Education and American Indians

• SIGNIFICANCE: Christian missionaries, the federal government, and public school systems have assumed responsibility for educating American Indians under policies that often have emphasized assimilation over tribal identity.

As more and more European settlers entered that part of the Americas now known as the United States, education was seen as a way of assimilating young Native Americans into the dominant White culture. The history of Europeanized Indian education over four centuries tells a story of cultural genocide.

Missionary Activity and Paternalism, 1568-1870

The first school specifically founded for the education of American Indian youth in the New World was established by the Jesuits in Havana, Florida, in 1568. For the next three hundred years, Catholic and Protestant religious groups dominated non-Indian attempts to educate American Indians. In 1617, King James asked Anglican clergy to collect money for building “churches and schools for ye education of ye children of these Barbarians in Virginia.” One of the earliest of these religious schools was founded by the Reverend John Eliot in 1631 in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He developed a plan to bring American Indians together in small, self-governing “Indian prayer towns” where they could be instructed in Christian ethics and arts. In order to become accepted by the Puritans in these prayer towns, American Indians had to give up their old way of life completely, including long hair for men and short hair for women.

A common method of providing educational assistance during this period was by treaty stipulation. From the first treaty in 1778 until 1871, when treaty making with the American Indians ended, the United States entered into almost four hundred treaties, of which 120 had educational provisions. The terms usually called for teachers, material, and equipment for educational purposes.

The first specific appropriation by Congress for American Indian education was the Act of March 30, 1802, which allowed $15,000 per year “to promote civilization among the aborigines.” The money went mostly to missionary groups. In 1819, Congress established a civilization fund, which lasted until 1873, to provide financial support to religious groups and other interested individuals who were willing to live among and teach American Indians. The Act of March 3, 1819, which established this fund, also gave the president complete authority over American Indian education and remained the basic authorization for the educational activities carried out by the government on behalf of American Indian people.

Manual labor schools had their beginnings during the period when the tribes were being moved out of the East and Northeast. Usually these were located in American Indian country or at a site convenient to several tribes and, for that reason, were agreeable to the American Indians. They also drew support from the government, which believed that it was a waste of effort to provide only academic training. The first manual labor school, the Choctaw Academy, was organized in 1837 by Colonel Richard Johnson in Scott County, Kentucky. This school, and others that came later, offered religious, academic, and practical instruction. Six hours were spent daily in the classroom and six at work on farm and shop detail. By 1840, the US government was operating six manual labor schools with eight hundred students and eighty-seven boarding schools with about twenty-nine hundred students.

Several American Indian tribes, with the help of missionaries and educators, built and supported their own schools. The Mohawks did this as early as 1712 under the influence of the Reverend Thomas Barkley, an Anglican missionary. This school, with one temporary suspension, operated until the end of the American Revolution. The Choctaw and Cherokee, before their removal from their original homelands, had instituted common schools, supported with funds obtained from the United States for land cessions. After the removal of these tribes to lands west of the Mississippi, the Cherokee, in 1841, and the Choctaw, in 1842, reestablished their schools. (A number of states had not yet provided for a system of common schools in 1842.) The Cherokee system, by 1852, included twenty-one elementary schools and two academies. The enrollment in that year was given as 1,100. The Choctaw had nine schools, of which seven experimented with teaching reading and writing to adults. Teachers were brought from the East to be in charge of advanced academic work, and the course of study included music, astronomy, Latin, botany, algebra, and elocution. Within ten years, however, the majority of their teachers had changed from eastern-educated missionaries to locally trained teachers. The Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes, also members of the Five Civilized Tribes, followed the example of the Cherokee and Choctaw within a few years and established school systems. In all cases, the schools were tribally supported, and they operated without federal supervision until 1906, when the tribal governments of these five tribes were destroyed by an act of Congress.

In 1851, the period of reservation settlement began and did not end until the 1930s. Schools established on reservations were designed to devalue the traditional culture and religion of American Indian people. One of the most significant ways of undermining American Indian culture was the government’s attempt to suppress native language. In 1880, the Indian Bureau issued regulations that “all instruction must be in English” in both mission and government schools under threat of loss of government funding. In 1885, some teachers and administrators, recognizing the small utility of standard educational training and methods, suggested that special materials be created for American Indian children. No special textbooks were developed, however, until well into the twentieth century.

