One area where we might get a clearer picture of how pedagogical changes look good on the surface, but do very little to actually challenge old ways of thinking, may be in the field of education for Native American communities. In the early 1960s educators and policy makers with backgrounds in the social sciences of anthropology and education began a push for school reform that was, in their eyes, designed to improve the opportunities of achieving economic success for future generations of Native Americans.
Is it possible that these major curricula changes in public educational settings could actually have been designed not for the empowerment of the Native American individual, but for the disempowerment of the tribal nations themselves? That’s the question I ask myself after what I confess is an embarrassingly quick perusal of Guy B. Senese’s 1991 book called “Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans.” What follows in this post is a “summary” of what I see (correctly or incorrectly) Senese saying in his text.
“Self-Determination and the Social Education of Native Americans” begins with the reminder that the U.S. Congress holds Constitutional power to abrogate its trust responsibilities, its promise to financially care for the Native American people inhabiting the reservation lands that they have been promised under treaty, and most importantly to protect the material resources of the reservation lands the Native people agreed to call home in exchange for having abandoned far greater territories to an aggressive U.S. government. Those reservation lands and the resources within them could not be owned by anyone other than the tribes themselves. The reservation is effectively the property and management responsibility of each tribe’s government, so no individual member of the tribe can claim land ownership (the ability to sell the land to a non-tribal member).
But of course, almost as soon as the ink was dry, the U.S. government would experience a hankering for the resources available within those lands. The need for gold was, for instance, at the heart of the “Indian Wars” in the postbellum years. Even as late as the early Twentieth Century that hankering had continued, with the Hoover Administration eager to release tribal lands from governmental oversight during the Great Depression. It was FDR’s New Deal program that temporarily stalled this Federal push to reclaim tribal lands.
The end of the Second World War and the coming into its own of the Truman Administration reignited the impetus to release heirship-allotted lands into the control of returning Native American veterans. In other words, veterans returning from the war had the right to sell the land dwelt upon by their parents, even if that land was part of the tribal nation and was forbidden to be sold to individuals outside the tribe.
One representative of the Pine Ridge Reservation expressed worry that if “tribesmen” were given the land, they would sell it to outsiders and “spend their money foolishly.” This would be how great tracts of tribal land would end up in the ownership of non-Natives. Tribal leaders were fearful of the powerful interests that would try to separate them from their lands, a warning handed down by their elders.
But in Washington D.C., the stronger argument was for “G.I. Justice” and payback to Native veterans who had so honorably served the United States in the Second World War. Federal officials within the Truman Administration therefore doubled down on efforts to terminate the reservation status of tribal lands and give former Native American soldiers the right to sell their lands for profit.
Another factor was in play at the time: in the postwar years the nation was still recovering from the trauma of global conflict and loss, and the dominant mood was against “pluralistic sentiment.” This trend gave strength to the idea that Native people should be “assimilated” into the national (white) culture and economy (industrial).
This powerful cultural breeze, always swirling around the bureaucrats in Washington D.C. who oversaw “Indian Policy,” was whipped into a furious storm with the Truman Administration and its adherence to the goals of “Termination.” Interestingly, the push to terminate tribal reservation status lost some of its fury when the reins of power transitioned to the Eisenhower Administration.
Termination was nothing new. By the end of 1947 the Department of Interior had begun a termination policy that removed reservation status from a number of tribes, a program overseen by the same officials responsible for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war. There was ground enough for the Truman Administration to plant its flags of “G.I. Justice” and resume the push for Native Americans assimilation and tribal nation termination that had begun with the Hoover Administration but was shunted aside by the need to deal with the Great Depression.
For some reason, however, the Eisenhower Administration stuck its foot out and tripped the policymakers in their race to termination. But that might simply be a result of a new leader wanting to do something to stand apart from his predecessor, because the Eisenhower Administration never actually abandoned the goals of assimilation and termination. Instead, the new government maintained the end goal, but disguised the vehicle for achieving this aim with an increasingly sophisticated form, hiding behind various socioeconomic and psychological models that received the applause and active engagement of professional educators and academics, especially those in the social sciences. This newly garbed assault upon tribal survival found shelter beneath the umbrella of “self-determination.”
The Eisenhower Administration and the new Congressional embrace of assimilating the Native and taking tribal lands was driven in part by the Cold War which made clear the need for the minerals that lay beneath so much tribal territory. It was argued that national security depended upon the acquisition of these resources, which included oil and gas as well as uranium deposits. But a brutal policy of termination could not be easily achieved, especially as the newly arising leaders of the “Third World Movement” and the propaganda ministry of the Soviet Union were pointing to the economic despair of Native tribal areas as proof of Capitalism’s failure.
