Labored Learning: The Outing System at Sherman Institute, 1902-1930

Abstract

J after sunset on June 5, 1925, Dick Foinill jumped down from the bed of an oversized truck and touched his feet to the dusty Kansas soil for the first time. Foinill and twenty-four Navajos from near Tuba City, Arizona, had just completed a long journey crowded shoulder to shoulder into the bed of a pickup. For five days and four nights, they rode northeast from Tuba City through the mountains and high deserts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. After arriving on the high plains of Kansas, Foinill and his companions worked there for two months. Ten hours a day, they stooped in the dreadful Kansas heat and humidity, topping and harvesting sugar beets. The labor would be performed under the auspices of the “outing program” of Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding school in Riverside, California.1 According to reformers, bureaucrats, and Indian schools administrators, such work would inculcate young Indians with the prerequisite qualities of racial “uplift”: thrift, economy, and a willingness to work. All of this would be done for the wages of a migrant laborer. Torturously long days, shoddy living quarters, and inadequate food made employer-run living quarters hellish places on other farms that utilized migrant labor. This one would likely be much the same.2 Despite these looming challenges, Foinill awoke on his first morning in Kansas filled with excitement rather than dread. Before trudging out to the fields for the first time, he wrote a letter to his love interest back at Sherman