Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism Versus Evolutionism

Abstract

From long experience and wide observation I have come to have little patience with the science of ethnology that consigns a man, or race of men, to generations of slow development.

Richard Henry Pratt, Proceedings of the National Education Association, 1895, 763

These people, who are with us and with whom we share a common fate, are a thousand years behind us in moral and mental development. Substantially the two races, {Negro and Indian} are in the same condition, and the question as to what education is best for them, and how such education is to be put within their reach, is pressing itself closely upon all thinking men and women.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Proceedings of the Department of Superintendence, Circulars of Information, No. 3, Bureau of Education, 1883, 139.

In the final two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans built an extensive system of Indian schools, largely financed by Congress and increasingly controlled from Washington. These schools were principally residential, boarding institutions. Their goal was to indoctrinate Indian children in white ways: to eradicate native tribal cultures. This campaign to transform native children into American citizens appeared to represent a clear declaration of faith in the equality and educability of the Indian. Today, its aggressive and misguided nature is recognized and the long-term consequences for all the tribes are beginning to be understood. But, while scholars acknowledge the blinkered ethnocentricism of Indian policy, they have not questioned that its goal was rapid Indian assimilation. Historians argue over the impact of pseudo-scientific racist ideas on the formulation of Indian policy; disagreements focus on the pre-Civil War period and the early twentieth century. However, it is generally accepted that, in the late nineteenth century, Indian affairs were dominated by a group of Christian reformers and their universalist, Christian ideals. These self-styled “Friends of the Indian” worked for legislative reforms to bring individual land ownership and citizenship to all adult Indians and schooling to their children. Their reform programme, historians have consistently argued, was driven by a single overriding assumption: Indians, once having discarded their savage lifestyle, were capable of joining American society as the white man's equal.