The Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilizations

In February 1838 a teenaged Choctaw student named George Washington Trahern delivered an oration based on his essay “On History.” Standing before his classmates, the board of trustees, and other guests, Trahern argued that “history is the brightest ornament to an education.” The study of written documents “opened a vast field [of] important knowledge” to all people, enabling them to read about the governments, militaries, and social and cultural achievements of past civilizations. Trahern's argument was that “the moderns,” a category that included Indians, could use history to study past societies “and copy after them; or, if they are not fashionable at the present day, learn lessons from them.”1 George Washington Trahern, or “Wash” as his classmates called him, gave his speech during a pivotal era of U.S. imperialism, when American attitudes and policies regarding Indians were in flux. The setting was Choctaw Academy, the first federal Indian boarding school in the United States, which was located in Great Crossings, Kentucky. Thirteen years earlier, in 1825, Trahern's cousin, a Choctaw lawyer named James L. McDonald, helped negotiate the contract that created Choctaw Academy. At that time, the school was at the forefront of the federal government's civilization policy, which sought to pacify Indians through assimilation. The policy pushed Indian nations to use treaty annuities to support Western-style schools and supplemented indigenous efforts by sending additional funds as well as missionaries who served as teachers. One general declared, “educating the children ... will go further to keep peace on our frontiers than all the armies that has been or may be sent there.” By conquering minds, the United States could proceed, with greater peace and more honor, in its imperial march. By the time that Wash Trahern gave his speech, Choctaw Academy was at its height, enrolling about 175 students annually from seventeen native nations throughout the continent, but its elite curriculum was dangerously out of step with the new U.S. Indian policy of removal.2

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• Contingencies of Place and Time

  Open Access•Sara Doolittle•History of Education Quarterly•2018

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• Entangled Pasts

  Open Access•Margaret A Nash•History of Education Quarterly•2019

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