Native Americans in the American West in the 19th Century
Questions:
Directions: Pretend you are an Indian during the late 19th century to answer the
questions below.
Primary Source 1: Quote from Richard H. Pratt
1. What do you think Richard H. Pratt means when he says, “Kill the Indian in him,
and save the man.”?
Primary Source 2: Indian chief’s speech to his people
2. Pretend you are an Indian parent. After listening to this speech would you or
would you not send your child to this school. What part of the speech convinced
you to make your decision?
Primary Source 3: Photo of Carlisle Indian students
3. Describe the photo including the clothes, hair, and emotions. What idea or
message does this photo convey?
Primary Source 4: Photo of the same Carlisle students from document 2 four
months later.
4. Describe the clothes, hair and expressions in this photo and compare them to the
previous document. What changed and what idea or message would this photo
convey to the white population and to the Indian population?
Primary Source 5: Report of Forest Grove School
5. After reading this document, describe how this school is different from your
school. Use 3 pieces of evidence from the text to support your answer.
Primary Source 6: Political Cartoon
6. How were the children’s experience in this cartoon like that of the main character
in Cheyenne Again?
Primary Source 7: Wild West
7. Why do you think that Pratt felt the Wild West Shows exploited the Indian rather
than showing off their achievements learned at the Carlisle School?
Document 1: Interactive map of diminishing Indian tribes in the United States
8. What conclusion would you draw if you were an Indian in America?
Document 2: Excerpt of School life at Charlisle
9. How would school life be different from the Indian’s daily life with his tribe?
Document 3 : Essie’s Story
10. How did Essie and many students like her survive and even succeed in the Indian
Schools?
Primary source 1: Exerpt from Richard H. Pratt
Doc“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high
sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres.
In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the
race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/
Primary Source 2: Speech from Indian chief to his people
Cheyenne Transporter, Vol. 2, Darlington, I.T., Feb. 25,1881, No.13.
AN INDIAN ON EDUCATION
The following is a speech of Etahdleuh Doanmoe, a Kiowa, at Carlisle just before the holiday vacation.
He is one of the Florida prisoners who voluntarily went to Carlisle to school after he was released. The
speech is taken from a paper published at the school: " Many people are asking what is best for the
Indians and what to do for them. I think that education and learning how to work will help us most. We
see the whites all over the country, some in towns and big cities, trading in stores, working in shops,
some are lawyers and some are doctors and preachers. And they have many other occupations. And
then some white people live in the country and have large farms and houses and barns. Every white
man does something and so he gets money and has a good house. Then I ask how does the white man
know so much when the Indian knows so little, and I try to find out, so I may tell my people. Then I
see that the white man makes his children go to school while they are growing up, so they may have
good minds full of knowledge, and I see too that he teaches his children to work, so they may have
good bodies and muscles ready and strong to do something. The Indians do not know how to work the
white mans way, and they have few men among them who have knowledge to teach their children.
When I was a boy the Indians did not want education, and they lived in their camps and hunted the
buffalo, and ran horse races, or went off to fight the other tribes or the whites, and many went to Texas
to steal horses. The children ran about the camps without much clothing summer or winter. Their
mothers never washed them or combed their hair, and they were very dirty. Most of the Indians are that
way now, but I know now that they want education and to learn how to work. They want to become
civilized, and if our good friends among the whites will not get tired of trying to educate us and teach
us something, I think we may become good, civilized men and women and take care of ourselves."
Text Copyright (c) 2003 John L. Sipes Cheyenne Collection. Ft. Marion POWs Section File No. 23.
http://home.epix.net/~landis/etadleuh.html
Primary Source 3 : Photo of Carlisle students as they arrived at the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/chiricahua.pdf
Primary Source 4: Photo of the same Carlisle students from document 2 four months
later.
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/chiricahua2.pdf
Document 1: Interactive map
Interactive map
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/
native_american_map
Primary Source 5 : Report from Grove School
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/for
est_grove.pdf
Document 2: Excerpt from Carlisle Indian Industrial School article
Upon arrival of the second wave of Cheyenne and Kiowa children, the requested
provisions had still not arrived but for the least important item - an organ. The children
were housed in dormitories and classes began immediately. The school was structured
with academics for half day and trades, the other half. Half the group learned reading,
writing and arithmetic in the mornings, and carpentry, tinsmithing, blacksmithing for
the boys, or cooking, sewing, laundry, baking, and other domestic arts for the girls in
the afternoons. The other half learned their trades in the mornings and academics in the
afternoons.
