Acquiring and Using Literacy

Western Native Americans acquired literacy in a variety of ways during the 1870s and 1880s: from early missionaries, in day schools on the reserves, at eastern boarding schools, and on their own initiative without white involvement. They understood the written language within the framework of colonization, using it to maintain some sense of sovereignty. Letter writing and the postal system were wielded as anticolonial weapons to question the power of the US government, to demand change, and to remind officials about the government’s obligations. Like eastern Native Americans before the mid-nineteenth century, western tribes used literacy to acquire information independent of the US government. Newspapers created for Native audiences, by whites and by Natives, became vital resources. Natives also consumed white newspapers and magazines, connecting themselves to white sources and the national web of communication.

Innovations in Communication

Before the reservation years, Indigenous peoples confronted their dynamic and diverse trans-Mississippi world with continuous adaptations and innovations in communication. Many western Native Americans were multilingual before and after European contact. Native groups were exposed to multiple languages during their intertribal interactions, especially with tribes in close association. Among tribes with mutually unintelligible languages, communication required that some individual or individuals learn the language of the foreign group, which allowed them to maintain the social, political, and economic relationships required in their diverse regions. Moreover, long before the US government began its assimilation program west of the Mississippi, Natives were adapting to new forms of communication, including written forms. Before and after European presence, Native Americans used pictographic messages to communicate a wide variety of ideas to foreign groups, including complex messages of war, peace, trade, and religion. Also important to note, a few western groups created their own phonologic written language outside of white involvement.

In the early 1880s, a Southern Cheyenne named Turtle-Following-His-Wife living in Indian Territory at the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation used a pictograph to communicate to his son Little Man living seven hundred miles away at the Pine Ridge Reservation. Little Man easily understood the meaning of the picture upon receiving it. Turtle-Following-His-Wife was telling Little Man that he had sent fifty-three dollars (represented by the drawing of fifty-three silver dollars) to the agent at Pine Ridge to pay for his journey to his father’s home in Indian Territory.

Early Indian Education

Before the 1870s, the large majority of Native Americans living west of the Mississippi (outside the so-called Five Civilized Tribes) and east of the Pacific coastal region had little opportunity to learn to read and write, despite many decades of contact with Europeans and Americans. Early missionaries to the eastern Plains began developing systems of writing as a way to get Indians to read the Bible in the 1830s, a normal route toward Indian conversion east of the Mississippi for two centuries. Catholic missionaries began educating Santees of the eastern Plains in the 1840s with Dakota-language prints of catechism, prayers, songs, and biblical messages. Missionary work did not begin in earnest in the western Plains until the reservation years of the 1870s, but Lakotas had begun using written text to their political advantage as early as 1846. In January
1846, sixteen Brulé and Oglala Lakota headmen made their marks on a petition to the president that asked for compensation for their loss of subsistence and for Lakotas “getting killed on several occasions” because of white encroachment.

The 1880s

The federal government began to invest more in Indian assimilation and Indian education in the 1880s. In 1876, for instance, Congress appropriated only $20,000 for education, but by 1885 it appropriated $75,000, and nearly $1 million more came from the general fund. By 1890, Congress’s commitment to education skyrocketed to close to $1.4 million per year, nearly half of Indian Affairs’ total budget. Policy makers believed education was a humane way to solve white America’s so-called Indian question, to help the Indians understand the supposed superiority of white civilization, and to bring the Natives into American life. US government school would become sites of assimilation where Native ways of life were meant to be eradicated. According to one member of the Pres. Grant’s Peace Commission, government schools should introduce the English language because the “sameness of language” would produce the “sameness of sentiment and thought.” The English language was the foundation of assimilation, and its introduction to every tribe was seen as the key to erasing the differences between Natives and whites.