Government Control and Dependence, 1870-1923

In 1865, under President Ulysses S. Grant, American Indian boarding schools had their birth. After studying conditions among some of the western tribes, a congressional committee suggested that “boarding schools remote from Indian communities” would be most successful in solving the “Indian problem.” Grant, believing that the only solution lay in “the civilization” of American Indians into White culture, supported the move. In 1878, the boarding school system was launched when the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was founded by General Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt, alarmed at the “gross injustices to both races [American Indians and Black people]” that he had observed, believed that true equality could come to the American Indians only if they learned to feel at home in the White world, where they deserved both “the opportunities and . . . safeguards of our Declaration and Constitution.” At Carlisle, which enrolled children from the midwestern and western tribes, students were required to speak, read, and write English and to assume the clothing and customs of White people. They were taught skills that would later help them become employed in trades such as blacksmithing, carpentry, tailoring, and farming. Girls were taught domestic skills. After completing school, students were placed with White families for three years; they worked in exchange for their upkeep. The families were paid fifty dollars a year to cover costs of clothing and health care.

Forts no longer needed by the army were converted into boarding schools. Between 1889 and 1892, twelve such boarding schools were established. Little attention was paid to tribal differences in language and customs. It was assumed—rightly—that if children could be taken at a young enough age and moved far enough away from the influences of family and tribe, the odds against their ever again becoming a part of their original environment were remote. Children as young as five years old were sent to the boarding schools. The shock, fear, and loneliness that these children faced upon being uprooted from everything familiar and known can only be imagined. Pratt, operating under the noblest of intentions, had unwittingly contributed to one of the saddest chapters in American Indian history.

By 1887, Congress was appropriating more than a million dollars a year for American Indian education. About half the appropriations went to missionaries who were contracted to educate American Indians. Feuding between Protestants and Catholics, however, took place because the Catholics were much more successful in establishing schools. This led the Protestants to support funding only government-run schools. With the appointment in 1889 of General Thomas J. Morgan, a Baptist minister, as commissioner of Indian affairs, the Republicans made a systematic effort to stop government funding of all missionary schools. By 1900 all direct funding to these schools was ended. Tribes continued to receive a portion of the dollars that the federal government had previously provided the churches for funding of the mission schools. Some tribes maintained these schools in spite of the reduced resources; most used the funds for other needs.

Moves to Reform American Indian Education, 1924-1944

As the new century began, the continued inability of boarding schools and English-only education to transform American Indians into White people led to disillusionment and lowered expectations for American Indian education. Increasingly, American Indians were viewed in the same light as Black people at that time: as a permanent underclass for whom an inferior, nonacademic, vocational education was appropriate and adequate.

At the same time, because of the staggering loss of land and the inefficiency of education, the total Native Indian situation was growing progressively worse. In 1902, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was operating twenty-five boarding schools in fifteen states for 9,736 students. By 1912, there were more American Indian children in public schools than in government schools. As government schools lost ground, efforts to increase American Indian enrollment in public day schools did not include examining the ability of these schools to meet American Indian needs.

In 1924, a “Committee of One Hundred Citizens” was called together by the secretary of the interior to discuss how American Indian education could be improved. The committee recommended better school facilities, better-trained personnel, an increase in the number of American Indian students in public schools, and high school and college scholarships. These recommendations helped establish reservation day schools up to the sixth grade and reservation boarding schools up to the eighth grade.

In 1928, a government-sponsored study, The Problem of Indian Administration (the Meriam Report), claimed that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was providing poor-quality services to American Indians; it particularly pointed to the shocking conditions found in boarding schools. The committee recommended that elementary children not be sent to BIA boarding schools at all. Shortly after publication of the study, John Collier, one of the BIA’s leading critics, became commissioner of American Indian affairs and immediately sought to implement the recommendations of the Meriam Report. The Johnson-O’Malley Act (1934) allowed the federal government to pay states for educating American Indians in public schools.

