges of his day. The first is that there was an "Indian problem" of sufficient magnitude to warrant a federal system of education to solve. This so-called problem was how to assimilate and prepare the American Indians for citizenship and all the rights and responsibilities appurtenant to it. While seemingly simplistic—many European immigrants were acclimated in one or two generations—the social and political integration of the Indian was far more difficult because of political and legal realities and the deep attachment American Indians had for their sacred homelands. A significant component of this problem was whether or not to adopt the enlightened universalism philosophy of Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian School founder Richard Henry Pratt or the social-evolutionary philosophy of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute. While Pratt held to the moral belief that all Indian children were capable of being assimilated within a single generation, Armstrong subscribed to the scientific racism ideology that the Indians were far behind white Americans socially and morally and would require multiple generations to assimilate. Education as a tool of cultural change, of course, was by no means a revolutionary concept, although a federal near-monopoly of Indian education by the turn of the twentieth century underscored the breadth of federal involvement. The solution to the "Indian problem," at least in the minds of federal policymakers, Indian Office administrators, and Indian reformers, lay within the context of a highly formalized and ritualized education designed not only to stamp out all things Indigenous but also to teach Indian youth their appropriate role within American life.5 But there is a second reality embedded within Sells's statements. Not only

Daughter · Duty · Government (linguistics · Political science · Sister · White (mutation · Canadian Identity and History · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · Medicine