Amanda J. Cobb became interested in Bloomfield Academy because of her grandmother, Ida Mae Pratt Cobb, an alumna from the 1920s. Drawing on letters, reports, interviews with students, and school programs, Cobb recounts the academy's success story. In stark contrast to the federally run off-reservation boarding schools in operation at the time, Bloomfield represents a rare instance of tribal control in education. For the Chickasaw Nation, Bloomfield-a tool of assimilation-became an important method of self-preservation
Amanda J. Cobb is an associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of American Indian Quarterly. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Amanda J. Cobb became interested in Bloomfield Academy because of her grandmother, Ida Mae Pratt Cobb, an alumna from the 1920s. Drawing on letters, reports, interviews with students, and school programs, Cobb recounts the academy's success story. In stark contrast to the federally run off-reservation boarding schools in operation at the time, Bloomfield represents a rare instance of tribal control in education. For the Chickasaw Nation, Bloomfield-a tool of assimilation-became an important method of self-preservation
Amanda J. Cobb is an associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of American Indian Quarterly. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
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Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852-1949
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Overview
Amanda J. Cobb became interested in Bloomfield Academy because of her grandmother, Ida Mae Pratt Cobb, an alumna from the 1920s. Drawing on letters, reports, interviews with students, and school programs, Cobb recounts the academy's success story. In stark contrast to the federally run off-reservation boarding schools in operation at the time, Bloomfield represents a rare instance of tribal control in education. For the Chickasaw Nation, Bloomfield-a tool of assimilation-became an important method of self-preservation
Amanda J. Cobb is an associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of American Indian Quarterly. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803264670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2007 |
| Series: | North American Indian Prose Award |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Amanda J. Cobb is an associate professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico and is the editor of American Indian Quarterly. She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Nananumpolit aiya (To Start to Tell a Story)
Literacy and Schooling
Thus, the one room schoolhouse, with the proverbial schoolmarm standing in thedoorway as a symbol of literacy and civilization, was one of the first landmarks of awestern community. — DAVID WALLACE ADAMS, Education for Extinction
Beginnings
Indian Territory, circa 1850. The story goes that Reverend John HarpoleCarr of the Methodist Episcopal Church pitched a tent in a field of flowers.He was full of missionary zeal and missionary love, and he had avision — a vision of a schoolhouse rising there out of the wildflowers.It was to be a schoolhouse for Chickasaw girls, a boarding school. Hewould build it and maintain it and grow orchards and raise animals tosustain it. He would superintend, and his wife, Angelina, would teach.He could not know that the terrible war soon to come would halt theprogress of the school and work of the missionaries. He could notknow that in time the school would become the cultural seat of IndianTerritory, the pride of the Chickasaw Nation. He could not know of thefires that would destroy it again and again, and he could not know ofthe great desire of the Chickasaw people to rebuild and begin again andagain. Did he imagine, there in the field of flowers, the struggles forcontrol that would ensue, or what would be at stake in those struggles?Or did his hopes for the school outweigh all other thoughts — hopesfirmly rooted in the ideology of literacy and all it would bring:salvation,civilization, nationalism, individualism, prosperity. Imagine, Johnand Angelina making plans into the night, talking, eating, telling stories,and laughing with the Chickasaw families so anxious to see theschool built. Imagine the little girls wondering what it would be like togo to the school, excited perhaps, perhaps homesick already. Imaginethe Carrs, the Chickasaw families, and the daughters, all looking at thefield of flowers, watching a schoolhouse rise up out of the field, eachwith a particular vision of what it would become. It was to that field thatformer Chickasaw chief Jackson Kemp mailed a letter to his friend JohnCarr, who was camping there. He did not know how to address theletter. Remembering the wildflowers covering the prairie, he wrote onthe envelope "Bloomfield." So the story goes.
The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females opened its doors totwenty-five students in the fall of 1852. Originally located near what isnow Achille, Oklahoma, approximately fifteen miles south of Durant,Bloomfield suffered several fires and in 1914 was relocated to the site ofthe Old Hargrove College in Ardmore, Oklahoma. The school was renamedCarter Seminary in 1932 and continued functioning as a boardingschool for girls until 1949, at which time boys were admitted. Fouryears later, the school officially closed its doors as an academy when allof the children were integrated into the Ardmore Public Schools. Thechildren continued to board at Carter, however, and Carter Seminary isstill in operation as a boarding facility for American Indian childrentoday.
The story of Bloomfield is remarkable for many reasons, the mostsignificant being its very difference from other boarding schools forNative American children. The school was founded by the ChickasawNation in conjunction with missionaries in 1852, a time when manytribes were still the objects of massive military campaigns. Bloomfieldreached its zenith as an academy in the last years of the nineteenthcentury, a time when the federal government was waging a new sort ofwar against Indians.