If termination goals could not be rushed through as eagerly as hoped for, at least the territories could be more easily controlled through the agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). But of course, the energy industry still slavered over the thought of operating free of BIA and tribal regulatory interference, possibly benefitting from the inexperience of even the most sophisticated tribal councils.
Assimilationist policies that sought to draw individual Native citizens away from their tribal lands were invigorated by economic attitudes that envisioned people as resources. Put bluntly, Native individuals were little more than incredibly cheap labor. In a sort of feedback loop, economists saw in underdeveloped areas a workforce that would itself be crucial to developing a comfortable investment climate. This resulted in official programs that encouraged major industries to establish production lines in or near reservation lands.
The BIA was eager to cooperate in this program, while the Eisenhower Administration saw international public relations gains in the “industrialization” of tribal communities. Tax incentives guided many non-Native business interests to open assembly lines on reservation lands where labor proved quite cheap, trainable, and tractable. Enticements were also provided to corporations that could draw Native workers away from their tribal homes and into urban industrial economies where they would be divorced and divided from the ways and worldviews of their ancestral inheritance.
It was unquestioningly assumed that industrial development would itself be an educative force, endowing tribal people with factory capable work habits, bank favorable values of thrift, and an overall embrace of Euro-American nationalist cultural values. These values, centered upon the ideals of individualism and “self-support and self-help,” could erode traditional, tribal, and communal sensibilities. It was hoped that these “assimilated” Natives would themselves abolish the tribal authorities and embrace the philosophy of “self-determination,” the popular new way of saying “termination.”
But when, in some instances, these same workers proved themselves quite adept at adopting Western labor practices by going on strike, the corporate investors were noticeably distressed. Production most noticeably came to a halt in the Navajo nation as poorly paid laborers attempted to unionize their workplaces, and investors did not hesitate to remove themselves from reservation lands. Unionization and the fight for a fair living wage in the mid-1970s was a wrench tossed into the BIA’s smooth running program since the 1960s of guiding Vietnam war-related defense monies to electronics assembly lines and garment manufacturers on tribal lands.
Thus came crashing down the claim that the tribes had never had it so good and would eagerly be satisfied with economic exploitation in the form of low pay. What to do?
Academics turned to Education as an available route to assimilation and eventual undertaking by Natives themselves to sell off their reservation lands.
Under the many decades when boarding schools dominated the national government educational policy, Native children were taught vocational subjects. Nearly 75 percent of their learning time was dedicated to preparing for repetitive assembly line skills and the development of “desirable attitudes” toward physical labor.
By the early 1960s, however, it was generally agreed that Native children would be directed to public school on or near reservation lands. The dominant public school curricula appeared on the surface to be less invested in training an industrial labor force, but at heart educational policies continued to serve as producers of fodder for factory assembly lines. Professional educators, by and large, proved themselves thoroughly accommodating to the industrial economy.
Among those who gave warning was Vine Deloria Jr., who separated “the means to educate” from “the intention.” He saw the “intention” behind all the late-1960s money and scholarly attention being given to the education of Native children as an effort to blunt the tribal person’s resistance to government termination policies. Education, he worried, was in the service of training Natives to willingly embrace their own eventual exploitation and termination of their own tribes.
Deloria was part of a diverse movement of tribal thinkers and activists who had experienced a changing consciousness about “the anesthetic of false self-determination.” They cleverly used the ambiguous educational reforms of the 1960s to re-define for their communities educational structures that would benefit the economic and social development of the tribes without sacrificing actual power and control of the lands. With the occupation of Wounded Knee and the trashing of BIA headquarters in Washington D.C., this new generation of tribal activists saw not only the Federal government (and the succession of political leaders) as their adversary, but increasingly distrusted tribal governments they saw as non-representative of the majority of community members. The “invested” status of many tribal leaders, they suspected, was a barrier to their new nationalist definition of self-determination.
As well as feeling unrepresented by tribal governments, these young activists also saw education as crucial to their goals of eventual self-determination.
“Resource control and educational troll developed into key themes toward legitimate self-determination,” Senese says. The new generation encouraged curricular changes that would re-empower the cultures and values from which “self” arises. They believed that with self-regeneration would come a new form of tribal economy and development.
I’ll stop here, ruminating on the idea that all good education should contribute to the formation of a stronger, healthier sense of “self” that includes not only the individual but the communities that the person comes from and remains part of, a living social body.
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Photo Source: Teach for America, NYU Special Collections
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