The Termination Era, 1945-1970

In the 1950s, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, six “termination” bills were passed. They were intended to end all federal involvement with the American Indians, leaving policy issues in health, education, and welfare up to the states. Conditions improved little as states, for the most part, failed to provide adequate services in any of these arenas. Another program aimed at “relocation” helped American Indians move from reservations to cities, where, presumably, educational and employment opportunities were better. American Indian children in cities showed improved academic achievement, but many felt displaced and unhappy.

Between 1967 and 1971, Robert J. Havighurst of the University of Chicago directed a research project entitled the National Study of American Indian Education. Its recommendations called for greatly increased American Indian participation in goal setting and in the implementation of programs. During this same period, a report compiled by a Senate subcommittee on Indian education revealed that American Indian school dropout rates were twice the national average, that American Indian students lagged two to three years behind White students in school achievement, that only 1 percent had American Indian teachers, that one-fourth of teachers of American Indian students preferred not to teach them, and that “Indian children more than any other minority group believed themselves to be 'below average' in intelligence.”

During this time, American Indian educators had become increasingly active, and, by the end of the decade, the National Indian Education Association had been formed. In 1968, the first tribally controlled college, Navajo Community College, was founded, and in 1971, the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards was established.

The Move Toward Self-Determination Since 1970

The Senate report on the plight of American Indians led to the passage of the Indian Education Act in 1972. This act provided for special programs benefiting American Indian children in reservation schools as well as those attending urban public schools. It was amended in 1975 to require that American Indian parents be involved in the planning of these programs. The amended version also encouraged the establishment of community-run schools and stressed culturally relevant and bilingual curricular materials. The Office of Education, after a two-year study, recommended that tribal history, culture, and languages be emphasized, using the students’ native tongues as the language of instruction. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter created the new post of assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs and named a member of the Blackfoot tribe, Forrest J. Gerrard, to the position.

In spite of efforts to improve educational opportunities for American Indians, in the last decade of the twentieth century, American Indian students still struggled for visibility in the education market. High school dropout rates for American Indian students continued to be the highest for all minority groups, with only about half completing a high school education. Some reservation schools reported a yearly teacher turnover rate of 90 percent. In 1990, bachelor’s degrees earned by American Indians made up less than 0.5 percent of all degrees conferred. The number of doctorates earned by American Indians between 1980 and 1990 actually dropped, from 130 to 102. This trend continued into the 2020s, with one in ten American Indians between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four dropping out of high school. Approximately 69 percent of American Indians successfully completed high school, compared to the national average of 81 percent. That percentage dropped to 53 percent for students attending Bureau of Indian Education schools, which are mainly located on reservations and often struggle to secure funding and adequate staff.

In the 1990s, several public school districts with relatively large American Indian populations began to experiment with schools that focus on American Indian culture along with traditional academic curricula. One of these, the American Indian Magnet School at Mounds Park All-Nations School in the St. Paul, Minnesota, public school system, declared the goal of “placing education into culture instead of continuing the practice of placing culture into education.” Other efforts continued in the 2020s, such as expanding access to training to increase the amount of American Indian teachers and staff in schools. During this time, curriculum was also being crafted by tribal leaders in some areas, while other schools offered language immersion, in which English and American Indian languages would be taught concurrently. Three centuries of national educational policy must take at least partial responsibility for the tragic decline of tribal cultures in the United States, but perhaps it will also take the lead in providing a vehicle for the land’s original citizens to assume their rightful place in American society.

Bibliography

Cahn, Edgar S., and David W. Hearn. Our Brother’s Keeper: The Indian in White America. New American Library, 1975.

Hey, Harold and D'Arcy McNickle. Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet. Harper & Row, 1970.

Fishbacher, Theodore. A Study of the Role of the Federal Government in the Education of the American Indian. R & E Research Associates, 1974.

"Native American Education: History, Challenges, and Hope for the Future." Running Strong for American Indian Youth, 1 Aug. 2025, indianyouth.org/native-american-education/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

"US Apologizes for Federal Indian Boarding Schools, A Key Moment in Tribal-US Relations." Native American Rights Fund, 25 Oct. 2024, narf.org/united-states-apology-boarding-schools/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.

"Why Native Histories Matter in the Classroom." American Indian College Fund, 19 June 2023, collegefund.org/blog/presidents-blog/why-native-histories-matter-in-the-classroom/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2026.