"Completely discouraged": Women teachers' resistance in the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, 1900-1910

Frontiers, 1995 by Carter, Patricia A

Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins arrived at the Blue Canyon Day School near the Arizona Hopi Reservation in 1899, filled with self-doubt. Her own first sensations were mirrored in the countenances of the schoolchildren: "As they stood facing me, their dark eyes gazed at me fearfully. They must have felt they were on the verge of some strange and startling experience. Actually I was as afraid as they were," wrote Jenkins. (1) The children understood no English and she knew nothing of the Hopi or Navajo languages, so she pantomimed her every interaction. The children enjoyed the game, but by noon of the first day she felt the physical strain: "I was trembling with weakness." (2) To add to her stress, she immediately learned that the school supervisor wanted her new job for his wife. Another staff member warned her that any sign of weakness would give him a reason to ask for her dismissal. Jenkins determined not to allow him the opportunity.

Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins's experience paralleled that of many Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) teachers in the early decades of the twentieth century. Ignorant of American Indian languages and cultures, unprepared for additional roles from nurse to forester, and bewildered by illogical rules and dogmatic supervisors, these teachers struggled to maintain their equanimity. While employment with the BIA appeared to be one course through which "the new woman" of the twentieth century could expand her cultural, social, and geographic horizons, such ambitions clashed with the Bureau's bureaucratic machinery. (3) This essay focuses on the difficulties faced by women teachers in BIA schools in the first decade of the twentieth century in an effort to gain insight into the teachers' resistance and agency as women and workers.

The decade between 1900 and 1910 can be seen as one of transition for the BIA, as policymakers struggled to increase professionalization and stability amid exponential growth of schools and workers. During this time Bureau officials often expressed frustration with the high turnover of the service's work force. As historian Francis Paul Prucha has noted, much of the criticism of the BIA schools has been laid at the feet of the teachers and other personnel who made up the lower echelons of the Indian Service. (4) Robert Trennert charges BIA teachers with hanging on to outmoded behavioral codes, preferring these tools of cultural subjugation rather than adopting the more progressive policies handed down from Washington, D.C. (5) Thomas James suggests that teachers felt they were outsiders to both Washington reformers and the residents of reservations. (6) All of these themes are apparent in the autobiographies of BIA teachers explored in this essay: worker dissatisfaction as expressed by high turnover, the lack of communication and agreement between teachers and their employers, and, most important, the teachers' feeling of marginalization. The teachers often portrayed themselves as disenfranchised workers and powerless change agents who were personally demoralized by the system. What led to such feelings of incompetency and lethargy? I maintain that two major factors are involved: a lack of training and preparation for the BIA positions to which the teachers were appointed and the BIA's underestimation of the importance of teachers' understanding and agreeing with the BIA mission. Underlying both factors was a lack of communication between frontline workers (the teachers) and the BIA policymakers. As a result the teachers became locked in a never-ending struggle between accommodating and resisting the system.

Along with Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins's experiences, the autobiographies of Mary Ellicott Arnold, Mabel Reed, Estelle Aubrey Brown, Gertrude Golden, and Flora Gregg Iliff provide the primary resources for this study. (7) The use of autobiographies allows for a more intimate and detailed dialogical exploration of the responses of teachers to their roles as agents of assimilation and recipients of acculturation than is available through some other historical sources.

Sociologists have traditionally viewed teachers from one of two perspectives: as "uplifters" preparing children to make the most of their opportunities in a democratic society or, in reproduction theories, as tools of the dominant culture to reinforce power relationships through social and economic structures. (8) While new thinking has begun to stress the possibility of student resistance to the hegemonic power of schools, most theorists continue to portray teachers as willing or unwitting transmitters of dominant cultural values. (9) In other words, they accommodate the goals of the system. This perspective fails to note the more complex probability that teachers reproduce and accommodate the power structure while also questioning, resisting, and trying to change it.

A similar polarity is also seen in the history discipline. While early accounts of female missionaries and teachers tended to glorify their piety and self-sacrifice, Peggy Pascoe notes a recent, more critical trend among historians to reinterpret "everything from prisons to public schools as attempts by middle-class reformers to impose social control on potentially disruptive underclasses." (10) Such antipodal positions basically build on stereotypes and do little to expose the difficulties teachers faced in countering bureaucratic concepts that they found morally repugnant or simply illogical. And while some teachers may have fit the stereotypes, some didn't. Furthermore, in seeing teachers as invaders thoughtlessly force-feeding white, middle-class, Christian rhetoric to children of other races and classes, we justify theories of social control but fail to see the deeper meaning of teacher agency, resistance, and growth through interaction with cultures other than their own. Kathleen Weiler rejects the notion that reproduction and resistance are dichotomous practices, explaining instead that they are "mutually informing relationships of contraction." Weiler's theory allows for a more realistic view of teachers and teaching and establishes one goal of this essay -- to explore the roles of teachers as agents of both reproductive and counterhegemonic practices within schools. (11)