Michigan Indian Education Before and After 1934:From Oppression to Neglect Tuhin Chakraborty (bio) During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Native American children were educated in boarding schools specially designed to, in the words of boarding school pioneer and Carlisle school founder Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, "kill the Indian, save the man."1 In 1893, the federal government institutionalized the forced assimilation of Michigan indigenous children into Anglo-American economic and sociocultural norms by opening the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School (MPIIS), named for its location in Mount Pleasant.2 Much like Carlisle and other federal Indian schools at the time, the Mount Pleasant school employed the standard tactics of assimilation, ranging from compulsory Westernized curricula based on Anglicized gender norms to the proscription of indigenous languages on school grounds.3 However, one important factor that distinguished MPIIS from other, more well-known boarding schools was the circumstances surrounding its closure.4 In 1934, the US Department of the Interior, under Secretary Harold Ickes, negotiated with Michigan Governor William Comstock what is now known as the Comstock Agreement, which transferred MPIIS from federal to state control.5 Around this time, many Indian schools across the country, such as the Haskell Institute in Kansas and the Chemawa school in Oregon, were ordered to shut down.6 However, their arrangements differed from Michigan's because they were either allowed to remain operating by Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Commissioner John Collier or closed without state commitments to uphold indigenous education.7 The Comstock Agreement stipulated that Michigan would fully cover the costs of educating Native American school-age children so that they would not only receive a proper education, but also one on par with that for white students (and therefore better than the previous boarding school).8 This would be done in return for the Interior Department ceding MPIIS to [End Page 63] Click for larger view View full resolution The federal government established the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial School in 1893 on 200 acres of land taken from indigenous people just decades before. Source: Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University. Comstock's administration so that the governor could convert the school into a facility to house and treat the mentally disabled. Broadly speaking, the state could not deliver on its promises. There was systemic oppression at MPIIS—well documented by historians, activists, and indigenous people—and it is important to illustrate the impact and aftermath of the not-nearly-as-publicized state of neglect indigenous school-age children faced after Michigan was unable to educate them adequately until the 1970s. Moreover, shifts in Indian education policy in Michigan over the twentieth century simultaneously paralleled and diverged from broader national phenomena, such as the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act, highlighting Michigan's distinctive path to providing its indigenous population with the resources to continue their schooling.9 In stark contrast to Comstock's commitments, the transfer of MPIIS and the accompanying transitions in policy actually replaced federally structured assimilationism with the similarly poor conditions of myopic Native American educational policy. These conditions were exacerbated by a lack of federal financial support. High dropout rates, low college attendance rates, and other consequences of this neglect were, in turn, responsible for calls for renewed financial support and self-determination in the Michigan Native American education system after 1950. [End Page 64] Educational Assimilationism in Michigan After the establishment of the Michigan Territory in 1805, the young nation engaged in a multifaceted pattern of struggle and opportunistic cooperation with the indigenous communities already in the region to decide dominance (a story explored by scholars like Michael Witgen).10 According to Sarah Surface-Evans, such conflicts originally began as "external colonialism," where government armies fought back, subjugated, and militarily expelled indigenous peoples, such as the Iroquois in the early nineteenth century.11 However, by the late 1800s, after much of the remaining tribes' military power had decreased considerably with decades of war and one-sided treaties, "internal colonialism" became the norm.12 According to Surface-Evans, this included the inculcation of Native Americans into what was considered a "civilized" American lifestyle prioritized by US government officials.13 Although closely related, internal colonialism differs from...
Read full abstract
May 3, 2022
Xiao Wang + 4
Open Access