Contesting Education

US government officials’ efforts to entirely acculturate Native Americans into some general notion of American culture did not succeed. Native languages, in this case, continued to be spoken and written. In fact, Native Americans used the Americanized education instilled at Indian schools as an anticolonial tool. Many western Natives sent their children to schools throughout the 1870s and 1880s to acquire the skills of reading and writing and did so for a variety of reasons, many willingly and hopefully. They did not believe, as white educators did, that US government schools could eradicate their Indigenous identities. Some wrote to officials to ask for more schools and teachers. But government agents also manipulated or coerced parents who were hesitant to send their children to schools. Agents were on the reservations to unravel the knotty bonds of Native culture. Their job was to convince the Indians, through bribery or punishment or shaming, that assimilation was the only way forward for their people. It is also important to understand that from the very beginning, many educators relied on physical and mental abuse to try to eradicate Native ways of life from their students (government policies were dedicated to that end). Parents condemned the mistreatment of their children, and they expressed their concerns in letters regarding whom the US government hired to teach their children.

Off-Reservation Schools

Army officer Richard Henry Pratt was among the first to convince the US government to invest in off-reservation boarding schools for Indian students. He founded the Carlisle (PA) Industrial Indian School in 1879. Pratt reasoned that the surest way to rid Indian children of their “savage” ways was to immerse them in a “civilized” environment, in a white town, separate from their past. For nearly four decades, Carlisle was the home to thousands of Native children from nearly every Indian agency in the West. More than a dozen other off-reservation schools were founded in the 1880s. While fewer parents were opposed to sending their children to on-reservation day or boarding schools, where they could better protect their children, many were often understandably unwilling to send their children to off-reservation boarding schools. The traumatic cultural change, the great distance from home, and real threats of sickness and death were a few of the most common reasons parents refused. Despite the undeniably detrimental aspects of Indian education, the number of Indians who attended boarding and on-reservation day schools rose steadily throughout the 1880s. By 1892, 15.56 percent of Indians living on agencies in North and South Dakota were enrolled in a day or boarding school (this statistic includes all ages, not just children; the percentage of children would have been much higher), up from just 0.56 percent in 1873 and 3.95 percent in 1882. The percentage of students who attended those schools increased sharply from 1887 to 1892. Government officials were becoming more successful at persuading and coercing parents to send their children to school, and more parents were willing to face white education.

Literacy

Thousands of Indians living on reservations in the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa, and Indian Territory (excluding the Five Civilized Tribes) learned how to read in the 1880s, according to Indian affairs estimates. By 1889, nearly 12,000 Lakotas, Santees, Yanktons, Yanktonais, Mandans, Assiniboines, Gros Ventres, Utes, Paiutes, Shoshones, Bannocks, Arapahos, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Comanches, Apaches, Wichitas, Poncas, Pawnees, Otoes, Sac and Fox, Nez Perce, Blackfeet, Crows, Omahas, Winnebagos, and others could read in English or their Native language. Only nine years earlier, fewer than 3,500 could read. Only 4 percent of the individuals from those groups could read in 1880, but by 1889, the number reached 18 percent. In the Dakotas alone, nearly a quarter of Native Americans could read English or the Dakota language in 1890, compared to only five percent ten years earlier. Despite the emphasis on English education, a significant percentage of those Plains Natives who could read did so only in their Native language. Many Siouan-speaking people (Dakotas, Omahas, Poncas) took advantage of their early contact with missionaries. Eastern Dakotas (Santees and Sissetons), Western Dakotas (Yanktons and Yanktonai), and Lakotas were all taught to write Dakota. Many communicated with one another using both written Dakota and English. However, several languages, including Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Shoshoni, did not have a written form until the twentieth century. These groups relied on English.

