American Indian Culture and Research Journal

If there is an idol that the American people have, it is the school. If you don’t believe it, go out to Pine Ridge, where there are seven thousand Sioux on eight million acres of land . . . and find planted . . . thirty-two school houses, standing there as a testimony to our belief in education . . . . It is a remedy for barbarism, we think, and so we give the dose ...The school is the slow match. . . . [Ilt will blow u p the old life, and of its shattered pieces [we] will make good citizens. -Testimony of Miss Annie Beecher Scoville Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners in the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1901 During the late nineteenth century, no solution to the so-called Indian problem was mentioned more often than education. Determined to remold Indians into models of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant society, government officials seized upon schools as the best way to make such changes a reality. Confident that the classroom could transform Indian children more effectively than any other institution, policy makers sought to create a comprehensive school system that would provide a systematic, uniform standard of progress for those who entered it. Of the government's various programs, only education promised a complete metamorphosis for Indian children. Schools could be built anywhere and everywhere; they could accommodate students of all ages and both sexes; and they could act as the most powerful engine possible of the cultural reorientation that policy makers envisioned. Most important, schools targeted young children, those most vulnerable to change and least able to resist it. The Indian school system, Robert Utley has observed, "represented the most dangerous of all attacks on basic Indian values, the one most likely to succeed in the end because it aimed at the children who had known little if any of the old reservation life."