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Reviews
ASSIMILATION'S AGENT: MY LIFE AS A SUPERINTENDENT IN THE INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL SYSTEM
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by Edwin L. Chalcraft
edited and with an introduction by Cary C. Collins
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| University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2004. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 368 pages. $59.95 cloth. |
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| IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH and early twentieth centuries, a singular drama unfolded in Indian Country. The tale of federal Indian boarding schools depended on a variety of figures. American Indian children appeared first, surrounded by family and kin groups. Federal bureaucrats marched onto stage next, as if responding to the "Cry of the Macedonian." During the first act, school superintendents and staff stepped in from the wings, ready to perform roles prescribed by the world views of late-Victorian America. Between 1879 and 1928, reservation and off-reservation Indian Service schools taught thousands of Indian youth the values of white, Protestant America, including the "three R's" and pre-industrial revolution vocational skills. In this memoir, editor Cary C. Collins reminds us that the most obscure players in this drama remain those Indian Service employees who carried out Washington's mandates within the boarding school's tight confines. |
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Since few of these employees' recollections have survived, Edwin L. Chalcraft's memoir, Assimilation's Agent: My Life as a Superintendent in the Indian Boarding School System, gains significance. In an account penned shortly before his death in 1943, Chalcraft has reminded us of the dogma of his times, one predicated on Indian assimilation into the dominant society, while simultaneously deflecting readers' eagerness to stereotype these agents of federal power. |
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Chalcraft's recollection begins in 1881, when he and his wife Alice took the train from their hometown of Albion, Illinois, to Seattle. Within two years of their move, the young midwesterners had shifted their residence to the Chehalis reservation, in southwestern Washington Territory, where Chalcraft became superintendent of the tribe and its boarding school. Serving in dual roles of bureaucrat and school teacher, like other Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) employees, they remained among the Chehalis for six years. |
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Accustomed to moving its employees from one Indian nation to another, as in a chess game, the OIA transferred Chalcraft many times. His peripatetic career, covering four decades (1883–1925), reflected this pattern as well as national political party affiliation, aggressive competitors, and Chalcraft's persistent use of corporal punishment in the schools. Hence, sometimes he found himself exiled from his adopted Pacific Northwest and, on occasion, from his wife and children. During the 1890s, the OIA dismissed him for a five-year interval before he and his network of OIA friends could engineer a new appointment. |
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Chalcraft could almost be called a name dropper. He knew all of the leading figures in the Indian Service at the turn of the twentieth century, and their assistance helped his survival. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian School, supported Chalcraft, and Estelle Reel, superintendent of OIA schooling, stopped to visit when she was touring schools. Although dissension within the Indian Service disrupted many employees' lives, all remained bound by their assimilationist creed. In his introduction, Collins observes that Chalcraft did not receive any "formal training" for his OIA career, but I would argue that his immersion in the values of middle-class, mainstream America served as the equivalent (p. xxvi). As Collins points out, Chalcraft never wavered in his commitment to assimilation. |
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Collins portrays Chalcraft and his colleagues in the OIA as pioneers of "social engineering," a characteristic of Progressivism. John Collier, later commissioner of Indian Affairs (1933–1945), followed this path in his pre-World War I work with New York's immigrants. Bearing in common the need to alter the cultures of other people, these reformers shared the colonialist mentality. |
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In Chalcraft's case, however, the story retains a complexity that Collins could have emphasized more fully. Although Chalcraft remained glued to assimilation, exemplified in his efforts to squash the Indian Shaker faith when it filtered into the Chehalis culture, in a number of instances he also defended various Indian peoples against the infractions of outsiders, such as land thieves. Yet, Chalcraft would have been astonished to witness tribal defense of the federal Indian schools during the largely successful closures during Ronald Reagan's administration. |
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Chalcraft recalled that during his first superintendency at Chemawa Indian School, the students saved their earnings from hop picking during vacation and donated them to the federal government to enable the purchase of eighty-five additional acres for the school. In this way, the Native children initiated their claim over the school that would be echoed in their descendants' struggle to exempt Chemawa from the draconian closures of the 1980s. Their success reiterates a dimension of this story that is missing from both the memoir itself and Collins's introduction. Although the federal government and the Indian Service employees played important roles in this amazing drama, the Indian youth and their families maintained the leading roles. |
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| MARGARET CONNELL SZASZ
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| University of New Mexico, Albuquerque |
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