White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Indigenous Education) by Jacqueline Fear-Segal


White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Indigenous Education)
Title : White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Indigenous Education)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0803227884
ISBN-10 : 9780803227880
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 412
Publication : First published January 1, 2009

Tens of thousands of Indian children filed through the gates of government schools to be trained as United States citizens. Part of a late-nineteenth-century campaign to eradicate Native cultures and communities, these institutions became arenas where whites debated the terms of Indian citizenship, but also where Native peoples resisted the power of white schooling and claimed new skills to protect and redefine tribal and Indian identities.

 

In White Man’s Club , schools for Native children are examined within the broad framework of race relations in the United States for the first time. Jacqueline Fear-Segal analyzes multiple schools and their differing agendas and engages with the conflicting white discourses of race that underlay their pedagogies. She argues that federal schools established to Americanize Native children did not achieve their purpose; instead they progressively racialized American Indians. A far-reaching and bold account of the larger issues at stake, White Man’s Club challenges previous studies for overemphasizing the reformers’ overtly optimistic assessment of the Indians’ capacity for assimilation and contends that a covertly racial agenda characterized this educational venture from the start. Asking the reader to consider the legacy of nineteenth-century acculturation policies, White Man’s Club incorporates the life stories and voices of Native students and traces the schools’ powerful impact into the twenty-first century.

 

Fear-Segal draws upon a rich array of source material. Traditional archival research is interwoven with analysis of maps, drawings, photographs, the built environment, and supplemented by oral and family histories. Creative use of new theoretical and interpretive perspectives brings fresh insights to the subject matter.

White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Indigenous Education) Reviews

  • Bill

    Thorough and well-written, Fear-Segal's book sheds light on White attempts to acculturate indigenous peoples into White society in several ways: through missionary schools whose first aim was to Christianize children (often by separating them from their parents); through federally-supported schools (like those headed by Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Thomas Wildcat Alford) who goal, partially, was to turn into the indigenous into placid workers in American society; and, most important in this book, through the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Along the way, the author lets us see how indigenous peoples educated their children to preserve societal norms and rich cultures, and how difficult it was for children to shift to a written culture whose norms and expectations were so different from their parents'. The Carlisle School, not far from the campus of Dickinson College, closed in 1918 and its campus was taken over by the U.S. Army War College, and in 2000 was the site for a massive celebration of indigenous culture. This book carries the reader through enormous changes in cultural assumptions and political expectations, and in so doing reflects ways in which American culture itself has been reshaped itself to accommodate broader and more varied possibilities. Despite its weight, White Man's Club draws the reader in and through a complicated story. There are massive notes and bibliography for the scholar.