School life was modeled after military life. Uniforms were issued for the boys, the girls
dressed in Victorian-style dresses. Shoes were required, as no moccasins were allowed.
The boys and girls were organized into companies with officers who took charge of
drill. The children marched to and from their classes, and to the dining hall for meals.
No one was allowed to speak their native tongue.
Discipline was strictly enforced - military style. There was regular drill practice and the
children were ranked, with the officers in command. A court system was organized in
the hierarchical style of a military justice system, with students determining the
consequences for offenses. The most severe punishment was to be confined to the
guardhouse. The old guardhouse, built by Hessian prisoners during the Revolutionary
War, still stands.
http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html
Primary Source 6: Political Cartoon
Caption reads: “Now children, you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not…”
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets/assimilation/pdf/school.pdf
Read the document excerpt below:
Of the 10,000+ Indian children who attended the Carlisle school over its 39 year life span, most
returned to the reservation. Some of the returned students, much to Pratt's dismay, joined Buffalo Bill
Cody's Wild West Show. Pratt disliked the Wild West shows and was upset that he was forced to share
exhibition space with Cody at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Proud of the fine displays
recognizing the stellar accomplishments of his Indian students, Pratt railed against the exploitation of
Indians for show.
http://home.epix.net/~landis/histry.html
Primary Document 7: Letter
My Dear Capt. Penney
I am having 500 of the contracts printed. I am going to try and come up and have a talk
with you about the first of April. I will not take the Indians till about the 27th of April.
Many thanks for letting Shawgrass have permission to select the Indians as it will give
the Indians time to fix up their own affairs before leaving home. Of course this is not
final. As I will fix all bonds & contracts with you before taking them.
In regard to Mr Wm. Brown wishes to go as [unintelligible] interpreter, I think I have
promised John Shawgrass to take his brother. But if its your wish what her brow should
go. Please tell Shawgrass and I think it will be all right with the Shawgrasses.
I will be in Omaha for the next five days at the Merchants Hotel. Can I ask anything for
your store.
Very kind wishes
Yours truly
W. F. Cody
http://segonku.unl.edu/~jheppler/showindian/archive/letters/bbww.letter.codytopenney.1894.03.17.php
Document 3: Taken from oral story
Essie’s Story
Sally Hyer's history of the Santa Fe Indian School reveals another way in which Indian people have
used boarding schools to subvert the federal government's goal of cultural assimilation. In One House,
One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa FeIndian School, she presents the
results of an oral history project documenting the place of the Santa Fe Indian School within New
Mexico Indian communities from 1890 to 1990. The chronological scope of Hyer's study allows her to
trace the school's evolution over time and its shifting meaning for Indian people. From its founding
in 1890 to 1930, the school advanced federal assimilation policy and repressed traditional
culture; as in other boarding schools, however, Native students resisted cultural annihilation and
institutional control. From 1930 to World War II, facilitated by the educational reforms of
Indian Commissioner John Collier's administration, the school created programs that supported
cultural distinctiveness and pride. The school was closed in 1962, but in 1981, the All-Pueblo
Council of New Mexico reopened it as a truly Indian, community controlled school. Through years of
cultural adaptation and persistence, and their eventual exertion of administrative authority, Indian
people transformed Santa Fe Indian School from a tool of assimilation into an institutional
embodiment of political and cultural self-determination.
In Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher, we find an individual perspective on the
complex meaning of boarding school education for Indian people's lives and cultural identities.
Through this collaborative project, anthropologist Sally McBeth and Shoshone educator Esther Burnett
Horne tell Horne's life story as both a student at Haskell Institute and an instructor in several Indian
boarding schools. Despite Haskell's regimentation and discipline and its goal of Americanization,
Horne remembers her time there as a largely positive period in which she gained leadership
skills, experienced a sense of community, met her husband, and discovered role models in Native
teachers Ruth Muskrat Bronson and Ella Deloria, women who supported the retention of tribal
identities. Horne devoted her own career to nurturing Indian cultural identity within the
boarding school system, as a teacher at Eufala Creek Girls' Boarding School and the Wahpeton
Indian School in North Dakota. Thus Horne's life reveals, on an individual level, how Native
people perpetuated cultural traditions within institutions originally intended to effect cultural
assimilation.
http://maghis.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/2/20.full.pdf