American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the late nineteenth century, when the US government embarked on an educational program to teach English to American Indian students, there were few if any trained teachers of English as a second language in public schools in the United States. Immigrant groups that wielded some political power, such as German speakers, created their own schools, which were staffed with teachers who spoke the students’ languages. In contrast, poor immigrant children, if they attended school at all, were typically drilled in English by the same teachers in the same material as English-speaking children, even though they could not understand the teachers’ instructions. Given that teaching English and teaching through English were necessarily trial-and-error processes, the issue of language and language instruction pervaded the annual reports of the commissioner of Indian affairs at the turn of the century. While there is a growing body of literature on American Indian education in the late nineteenth century, including historical overviews and studies of particular schools, as well as the occasional study dealing with the US government’s language policy at the turn of the twentieth century, no detailed investigation exists of the methods teachers actually employed in order to teach English to American Indian students when this first nationwide English-as-a-second-language program was instituted. This study is a contribution to that history. To learn how English was taught at the time the US government was increasing its involvement in American Indian education, this article examines the second-language program developed at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia beginning in 1878. Hampton was not representative of all off-reservation boarding schools. Founded as a school for freed slaves and focusing on the African American population, it was not designed exclusively for American Indian students.