Using Literacy for Their Own Purposes

Though aware of the damaging effects that Americanized education could have on their children, many Native Americans still expressed a desire to have them educated so that they could use literacy to their advantage. Of course, no Native leader argued in favor of English-education because they wanted to see their cultures destroyed. They viewed it practically. Reading, writing, and speaking English would allow their nations to protect their interests. White Swan at Cheyenne River, for example, wrote Sen. Henry Dawes to ask for a copy of the past treaties between his people and the US government and a copy of the Dawes Act. “We don’t know what is coming to us,” White Swan wrote, “but there is some Educated Indians we can keep the paper of promises and if any of them come untrue we can see to it ourself.” Likewise, Oglala chief American Horse told a crowd of whites and Indian children that education was useful as a means of detecting the fraudulent activities of settlers and the US government. Southern Arapaho headman Left Hand (the younger) believed that learning English would give his people power in the court of law against the US government and the flood of white settlers in Oklahoma. Natives knew that the written words of whites were critical within the framework of colonization, so they acquired literacy to challenge reservation life. They were faced with situations that demanded some knowledge of the language of their adversary.

New Sources of Information

Gaining new sources of information was another advantage of literacy. Like eastern Native Americans before the mid-eighteenth century, western tribes used literacy to acquire more information independent of the US government. Plains Indians had newspapers printed in their own language as early as 1871. Natives were also devoted readers of white newspapers and magazines and used them to inform themselves about American culture, politics, and concerns more immediate to them. Connecting themselves to white sources, Natives snagged beneficial knowledge out of the national web of communication. Some, for example, became aware of US troop movements because of media reports. Native Americans also used white newspapers to spread their own information and appeals for justice. They understood that English was the only language that white Americans payed any attention to. In December 1889, Sam White Bird, Iron Nation, Killing White Buffalo, and nine other Lakotas from Lower Brule wrote to the office of W. H. Wills & Co., pension, patent, and claim attorneys in Washington, DC, to seek assistance in their fight with the US government. Their people were poor, but they did not want to sell their land. They hoped that a lawyer could make public the injustices done to them. They wanted the press to get involved. “We give you this letter and you going to send it some newspapers in every cities,” they directed. “That is the reason we give you this letter,” White Bird wrote, closing the letter with a pledge: the men were “going to get the mail to it.”

The Mail

During the early reservation years, Natives saw that the mail offered practical benefits, and as more and more Natives learned to read and write, the usefulness of literacy became more apparent. It is important to recognize that the growth of Native literacy coincided with the westward expansion of the US Postal Service. Each Indian agency had at least one post office, some established within the agency offices. In 1876, the doctor at the Santee Agency in Nebraska reported that half of the Santees (Eastern Dakotas) there could read and write and that more than half of the mail received at the agency post was for Santees. That same year but farther south in Indian Territory, the clerk at the Pawnee Agency commented on the rush that accompanied mail day at the agency. Pawnees aiming to send and receive correspondence swamped his office. Because of the volume of mail, servicing the postal demands of Natives became a responsibility of reservation employees early on. In 1890, the agent at the Western Shoshone Agency in Nevada told the Commissioner of Indian Affairs that one of the jobs of his agency clerk was to write and read letters, to carry on “an extensive correspondence,” for illiterate Shoshones.

Writing to Resist

Native Americans did not always utilize literacy and the US Postal Service in the ways whites expected. Natives questioned the power of the federal government and made their thoughts known to white America. They knew that English literacy was meant to be a tool that would contribute to the destruction of their culture, yet many came to use it as a tool of self-determination instead. Letter writing and the postal system were wielded as anticolonial weapons to question the power of the US government, to demand change, and to remind officials about the government’s obligations. In letters to white officials or allies, Natives criticized government policies and employees, demanded assistance, and offered their opinions on agency decisions, like the hiring and firing of agents, farmers, and teachers. The conduct and performance of all agency employees, from whites to the Indian police, were frequently criticized via letter. Native letters to whites also touched on topics of land rights, US legislation and policies. Between January 1889 and March 1890, over one hundred letters regarding allotment were sent to the Commissioner of Indians Affairs by Native Americans (or those claiming to be of Native American descent), at least twenty-four came from Native American women. Western Native Americans turned the educational goals of the US government on its head, and used literacy to reestablish a sense of sovereignty, decolonize some aspects of their lives, and protect their tribes and families from colonial abuses.

Origin and Number of Known Surviving Native American Letters Sent to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1890

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