Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joel Pfister is Professor of American Studies and English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of four books, including Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern, also published by Duke University Press, and Critique for What? Cultural Studies, American Studies, Left Studies. He is a co-editor of Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""The Yale Indian" advances a project begun in Joel Pfister's "Individuality Incorporated" and also breaks new ground. This book, based on archival research, is about the Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) Henry Roe Cloud (1884-1950), the first full-blood Indian to graduate from Yale (BA 1910, MA 1914). Mostly overlooked by historians, in his era he was recognized as one of the greatest Native leaders. Roe Cloud expanded the meaning of 'Indian, ' in part by striving to develop a university-trained professional and managerial class of Native people at a time when the Carlisle Institute was educating Indians to work on Ford's assembly lines. This is a rich and important book."--Arnold Krupat, author of "Red Matters: Native American Studies"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE YALE INDIAN

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface.........................................................................xiAcknowledgments.................................................................xviiIntroduction. Chapters in the Education of Henry Roe Cloud.....................1One. Yale Education............................................................23Two. Sentimentalized Education.................................................83Three. Cultural Incentive-and-Activism Education...............................127Coda. The Indian Ethos of Service..............................................161Appendix. Sometimes History Needs Reminding....................................175Notes...........................................................................177Index...........................................................................243

Chapter One

HENRY ROE CLOUD was not culturally slated to wind up at Yale or any institution remotely like it. He was not supposed to acquire the knowledge, and the social uses of the knowledge, that Yale taught. Neither was he expected to meet, no less befriend, most of the men of social standing that Yale welcomed or the refined women who moved in Yale circles. Equally, he was not intended to receive anything resembling a Yale schooling in incentive, aspiration, taste, and feeling. At early twentieth-century Yale he also encountered the changing ways in which markers of American middle- and upper-class individuality were coming to assume conspicuously psychological forms. For the Yale he attended was beginning to assign class value to new cultural and literary forms of an elite psychological individuality. The Winnebago realized well before he matriculated that colleges like Yale (he had also visited Princeton and Wesleyan on his college tour) offered not just academic courses of study but a cultural authorization, an intellectual status, a social identity, a gilded stage for improvisations, an access to class power that he could use for himself and the Indians he served.

At the same time, I do not think that he saw his education at institutions such as Mount Hermon, Yale, Oberlin, and Auburn purely as socially instrumental. The letters I have read convey Roe Cloud's love of learning and rhetorical play. Unafraid of intellectual challenges, he took social pleasure in oratory and debate. He was curious about exploring multiple ways of thinking, multiple ways of feeling, multiple ways of seeing and of seeing himself. Roe Cloud did not think that an Indian should be interested only in particular subjects or ideas. Charles Eastman rhapsodized that his education led him to dive "deep into a strange life from which I could not retreat.... I absorbed knowledge through every pore.... The more I got, the larger my capacity grew, and my appetite increased in proportion." This also expresses the intellectual spirit of Henry Roe Cloud.

Below I situate Roe Cloud's letters in a phase of Yale's history and address key questions about this case study in the development of white-collar Indian activism. Did Roe Cloud enjoy Yale? Was his presence there significant? Did some campus groups, activities, publications, and faculty sponsor Indian stereotypes? If Roe Cloud performed the role of student, did he also enact the role of teacher? How did he use what he learned? Who did he try to influence?

COLLEGE INDIANS AND CLASS LITERACY

The writings of Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas Jefferson Morgan help clarify some aspects of the systemic production of inequality Roe Cloud battled. In 1890, possibly thinking himself beneficently progressive, this well-educated commissioner advocated the formation of three five-year industrial high schools for Indians (Carlisle, Haskell, Chemawa) to form "character," adapt students to "modern civilization," accustom them to repetitive toil, and inculcate what was openly termed "treason to the tribe." He armed that "the Indian [has] the same diversity of endowment and the same high order of talent that the other races possess" and voiced parsimonious encouragement for those "very few" Indian students with "special aptitudes and lofty ambition" who wish to attend college. Although he acknowledged the "urgent need" among Indians "for a class of leaders of thought, lawyers, physicians, preachers, teachers, editors, statesmen, and men of letters," his interest in addressing this "need" was by no means "urgent."

Any Indians who aspired to attend college fared no better with Indian Affairs Commissioner William A. Jones. In 1900 he admitted that the state education of its "wards" in no way constituted "an elaborate preparation for a collegiate course." He used the gospel of self-help as his cover for the systemic under-education of an entire people: "Their future career should always be dependent upon their own exertions and not at the expense of the General Government." Then in 1905 Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, a graduate of Williams College and Columbia Law School, enthusiastically supported teaching Indians "handy tinkering" (such as mending harnesses and wagon wheels), elementary letter writing, and basic literacy skills (for reading bills and newspapers), while he confidently assured whites that only a tiny proportion of Indians possess the talent and "individuality" (his term) to attend college. He believed that Indians' evolutionary racial characteristics as well as their cultural environments handicapped them. A year later Roe Cloud commenced "tinkering" at Yale. Only in the late 1920s did the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in response to lobbying on the parts of Indians and reform groups, which included Roe Cloud, offer some Indian youth a high school education that, in Morgan's words, was readily available-and available not in a five-year half-academic and half-vocational training industrial program-to "the great mass of youth of every race and condition except the Indian."

In the early 1910s, Robert Yellowtail (Crow), who later became superintendent of his reservation, and Thomas Sloan (Omaha), a Hampton Institute valedictorian who had been accepted at Yale Law School and chose instead to apprentice to become an attorney, published articles in Carlisle's Red Man, in which they argued that young Indians now needed college educations to fight new sorts of battles in American courts, legislatures, and bureaucracies. Similarly, in 1913 the Society of American Indians decried systemic efforts to reproduce Indians as a "grammar school race" ill-equipped to "compete with a [white] college bred race." Some Indians who had not been able, or permitted, to take this educational route identified its importance. Thus in the 1930s Luther Standing Bear, the great Sioux autobiographer and cultural critic who had attended Carlisle, but not high school or college, told the ridiculous tale of his brother Henry's request to the Indian Affairs commissioner for funds to study in a Chicago college. His brother had just returned from Carlisle, where he had only a few years of half-academic and half-vocational education. The commissioner turned him down because other Indians "who crave[d] a higher education" would expect the same backing if he granted it to his brother. "That is the most exalted opinion I ever heard an Indian Commissioner express on the educational aspirations of the Indian youth of the land, and I think his compliment was...