White Man's Club: Schools, Race and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation

Abstract

With the publication of Jacqueline Fear-Segal's White Man's Club, the historiography of Indian residential schooling has reached a new level of sophistication. This is not a history of the school system but a deeply analytic treatment of the discourse of race and the “asymmetries of power” reflected in the schools, which together produced “what it meant to be Indian in the United States” (p. xvii). Education was, as Fear-Segal contends, “integral not only to a story of land theft, ethnocide, and cultural erasure but also to a pattern of progressive racialization” (p. xiv). That pattern, the movement from the optimistic universalism of cultural evolution to “scientific” racism, is traced through the familiar characters of the schools' story: Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, the Riggs family, and, of course, Capt. Richard Henry Pratt of Fort Marion, Florida, and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The text makes a second significant contribution in its probing of “the actions and reactions of Indians who struggled to resist as well as claim the power of white schooling.” Her use of James Scott's analytical tools enable the reader “momentarily to hear the whispers of some Indian voices” in the midst of the “booming tones of white authority” (p. xvii). Fear-Segal teases those whispers out of a range of sources: Carlisle's student newspaper and its school cemetery, as well as student biographies. Her hunt for the “hidden transcript” of Indian experience begins with drawings by Fort Marion prisoners, underlining the artists' understanding of the power of their American captors within the geography of the classroom and the person of the teacher; it continues in other sets of drawings—the spatial record of school layouts. She demonstrates that purported reformers, failing to recognize internalized attitudes rooted in the nation's racist fiber, replicated them in school design; students, who rhetorically at least were being made fit for life in an American world, experienced in school the same sort of exclusionary social relations that would characterize their post-school fate.

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