Turning the Tables on Assimilation:
Oglala Lakotas and the Pine Ridge Day
Schools, 1889—1920s

Thomas G. Andrews

This essay examines cultural contestation between Anglo assimilationists and Oglala Lakotas in the federal Indian day schools of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. It argues that Oglalas adeptly subverted the academic, manual, and moral goals of these institutions, transforming them from agents of cultural destruction into agents of Oglala persistence.

Ambitious, numerous, and controversial, boarding schools comprised the primary front in the federal government's campaign to assimilate Indian children into the American mainstream. Yet all too often, popular memory and historical scholarship alike have isolated residential schools from the larger educational context in which they operated. 1 Boarding schools represented the largest and most heavily publicized component of the government Indian school system, but they hardly comprised the sum total of government efforts to educate Native American children. Federal officials built more than a hundred day schools throughout the Indian reservations of the American West in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, in regulations first promulgated in 1894 and frequently reinforced in the following three decades, the Office of Indian Affairs carved out a crucial niche for day schools in the federal Indian education system. According to these rules, Indian children were to begin their formal education at local day schools, progress to reservation boarding schools around the age of ten, and leave their tribal homelands for further schooling only after they had exhausted their reservation's educational resources, usually around the age of sixteen. The scheme proved difficult to implement on many reservations; nonetheless, roughly 15—20 percent of the Indian children attending school in any given year between the late 1880s and the 1920s received their education not at residential institutions, but at local day schools. Just as importantly, at least as many more children likely arrived at boarding school only after years of day schooling. 2

1

Despite the appearance in recent years of dozens of fine monographs and articles on Indian education, the story of these important institutions nonetheless remains practically untold. 3

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