Although the Chickasaw people had been forcibly removed fromtheir homeland in Mississippi to Indian Territory and had suffered devastatingloss, illness, and deaths as a result, they had not been subjugatedto a reservation, a fate met by many tribes. The federal government'sdecision to force Indian nations on to reservations signified amajor change in American Indian policy. The United States had previouslydealt with American Indian tribes either by making treaties orwaging war, both of which were based on their recognition of each tribeas a sovereign power. The reservation system did not merely representa change in policy; it represented a fundamental change in the government'sperception of Indian peoples. No longer would government officialsview Indian tribes as independent nations. Now, policymakerschose to see tribes as wards of the government, colonized peoples, andconstructed policy built on that belief, thus leveling a major blow toAmerican Indian people. Once the Civil War ended, the U.S. governmentand its citizens again turned their full attention to the conquest ofthe western frontier. No opposing force could halt the steady march ofwhite settlers in their advance or hold back the building of the railroads,"which tied the nation together with ever tightening bands of steel."U.S. citizens, anchored in and acting out of the spirit of American Evangelicalism,believed their conquest of the West, both physical and spiritual,was more than inevitable; it was divine. Truly, America believed,this war was holy.
As a result, legislators began to see the reservation policy as a quicksolution for pressing problems. The reservation system, which wasless expensive and more humane than military solutions, would cementthe conceptualization of Indians as wards of the government yet wouldbe a natural extension of previous, less comprehensive removal policies.On a practical level, forcing Indian peoples onto reservations(1) provided more land for white settlement; (2) segregated Indians andwhites, allowing white settlers to move westward and protecting bothfrom the possible violence of the other; and (3) served the "humanitarian"purpose of providing a safe place where Indians could become"civilized" without disruption. Soon, however, as white settlementshemmed in the reservations on every side and white settlers clamoredfor more land, reservation land, the government realized that the reservationsystem had only been a temporary solution to the land issueand had actually created a new and very real set of problems. Reservationsreinforced the very communal, tribal systems the federal governmentwanted to smash. In addition, by removing Indian peoples fromtheir homelands and taking away their self-sufficiency, legislators hadcreated a system of dependency and poverty. Finally, white settlerswanted more land, indeed, believed it was their Manifest Destiny tohave the land, and neither the United States government nor its citizenrywould rest until every single acre of land was open for white settlement.This opinion was shared by Christian reformers. General ClintonB. Fisk, president of the 1885 Lake Mohonk Conference of Friendsof the Indian, voiced the principle objective underpinning the conference'sreform policy: "We should work especially to throw down everybarrier in the country, so as to have no foot of land on which any Americanmay not go." Legislators needed new answers and new policiesquickly. They did not have to look far.
American Indian policy was at this time heavily influenced by the effortsof several Indian reform groups who, united in their belief that theU.S. treatment of American Indians constituted a stain on the honor ofthe new republic, demanded new solutions to the "Indian problem" thathad plagued the country since its inception. The "New Christian Reformers"were well-educated, well-established, well-intentioned, evangelicalProtestants who had various levels of experience with Indian issues.Unfortunately, they had little to no actual knowledge of Indianpeople or their values and worldview and no interest in finding out whatIndians thought about their own situation. They gathered annually,beginning in 1883, at the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of theIndian in order to agree upon a reform platform and to decide how bestto influence the legislature and public opinion. The influence theywielded cannot be underestimated. According to historian Francis PaulPrucha, "they represented or reflected a powerful and predominant segmentof Protestant church membership, and thereby of late nineteenth-centuryAmerican society. When they spoke, they spoke for a large majorityof the nation.... They were the chief channel through which thisAmericanism came to bear upon the Indians."
The reform groups did not always agree precisely how Indian policiesshould be reformed; they did, however, agree on the basic answer to the"Indian question." Their answer was "Civilization," thought of as simultaneouslya benevolent gift and a new battle to be fought. Thebreaking up of reservations for the allotment of land in severalty andthe extension of the nation's legal system to Indians were both parts ofthe reformers' plan to civilize American Indians; however, reformersbelieved that "true civilization" depended on more than land and law.True civilization required real cultural change — changes in government,in family systems, in habitation, in livelihood, in values, in dress.Civilization required Christianity. Civilization required the English language.The reformers believed that only one system could accomplishsuch complete change. Civilization, the reformers concurred, was amatter of education, of literacy. The American common school that roseto dominance in the United States as the "one best" educational systemwas considered the glory of the new republic, the panacea for every ill,and reformers had every faith in its civilizing powers. Christian educationwas a natural outgrowth of the nation's ongoing missionary endeavorsout west and, furthermore, was much more economical thaneither warfare or perpetual dependency. Education was considered along-term strategy; it was aimed, after all, at children. Providing Indianchildren with formal education would realize a sweeping progressivevictory, and since reformers believed that schooling would speed theslow "cultural evolution" process, perhaps transforming the Indiansfrom their current stage of "barbarism" to the ultimate stage of "civilization"in a single generation, the victory would be won in recordtime. According to Merrill Gates, the president of the 1891 Lake MohonkConference for Indian reform: "That is the army that is going towin the victory. We are going to conquer barbarism; but we are goingto do it by getting at the barbarians one by one. We are going to do itby that conquest of the individual man, woman, and child which leadsto the truest civilization. We are going to conquer the Indians by astanding army of school-teachers armed with ideas, winning victoriesby industrial training, and by the gospel of love and the gospel ofwork." During this time period, children of many tribes were literallyripped away from their families and forced to attend federally run reservationand off-reservation boarding schools, the latter considered themost effective. Unfortunately, stories told by students of these schoolsare never happy ones.
