1 Horne, Esther Burnett and McBeth, Sally Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 41–2.Google Scholar

2 See, for example Rury, John L. “Who Became Teachers?: The Social Characteristics of Teachers in American History“ in American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work ed. Warren, Donald (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 9–48; Chirhart, Ann Short “Carrying the Torch: African-American and White Female Teachers and Professional Culture in the Georgia Upcountry, 1920–1950” in Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom eds. Grosvenor, Ian Lawn, Martin and Rousmaniere, Kate (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 217–234; and Forten, Charlotte L. “A Black Teacher Goes South: Journal and Essay in Woman's “True” Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching ed. Hoffman, Nancy (New York: The Feminist Press, 1981), 140–145. Each offers an African-American perspective in an otherwise white-based collection, but no other racial groups are included. Work like Ruben Donato's The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans During the Civil Rights Movement (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997) represents the happy exception to a perspective on race that is largely dichotomous.Google Scholar

3 Fultz, Michael “African American Teachers in the South 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the Ironies of Expectations and Protest.“ History of Education Quarterly 35: 4 (Winter 1995): 403, 404, 408, 415.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Painter, Nell Irvin Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Knopf, 1977), 49. Painter explains that a successful petition to place only Black teachers in Black schools in St. Louis in 1877 led to similar action in a number of other cities.Google Scholar

5 Ahern, Wilbert H. “An Experiment Aborted: Returned Indian Students in the Indian School Service, 1881–1908,” Ethnohistory 44 (Spring 1997): 272.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ibid., 272–273.Google Scholar

7 In addition to serving in the Indian School Service, a number of Native-American teachers worked in mission schools that, until 1900, contracted with the United States government to educate Indians. Government support of mission schools, begun with the Indian Civilization Fund (1818–1873), grew ever larger so that the Bureau of Catholic Missions received $347,672 from the government in 1889. Anti-Catholic sentiment combined with the growing status of the Indian School Service led to the elimination of all mission support for Indian education in 1900.Google Scholar

8 Cody, Buffalo Bill initiated a wild west show in 1883, and this and similar “entertainments” provided regular displays of Indian “savages” performing warfare into the second decade of the twentieth century. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which drew 27 million people, making it the largest tourist attraction to date, included a “display” of Indians in huts who enacted daily activities designed to confirm their lowly place in a racialized chain of human progress that put European Americans at the top. These and similar representations of Indians helped shape public perception of them as savages.Google Scholar

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10 Coleman, Michael American Indian Children at School (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993); Lomawaima, K Tsianina They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chiloco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Child, Brenda Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Riney, Scott The Rapid City Indian School, 1898–1933 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); Cobb, Amanda Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy of Chicksaw Females 1852–1949 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).Google Scholar

11 Smith, Joan K. and Vaughn, Courtney “A Conundrum: Perceptions of Gender and Professional Educators during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.“ Educational Foundations 14 (Summer 2000) includes a brief discussion of Native women educators (13–15). Spack, Ruth America's Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002) includes accounts of four Indian teachers: Lilah Denton Lindsey (Creek/Muscogee); Thomas Wildcat Alford (Absentee Shawnee); Winnemucca, Sarah (Paiute), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), (82–107).Google Scholar

12 “In 1852, eleven hundred Cherokees were enrolled in twenty-one schools. Two years later, more than half of the teachers in the common schools were of Cherokee descent.” And “In the years between 1876 and 1887, the seminary faculty included a growing number of young alumnae,” Mihesuah, Devon A. Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851–1909. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 19–20 and 54. In 1859 Serena Factor Chickasaw, “was invited to teach the primary grades” at Bloomfield Academy, Cobb, Amanda J. Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852–1949 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 51.Google Scholar

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18 Hopkins, Sarah Winnemcca Life among the Paiutes (1883; rpt Reno, Nevada: University of Nevada Press, 1994) recounts multiple examples of deceptions and betrayals of her people by whites. In an account of serving as translator for Father Wilbur, an educator, she writes, “Right here, my dear reader, you will see how much Father Wilbur's Indians are civilized and Christianized. He had to have interpreters. If they were so much civilized, why did he have interpreters to talk to them? In eighteen years could he not have taught them some English? I was there twelve months, and I never heard an Indian man or woman speak the English language except the three interpreters and some half-breeds. Could he not have had the young people taught in all that time? A great many white people come to see the Indians. Of course one who did not know them might think they were educated when they heard them sing English songs, but I assure you they did not know what they sang any more than I know about logarithms” (215–16).Google Scholar

19 Peabody, Elizabeth Second Report of the Model School of Sarah Winnemucc, 1886–1887 (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son 1887), 3.Google Scholar

20 Quoted in Peabody, Elizabeth Sarah Winnemucca's Practical Solution of the Indian Problem (Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1886), 5.Google Scholar

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26 Quiocho, Alice and Rios, Francisco “The Power of Their Presence: Minority Group Teachers and Schooling“ Review of Educational Research 70 (Winter 2000): 497 and 522.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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28 Zitkala-Ša, “An Indian Teacher Among Indians“ The Atlantic Monthly 85 (1900): 381–386. Her later teaching experience in Utah was more rewarding, as she reports in Gertrude Bonnin, “A Year's Experience in Community Service Work among the Ute Tribe of Indians,” The American Indian Magazine: The Quarterly Journal of the Society of American Indians 4 (October-December 1916): 308.Google Scholar

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32 Pingatore, Edith “History of the Mount Pleasant Indian School 1893–1934,” (unpublished, undated document held by Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan, reports “Three white teachers, Kaup, Lydia E. Fry, Anna R. Campbell, Helena and one Indian teacher Susie McDougann, were now employed, salaries, $720, $660, $600 and $540 respectively” (5). Trennert, The Phoenix Indian School reports that Hugh Patton's job was given to an “Anglo schoolteacher… forcing the hard-working Pima to accept a subordinate position” (38). Carter, Patricia A. “‘Completely Discouraged': Women Teachers’ Resistance in the Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools, 1900–1910“ Frontiers. 15:3 (1995) reports that “a respected and long-term American Indian woman employee was let go to make a position for the supervisor's daughter at the Leupp School.” (58).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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38 Because of the vocational emphasis in Indian education, most boarding schools taught printing, and as a result many school newspapers were produced and circulated from one school to another. Reports on alumni in these newspapers often mentioned students continuing on at state normal schools. For example, Agnes White Almon, a Seneca, enrolled at Bloomsburg State Normal after Carlisle “Concerning Ex-Students and Graduates” The Red Man (February 1912): 237; Dyackanoff, Kathryne an Alaska Native went to West Chester State Normal, The Indian Craftsman 2, 2 (October 1909): 5; and Wagner, Vera a Sioux, was educated at Carlisle and a state normal school The Red Man (December 1911): 156.Google Scholar

39 Hewes, Dorothy “Those First Good Years of Indian Education: 1894 to 1898,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 5: 2 (1981): 75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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41 These groups included the Boston Indian Citizenship Association (1879), the Women's National Indian Association (1879), the Indian Rights Association (1882), and the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian (1883).Google Scholar

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59 Quoted in Hafan, P. Jane Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and the Sun Dance Opera, Zitkala-Ša (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), xvii–xviii.Google Scholar

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80 Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) typifies the tendency to portray Stowe as an author while eliding her role as a teacher.Google Scholar

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