"Good Enough for the Red Man": A Study of the Indian Schools and Indian Education, 1900-1940

Abstract

The author traces the changes in the Indian education system in America from 1900 to 1940. The system under men like Carson Ryan Jr., Willard Beatty, and John Collier would have been unrecognizable to the early pioneers of federally controlled Indian education. Within a period of forty years, federal Indian policy underwent fundamental changes, the origins of which are varied and difficult to trace. In the late nineteenth century, the nation had been emerging from an era where Indians and the federal government had been engaged in warfare brought about by the creeping expansionism of manifest destiny, and broken treaties. In the twentieth century warfare had given way to forcible assimilation of Indian children through education. By 1930, policy had again changed radically: the pedagogy, methodology, rhetoric, and goals of the Indian education system had begun to shift away from an unyielding policy of total assimilationism and towards the beginnings of Indian self-determination.