The Consequences of Competition: Federal Boarding Schools, Competing Institutions, Pueblo Communities, and the Fight to Control the Flow of Pueblo Students, 1881–1928

Abstract

Samuel M. Cart, superintendent of the recently opened federal boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sat down at his desk in September 1891 to write the commissioner of Indian affairs regarding his recent recruiting tour through the pueblos under his jurisdiction. The recruiting trip was in preparation for the first full school year of Santa Fe Indian School's (SFIS's) existence. Though Cart had only recently arrived, his would-be pupils belonged to communities who had lived in the region for over millennia. The Pueblos among whom Cart had just traveled had established successful agricultural committees in the arid region and developed complex social and cultural means to order and influence the world that Cart's countryman now called the American Southwest. And for generations, they had educated their children in order that their communities would survive. Now Cart, and men and women like him, had traveled to the Southwest to convince the Pueblos (and other Native American groups) that their way of life was inferior, their social–cultural complex was immoral, and their methods for educating their children were insufficient.