The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 by Kim Cary Warren (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935 by Kim Cary Warren Erika Kitzmiller The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935. By Kim Cary Warren. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. 248 pp. $26.95 paper. For decades, historians have written extensively about the educational experiences of African American and Native American youth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These works have documented the lives of the reformers who opened schools, the kinds of curricula that the educators used, and the reactions of the youth who attended these schools. Kim Cary Warren’s exciting book, The Quest for Citizenship: African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880–1935, makes an important contribution to this literature by comparing and contrasting the educational experiences of African Americans and Native Americans in Kansas during this period. Drawing on the historiographies of whiteness studies and multicultural education, she is particularly interested in the ways in which African Americans and Native Americans defined citizenship for themselves despite the pressures from white reformers to dictate the definition of citizenship for these groups. By examining what she calls cultural citizenship—the feelings and modes of behavior that these groups held—rather than political or legal citizenship, the author aptly shows that both groups leveraged their educational experiences and institutions as a way to articulate different ideas about American citizenship and identity. Kansas, she argues, provides the ideal backdrop for this comparative history as it is one of the primary places where Americans have continually tested ideas about how they should think about themselves, as individuals of a particular group and citizens of their nation. The book is arranged thematically and chronologically and begins with the history of the white reformers who came to Kansas and opened schools for Native Americans and blacks during Reconstruction. In the first chapter, Warren focuses her argument on several reformers, Elizabeth Comstock and Laura Haviland, who worked in African American schools, and Hervey Peairs, who served as the leader of the Haskell Indian Institute. Like other reformers [End Page 390] engaged in this work, these individuals believed that formal schooling under their direction could help African American and Native American youth become better citizens. This schooling, Warren points out, required the suppression of their cultures and promoted a strict adherence to white, middle-class social and gender norms. As a result, it replicated the very inequalities that these reformers said they wanted their students to overcome. At the same time, as she shows in chapters one and two, the pedagogy and curriculum that these reformers used promoted different outcomes for African American and Native American youth. Native American youth, the reformers hoped, would be able to assimilate into white society and encouraged them to mirror the ideals of this world. In contrast, Warren argues that the white reformers implemented curricula in black schools to prepare African American youth “for a permanently marginal station in society separate from whites” (p. 47). In chapters three and four, Warren compares the strategies of negotiation that both groups used to counter racism and inequality in their schools. As they engaged in this work, she argues that these individuals participated in a process of defining citizenship for themselves. According to the author, the strategies that Native Americans used ranged from accommodation to outright rejection of school policies and white reformers. Boys routinely ran away from their schools; girls often started fires in their institutions. Like their children, Native American parents frequently challenged school policies and administrators, but unlike African Americans, they focused primarily on their children’s needs rather than asking for systematic, legal change. She illustrates this point through two case studies of Native American parents—T. B. LeSieur and Annie Pryor—who deliberately challenged school policies and administrators on their children’s behalf. In chapter four, she argues that African Americans, on the other hand, used specific strategies of negotiation to end segregation in their schools and to ensure that their children received the same educational resources as their white peers. While Kim Cary Warren’s work pushes historians to move from a black/ white...