But Bloomfield was different. The Chickasaws had not been relegatedto a reservation and had achieved in the last half of the centuryin Indian Territory a much higher level of autonomy, self-sufficiency,and independence than most other tribal nations. The Chickasaw Nationfounded Bloomfield in 1852, thirty-one years before the Christianreformers first gathered at Lake Mohonk. The Chickasaws foundedBloomfield, not because the federal government demanded it, but becausethe Chickasaw people knew that literacy training was crucial totheir survival as a nation, to their preservation. Bloomfield is also remarkable(1) because the Indian academies were far superior to anyschooling provided for whites in Indian Territory at that time; (2) becauseit existed as an academy long after the corresponding Chickasawacademies shut down, long after the demise of the academy system atthe hands of the new, uniquely American common school; and, finally,(3) because it was an academy for females.
We have very little knowledge of the history of women's education.According to Catherine Hobbs in the introduction to Nineteenth-CenturyWomen Learn to Write, "histories of nineteenth-century education andwriting instruction most often generalize from elite male experience,using records of the century's prestigious all-male institutions.... Thevalue of having histories of girls' and women's experiences of literacyneed not be argued, yet the work of writing these histories and listeningto women's 'voices' from our past has only begun."
Sadly, the voices of women are not the only ones excluded from ourhistories. Histories of education have rarely included American Indianeducation, and, unfortunately, histories of American Indian educationhave rarely discussed the special concerns and perspectives of AmericanIndian women. However, there are some scholars who have given voiceto an impressive range of perspectives and contexts and who have mademany excellent contributions to the field of American Indian education.These scholars have done much to demonstrate the depth, complexity,and symbolic significance of the boarding school experience, an experiencethat has shaped our identities, nations, and relationships witheach other, like it or not.
Of these scholars, a few have contributed to the field by offeringbroad, comprehensive histories of American Indian education. Amongthem is Francis Paul Prucha, who has time and again provided thoughtfuland thought-provoking histories of American Indian policy andschooling that form a foundation for all scholars of Indian education.Of special note are American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers andthe Indian, 1865-1900 and The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888-1912.Another such scholar, Margaret Szasz, in Education and the American Indian:The Road to Self-Determination since 1928, provides broad, historicalcoverage of the education directed by the Indian Bureau between 1928and 1973, a crucial period in the history of Indian education, marked bythe 1928 Meriam Report and the 1969 Kennedy Report. Furthermore,David Wallace Adams not only discusses policy formation and implementationin Education for Extinction: American Indians and the BoardingSchool Experience, 1875-1928 but also provides a superb analysis of students'complicated and ambivalent responses to the schooling system.Significantly, Michael Coleman makes students' autobiographical accountsthe focus of American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930, and, indoing so, unites the voices of a hundred students from different tribesand schools, emphasizing both their collective experience and individualchallenges and adding an essential perspective to our histories.
Other scholars have chosen to highlight specific schools, tribes, orstudents, which allows them to more closely examine the particularcontext of a school or the intricate dynamics of cultural interaction andidentity formation, issues that are at the heart of this book. Furthermore,focusing on specific schools or students has enabled these scholarsto feature the oral histories of former students in their studies; theirwork with oral histories has helped pave the way for my own.
K Tsianina Lomawaima, Clyde Ellis, and Sally J. McBeth have alldeepened their work by interviewing former students and bringingsignificant firsthand perspectives to the conversation. In They Called ItPrairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School, K. Tsianina Lomawaimadraws on interviews with more than sixty Chilocco alumnae, demonstratingthe richness and diversity of student responses to their experiencesand underscoring the fact that Indian students were never passiverecipients of a system. This book was of particular interest to me becausemany Bloomfield students went on to attend Chilocco and oftenspeak of their experiences there. Clyde Ellis, in To Change Them Forever:Indian Education at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School, 1893-1920, remindsus that change signifies life and strength. Cultures and culturalidentities are constantly changing; for the Kiowa people, boardingschools were the "latest in a long series" of changes. Finally, in herinsightful work Ethnic Identity and the Boarding School Experience of West-CentralOklahoma American Indians, Sally J. McBeth uses interviews todemonstrate that boarding schools became pan-Indian centers wherestudents integrated and forged a strong, common ethnic identity.
