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

Frontiers, 1995 by Carter, Patricia A

Arnold and Reed decided to join the BIA after meeting a Bureau agent while visiting a cousin in Chico, California. (24) On receiving their appointments they asked several sources, but no one could tell them exactly what they were expected to do in their assignments as "field matrons." One Indian agent suggested that they were to have a "civilizing influence." (25) Feeling none the wiser for this information, they traveled on to the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in the Klamath River Valley in northern California. During their year (1908-1909) in the area near Somesbar, California, they worked with the Karok people, a group also known as Orleans, above Yurok or Weitchpec and below Shasta. In 1910 a census found a total of 775 Karoks. Of these, 411 were of mixed Anglo and Karok heritage. All but 11.4 percent spoke English and 237 of the children (ages six to nineteen) attended school. Karok men were employed as farm laborers, farmers, gold and silver mine workers, building and hand trades laborers, and lumberers, whereas the census reported only twenty women as employed, eleven as basket makers. (26)

Although the account of Reed and Arnold's experience is not unduly critical of the BIA, when invited to return, they did not. Of the six women in this study, Arnold and Reed had the least supervision and the most freedom to do as they pleased. Though they broke the rules with relative impunity, they also recognized the limits of their power to make or encourage systemic change.

Gertrude Golden was born in November 1874 in Monroe, Michigan, where she attended public school and later taught for eleven years. Her teaching career began at the age of fifteen and accordingly her education was haphazard. She studied the normal school curriculum for short terms at Adrian and St. Mary's Colleges (in College and Monroe, Michigan, respectively) but never received a degree at either location. As was the norm for many self-supporting women teachers, Golden taught until she had enough savings to attend college. Once her funds were exhausted, she returned to teaching. In the fall of 1900, Golden took the BIA teachers exam in Detroit. On receiving a tersely worded telegram about her assignment, "Destination: Red Moon Reservation, Oregon," Golden departed Monroe, Michigan, immediately for the Umatilla Agency Boarding School. Her reasons for going included a desire to escape from the "too limiting, too monotonous a life" she had experienced in her village school. She explained, "Although I was not longing for adventure, I did crave a change of scenery." Her new job promised: "a salary twice what I was getting, with a promise of an increase; a chance to study human types in which I had always been interested; opportunity to travel and see something of the country." (27) While she eschewed the idea of adventure as the motivating force, neither did she offer a simplistic moralistic framework for her decision. She went to satisfy her own needs for money, travel, and intellectual stimulation.