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

Frontiers, 1995 by Carter, Patricia A

Resistance and Agency

What at first glance seemed like a exhilarating exploit quickly materialized into a job with seemingly endless responsibilities and conflicting expectations. Although most women who taught for the BIA had previous teaching experience, the BIA's conceptualization of this position required considerably more personal dedication and perseverance than did the schools back home. Employees complained bitterly about unreasonable expectations, poor physical facilities, and lack of collegiality, as well as the absence of privacy and personal time. During the first decade of the twentieth century, some urban schoolteachers became involved in the women's movement, participated in secret marriages, filed suits against their school districts, and organized unions, in individual and collective efforts to resist or actively subvert the rules that limited women's full participation within the educational system. (40) However, the geographic isolation and highly centralized bureaucracy made the possibility of collective activity by BIA teachers less likely. Many schools had only one or two teachers. (41) Communication with other schools or with Washington was infrequent and generally made only through the Indian agent or school supervisor. (42) Thus, teacher resistance within the BIA can be seen in highly personalized forms, from actively breaking pedagogical precedents, refusing orders, and even blackmail or more covert or passive activities such as sharing fantasies and complaints with co-workers, stealing food, holding prohibited parties, creating hiding places, and taking illicit drugs. Sharing their experiences in letters to people back home was a common means of resistance, one that provided the foundation for the books that these six women eventually wrote. Indeed, the very act of writing and publishing these stories, even as much as forty or fifty years later, was a form of continued resistance and agency.

After only a short time at Blue Canyon, Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins began to think of her work as a "treadmill." As the school's only teacher, she was responsible for four classes of students, working with each for two hours a day, and en with the combined group for a study period each evening. She was surprised to learn that in addition she was expected to cook for the other employees every third week. The latter task seems to have intimidated her far more than the teaching hours. In her Williamsburg home there had never been any expectation that she learn domestic duties. Indeed, she notes with some humor that the only time she had ever entered the kitchen was to carry a note from her mother to their cook. In what would have been her free hours in Williamsburg, Jenkins supervised the children's meals at the school, helped them to dress and bathe, medicated them when they were sick, removed lice, broke up fights, soothed hurt feelings, and acted in many ways as a foster mother to students. (43)

Beyond the multitude of such duties, teachers complained that the centralization of authority in Washington, D.C., led to schools run as the independent fiefdoms of tyrannical and petty bureaucrats who were put in place through patronage appointments. Along with the endless lists of rules developed by officials in Washington, local agents and school supervisors invented their own rules covering teacher behaviors such as appropriate dress, language, and deportment, as well as controlling what a teacher might do during her recreation and vacation time. Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins quickly learned that one unwritten rule at the Blue Canyon Day School was to "always look busy." Her friend encouraged her to hide her embroidery whenever there was