Like other authors I have mentioned, Brenda Child describes theboarding school experience from the perspective of the students; however,in Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940, Childadds an important and unique perspective by sharing the story throughthe letters of the students and their family members. Another distinctivestory is told by Esther Horne and Sally McBeth in Essie's Story: The Lifeand Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher. Horne and McBeth collaborate to tellHorne's own life story, first as a student in the boarding school systemand then as a teacher.
All of these histories have been invaluable sources for my own workand have greatly informed this book. However, the schools establishedby the so-called Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma were shaped by verydifferent historical events. As a matter of fact, the experiences of childrenat Bloomfield and other academies run by the Five Civilized Tribeswere so distinctive that in Education for Extinction, Adams writes that theyare exempt from his study on the grounds that their stories are "sufficientlyunique as to require a separate investigation altogether."
Devon Mihesuah undertakes just this sort of investigation in Cultivatingthe Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary,1851-1909. Mihesuah's site-specific archival research discusses the typeof education offered at the Cherokee Female Seminary in Indian Territory,in present-day Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Mihesuah's research is particularlyrelevant to this project because the Cherokees and Chickasawsboth belong to the Five Civilized Tribes, that is, southeastern tribes thatwere removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s. Not only do the tribesshare similar backgrounds, but the education of the Cherokee childrenin Indian Territory began at the same time as the education of theChickasaw children, and the type of education offered was also similar.
I hope to contribute to the existing scholarship, not by revising orcorrecting already written histories of literacy instruction, but insteadby telling an untold story — adding a thread to the history of women'sliteracy education, to the type of literacy instruction American indianstudents received, and to the special issues of language and identity theyfaced, particularly mixed-blood students. The experiences of Indianchildren at boarding schools across the United States during the periodof strict federal assimilation policies are quite different than the experiencesof white children. Furthermore, American Indian tribes are notidentical; they have separate and distinctive languages and cultures,and their experiences have been shaped by differing historical circumstances.The disparity between the boarding schools founded by southeasterntribes and the federally run boarding schools to which thechildren of other tribes were sent is shocking.
The Chickasaw boarding schools are unique in that the tribe foundedand sponsored academies, as well as neighborhood day schools, longbefore the federal government took control of the Chickasaw schoolsystem. Of the Chickasaw boarding schools, Bloomfield in particularstands out, chiefly because it was considered significant enough to remainin operation forty years after Oklahoma statehood. This researchhas special significance for the Chickasaw Nation — especially for thewomen who attended the academy and their descendants — because itwill help to preserve Chickasaw stories and heritage. This book is particularlysignificant for me — because I wrote it for and with the helpof my family.
Values, Purposes, and Community Goals
In this book, I focus on the type of education the students of BloomfieldAcademy received and why. When I first began to research the school, Iwas astounded, by the curriculum, by the pictures, by the attitude ofmany of the alumnae — largely because of the vast difference betweenBloomfield and off-reservation schools I had read about. I became intenselycurious. Why was Bloomfield different? In its history as a boardingacademy for girls, Bloomfield had three different administrations:mission, tribal, and federal. I noticed that each administration substantiallychanged the curriculum of the school. Why? To what end? Whatsort of lives were the students being prepared to lead and why? To participatein what community? White? Tribal? Both? Missionaries, Chickasaws,and federal educators provided literacy training through formalschooling because doing so was valuable and useful, yes, to the Chickasawgirls, but more importantly to themselves, for their own purposes.Each administration had a specific agenda for educating the Chickasawgirls and for educating them in a specific way. My objective is to examinethe elements of the curriculum offered at Bloomfield under eachadministration and the purposes and implications of each — the implicationsare significant. At its core, this study is a question of identity.The bottom line is that any administration's agenda or objective wasreally about what identity that administration wanted the students tohave: Chickasaw citizen or U.S. citizen? Subservient woman or communityleader? It is particularly interesting to me that most of thestudents who attended Bloomfield were mixed-blood students. I interviewedfifteen women who attended the school, all of whom, like me,are mixed-blood. This study becomes, then, a story of mixed-blood students,mixed literacies, mixed cultures, and mixed identities; Bloomfieldis the site where all of these issues intersect and intertwine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Listening to Our Grandmothers' Stories by Amanda J. Cobb. Copyright © 2000 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.