Introduction: A Brief Survey of Indian Agency Educational
Policy and its Relationship to the Southern Utes
Since the middle of 19th century responsibility for the education of native Americans had rested with the Office of Indian Affairs. The avowed policy of the Agency was the acculturation of the Indian, in essence to turn Indian society into a mirror image of middle class white society. Indian children were to be taught in English, learn basic academic skills, and master the skills of the farmer and the housewife.1.
| The Government has entered upon the great work of educating and citizenizing [sic.] the Indians and establishing them upon homesteads. Adults are expected to assume the role of citizens, and of course the rising generation will be expected and required more nearly to fill the measure of citizenship, and the main purpose of educating them is to enable them to read, write, and speak the English language and to transact business with English-speaking people. 2. |
Earliest schools were mission schools or "contract schools," run by religious associations and supported with public funds. As the 19th century waned, however, government funding for sectarian schools was gradually phased out. By 1900 "the appropriations act for fiscal year 1900 reduced the sums available for contract schools to 15 percent of the 1895 base, and it included the decisive phrase 'this being the final appropriation for sectarian schools.'" 3.
There developed three different types of secular Indian schools: the reservation day school, the reservation boarding school, and the off-reservation boarding school, with the Carlisle, Pennsylvania school the most renown of the off-reservation schools. While the day school seemed to offer the ideal solution to Indian education, in fact it failed in achieving the goals of white educators. Cheap to operate and convenient for Indian families, the day school failed to provide the necessary uplifting experience for Indian families. Absenteeism was a major problem; Indians opposed to white education simply refused to have their children attend.
Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz reported to Congress in 1879 that,
| It is the experience of the department that mere day schools, however well conducted, do not withdraw the children sufficiently from the influences, habits, and traditions of their home life, and produce for this reason but a ...limited effect.4. |
Reservation boarding schools it seems would have answered the criticisms leveled at day schools about the continued influence of Indian families upon their young students. In fact, they did not. Educators supervising reservation boarding schools complained vigorously that when the children returned to their families for vacations they relapsed into the old Indian ways. The solution then was the off-reservation boarding school with Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle School as the prototype.
| The schools among the partly civilized Indians should in all cases be boarding-schools, where children of both sexes, while being taught necessary branches of a common education, may, at the same time, be instructed in manual labor appropriate to their respective sexes. The day-schools are a total or comparative failure in nearly every instance known to the members of the board. The reasons are stated in the report of Mr. Brunot, before referred to. 5. |
Indian children, according to Schurz, would absorb civilizing influences once they were removed from tribal ways and located in a white environment. He noted also that
| Especial attention is given in the Indian schools to the education of Indian girls... Nothing will be more apt to raise the Indians in the scale of civilization than to stimulate their attachment to permanent homes, and it is woman that must make the atmosphere and form the attraction of the home. She must be recognized, with affection and respect, as the center of domestic life. If we want the Indians to respect their women, we must lift up the Indian women to respect themselves. This is the purpose and work of education. If we educate the girls of to-day, we educate the mothers to to-morrow, and in educating those mothers we prepare the ground for the education of generations to come. Every effort made in that direction is therefore, entitled to especial sympathy and encouragement....6. |
Utes were initially hostile to white education, viewing it as either useless or downright dangerous.7. Interestingly the Southern Ute Indians were quite successful in resisting sending their children to off reservation boarding schools. A few children were sent to the schools off the reservation, but child mortality rates were high. Ute families were understandably reluctant to enroll their children in distant schools; albeit the Ute reluctance was incomprehensible to officials of the Office of Indian Affairs.
| The position of the Utes is a perplexing one, even to their best friends. No tribe is so solidly and persistently set against civilization as this. They have no schools nor churches, and desire none. They also refuse to take the first steps toward self-support, by any of the peaceful arts and industries of civilized life.8. |
Ute children were to be educated at the Fort Lewis boarding school, but families were reluctant to send their children even to this school located in Colorado. In 1900 the Indian Agency was struggling to education Ute children.
| Some progress was made in the way of education during the year past, a great effort being made last fall to put children in the Fort Lewis school. It is a fact to be regretted that Ute children have never attended school heretofore, with a few exceptional cases: but we were successful in securing 25 and placing them in Fort Lewis. Some of those ran away and one died at the school. Our efforts will be commenced with renewed vigor this fall, and we have reason to believe will be attended by gratifying results.9. |
The optimism was unfounded, for by the following year little improvement could be reported.
| A majority of the allotted Utes... converse readily
in the language of the country, i.e., Mexican, besides their native
tongue; but they have steadfastly refused to recognize Fort Lewis as
their reservation school, and it has been extremely difficult to get
children to attend there, though every fair effort has been made in that
direction. There were 22 children set to this school in the past year, 3
of whom died. There is authorized, and will be built this summer and fall, a boarding school at the Ignacio Agency of 80 pupils capacity, and there is little doubt that this institution will be liberally patronized, as the Indians express great satisfaction over the fact that they are going to have a school of their own.10. |
As the Southern Ute Tribal History makes very clear, "Early in the 20th century, the Utes still had a general feeling of hostility toward white people...."11. Ute suspicion of off the reservation education was apparently well founded, as the documents record a grim picture of child mortality. In 1912 Superintendent Walter G. West wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that:
| Some years ago a few of our children [Southern Ute] were transferred to non-reservation schools. Unfortunately there were some deaths among those transferred and this has had an effect on the minds of these Indians. A child who was formerly at the Santa Fe School in New Mexico, but who returned to the Reservation on account of poor health died in January of tuberculosis. ...The Indians are of the belief that he contracted the disease and that his death was due directly to his connection with that school.12. |
By 1902 the Utes had succeeded in getting a reservation board school for their children. As the Report Concerning Indians in Colorado stated:
| The close of the year witnessed the completion of the
Southern Ute Boarding School at this agency--a splendid plant, 50 pupils
capacity, built of brick and equipped with a good water system, sewage,
and gas plant. The education of Southern Ute has been the greatest
problem each agent has had to cope with and there are but few who speak
English in the tribe. Now that they have a school on their
reservation this difficulty will be obviated, and should the Department
decide to put the school in operation the coming fall a full attendance
can be had from the allotted Ute. The Wiminuche or unallotted Ute have no school and no children attending any Government Indian school.13. |
Although the school may have been launched with great optimism, conditions in the school facility rapidly deteriorated. The inspection reports are filled with complaints about overcrowding, poor facilities, and lack of trained employees. In 1909 a second school was provided for Southern Ute students, the Allen Day School in Bayfield.14. By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, however, the emphasis was shifting to educating Indian children in the public schools with the Federal government paying for tuition.15.
In 1924 Indians were granted United States citizenship. At the same time reformers, noting the almost universally wretched conditions in Indian schools pushed for great Indian autonomy in education decisions. Indian schools gradually assumed less and less importance in the overall education of young Native Americans.
By May 1928 The Southern Ute Boarding School was exclusively a boys' boarding school with only Navajo children in attendance. Most of the Southern Ute children were attending public schools.
| Both grade and high public school facilities to which Indians are admitted as freely as white children are available in the town of Ignacio. 16. |
While this pronouncement is more than a trifle over-optimistic, it does reflect the then current understanding of the status of Ute education. More and more the children of the Ute tribes were absorbed into the local school systems; the Indian schools ceased to function as a dynamic force within Native American lives.