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Beyond Horace Mann: Telling Stories about Indian Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

David Wallace Adams*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University

Extract

For all the times Horace Mann has been quoted on one subject or another, the following passage has somehow escaped educational historians' notice.

If a savage will learn how to swim, he can fasten a dozen pounds' weight to his back, and transport it across a narrow river, or other body of water of moderate width. If he will invent an ax, or other instrument, by which to cut down a tree, he can use the tree for a float, and one of its limbs for a paddle, and can thus transport many times the former weight, many times the former distance. Hollowing out his log, he will increase, what may be called, its tonnage, – or, rather its poundage, – and, by sharpening its ends, it will cleave the water both more easily and more swiftly. Fastening several trees together, he makes a raft, and thus increases the buoyant power of his embryo watercraft.

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Copyright © 2014 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Mann, Horace, Twelfth Annual Report, 1848, in The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, ed. Cremin, Lawrence A. (New York: Teachers College Press, 1957), 88.Google Scholar

2 Frisbe, Charlotte Johnson, Kinaaldá: A Study of the Navajo Girl's Puberty Ceremony (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 189. Also, Roessel, Ruth, Women in Navajo Society (Rough Rock, Navajo Nation: Navajo Resource Center, Rough Rock Demonstration School, 1981), 83–99; and Markstrom, Carol A., Empowerment of North American Indian Girls (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 303–312.Google Scholar

3 On this point, see Cahill, Cathleen K., “'Seeking the Incalculable Benefit of a Faithful, Patient Man and Wife:’ Families in the Federal Indian Service, 1880–1925,” in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest, ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 7192; and Cahill, , Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), chapter 2.Google Scholar

4 For general accounts of the history of Indian schooling, see Reyhner, Jon and Eder, Jeanne, American Indian Education: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); and Lomawaima, K. Tsianina and McCarty, Teresa L., To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006). Case studies on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century boarding school abound, and space does not permit a full rendering of this growing literature. For general treatments, see Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995); Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); and Trafzer, Clifford E., Keller, Jean A., and Sisquoc, Lorene, ed., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).Google Scholar

5 For differing viewpoints on the meaning of this concept, see Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 2325; and Farella, John R., The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984), chapter 2.Google Scholar

6 Teachers meeting minutes, 1932–1935, Eastern Navajo Agency, box 120, Record Group 75, National Archives-Pacific Southwest Region.Google Scholar

7 For general examinations of the Progressive Era, see Margaret Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination, 1928–1973 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), chapters 3–7; Lomawaima and McCarty, To Remain an Indian, esp. chapters 4–5; and Reyhner, and Elder, , American Indian Education, chapter 8. Excellent case studies of the Navajo experience are Parman, Donald L, The Navajos and the New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), chapter 8; Katherine Jensen, “Progressive Education for Native Americans: Washington Ideology and Navajo Implementation,” Review Journal of Philosophy and Social Science 3, (Winter 1978): 686–94; and Jensen, , “Teachers and Progressives: The Navajo Day School Experiment,” Arizona and the West 25, (Spring 1983): 49–62; and James, Thomas, “Rhetoric and Resistance: Social Science and Community Schools for the Navajos in the 1930s,” History of Education Quarterly 28, (Winter 1988): 599–626. Case studies on the self-determination era are also sorely lacking. The exception is McCarty, Teresa L, A Place to be Navajo: Rough Rock and Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Mahwah, NT: Erlbaum 2002).Google Scholar

8 Gilbert, Matthew Sakiestewa, Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010): 686–94.Google Scholar

9 For a splendid example, see Jacobs, Margaret D., White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).Google Scholar

10 Southern Workman 10 (December 1881), 123.Google Scholar

11 For a longer discussion, see my “Education in Hues: Red and Black at Hampton Institute, 1878–1893,” South Atlantic Quarterly 76, (Spring 1977): 686–94. I discuss the Carlisle football team in depth in “More than a Game: The Carlisle Indians Take to the Gridiron, 1893–1817,” Western Historical Quarterly 32, (Spring 2001): 25–54. For a comparative study of Indian and black education in one region, see Warren, Kim Cary, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).Google Scholar

12 Martin, Calvin, “Introduction,” in The American Indian and the Problem of History, ed. Martin, Calvin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15.Google Scholar

13 Marriott, Alice and Rachlin, Carol K., American Indian Mythology (New York: New American Library, 1968), 686–94.Google Scholar

14 Gorn, Elliot L., “Professing History: Distinguishing Between Memory and the Past,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 April 2000, B4.Google Scholar

15 Alamo Community School Archives.Google Scholar

16 White, Richard, Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family's Past (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 6.Google Scholar