American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1743 Samson Occom, a twenty-year-old Mohegan, made his way north from his Native community to the English settlement of Lebanon, Connecticut. Occom eagerly anticipated learning to read through tutoring from Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. As he wrote, “When I got up there, he received me With kindness and Compassion and instead of Staying a Fortnight or 3 Weeks, I Spent 4 years with him.” A little more than a century later, in 1854, a student at the recently opened Cherokee Female Seminary wrote in the student newspaper this advice to her peers: “Let us begin now in new energy that we may gain that intellectual knowledge which will reward the hopes of our Nation, fitting us for doing much good among our people.” Some sixty years later, in 1915, during her first day at Santa Fe Indian School, a five-year-old girl from San Juan Pueblo clung to her mother’s shawl as she faced the challenges thrust upon her. Taken to the principal’s office, she pulled the shawl about her, recalling later, “The principal pointed to a clock up there and he asked me if I could tell the time. I just looked at it and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to tell time, so I just covered my face [with my shawl] and the students laughed.”