Volume 2 Number 3
October 1962

A Little-Known Part of the Continuing Church-State Conflict
Found In Early Indian Education
Fredric Mitchell

The early history of Indian Education in the United States contains a segment of the continuing, current controversy between church and state over the use of tax funds for the support of religious schools. In the particular bit of neglected history reviewed below, church and state stood toe to toe and "eyeball to eyeball." Whether either stepped back or blinked is an interpretation subject to consequences not yet in, nearly a century later. But this brief history of federal support of religious Indian schools is important in itself, and perhaps something is to be learned from the scars of battle by those involved in the struggle today.

The story began in 1819 (see Reference 1) when the Congress of the United States appropriated $10,000 to the War Department to be used as a "civilizing" fund in contrast with the manner in which the War Department ordinarily spent Indian funds. On receipt of this money, the War Department printed and distributed a circular stating in part the following:

Requests for funds from organizations already conducting schools among the Indians came in immediately, and thus began a period of 80 years during which the federal government supported private Indian education. This fact does not, in itself, carry the full significance of the expenditure of public funds for private schools. The real significance lies rather in the fact that the money was distributed to churches to operate church schools. This was noted by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, whose office later took over from the War Department the job of distributing funds and supervising Indian education, and who figures importantly in the ensuing church-state conflict. The appropriation of 1820 for $12,000, he recorded, was distributed to 21 church schools. Whether either these first or later appropriations for the next half century or more were known by the Congress to have been distributed among churches is not clear from early records. But one may safely assume that if any question arose about the specific kinds of schools to be aided by the War Department, such a question must have seemed rhetorical to those interested in the experiment of substituting education, of whatever kind - whether secular or sectarian - for war with the Indians.

The Congress increased the initial appropriation regularly after 1819 until the annual sum reached $100,000 by 1870. These increases were doubtless based on the recommendation of private schools given by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in his annual reports to the Secretary of the Interior. Some discord among the several denominations, and occasionally between the churches and the government, inevitably occurred during the first 60 years of this program, but the Commissioner was still enthusiastic about tax support for religious Indian schools as late as 1882. He stated in his report of that year the following:

The first evidence of serious trouble began to emerge after the government started erecting school buildings and turning them over to sectarians to operate. Three years later, in his report of 1885, the Commissioner declared the government's intention of managing its own schools in the future. At the same time, he endorsed continued tax support of sectarian schools:

In the early 1880s the government began seriously to assess its role in Indian education. At that time, Indian education consisted of a considerable number of schools conducted by 20 or more different churches, all drawing substantial sums from the government. In addition there was a second group of schools which the government had built and sometimes turned over to sectarians to operate. These schools it had begun to take over and operate entirely after the policy stated above was enunciated. But the growing friction among the denominations and between church and state, the expenditure of substantial public funds for private schools over which the government had virtually no control, and on the whole the disorganized and piecemeal nature of Indian education called for extensive changes in the government's posture.

Soon after 1880, therefore, the Commissioner outlined in detail a comprehensive system of Indian education to be owned and controlled exclusively by the federal government. Work on this project was immediately begun and was well along by the early 1890s. When it became operational, there existed in fact parallel school systems for Indian children--one under the control of a number of churches, and a second owned and controlled by the government. Both, however, were supported by appropriations from the Congress. It is worth noting that in terms of the current controversy between church and state, there actually existed for one short and bitter period in the late 19^th Century what present-day advocates of tax support

of religious schools propose to bring about today, viz., a sectarian controlled system of education paralleling the public school system, with both supported alike from tax funds.

Having nearly completed its educational system for the Indians, the government made school attendance compulsory. At the same time, however, the Commissioner declared in 1889 that "The Indians, like any other other class of citizens, will be free to patronize those schools which they believe to be best adapted to their purpose." (7:97)

But with a change of administration, the government also made a radical change in Indian education policy. The Commissioner spelled out the new policy two years later in his report of 1891 as follows:

This strong statement drew first attention to the violation of Constitutional guarantees separating church from state in the use of tax funds for the support of religious schools. It went further in stating the government's intention of bringing Indian education completely under federal control, and recommended that funds for the support of religious schools be cut off gradually but completely.

By this time the money appropriated annually for religious Indian schools approached the half-million-dollar mark, and the sentiment against tax funds for religious schools had become so wide-spread that the Congress responded with vigor the same year and enacted the following to give the Commissioner the necessary power to enroll all Indian children in government schools:

The Commissioner followed up by refusing allotments of funds to increase the number of sectarian schools, thus maintaining the "status quo," and by reducing funds available to those already in operation. The Congress then acted even more decisively to bring support of religious schools to an end by cutting off entirely any use of tax money for sectarian education in the following little-known declaration of 1895:

What were the effects of these extreme moves by the government on the churches conducting Indian schools? Their reactions can be divided into Catholic and non-Catholic. So far as has been discovered, the non-Catholic churches accepted the judgment of the Congress and cooperated with the new policy by withdrawing requests for or refusing funds. Some churches took affirmative stands in support of the new doctrine. The Methodist Episcopal Church stated its position as follows:

Other churches, like the Baptists, went even further and memorialized the Congress, asking for an amendment to strengthen the Constitution against the "meddlesomeness of ecclesiasticism." The Constitution would be strong enough as written, the Baptists said, except for the large number of immigrants "bred in the state-church and church-state ideas of Europe and not accepting at once their principles of freedom and the separation of function which have been for the century the glory of our American Institutions" (9:179).

The Catholic Church reacted differently from the other churches and was soon engaged in a conflict which ended with a severance of relations by the government. A bit of this church's philosophy together with a look at the important position it had come to occupy in Indian education will set the scene for the looming storm:

The Catholic Church teaches in its encyclicals that it is the primary institution on this earth and that the family and state are secondary and tertiary institutions. It also teaches that it derives authority directly from God in executing its mission of training man and preparing him for the life eternal. To fulfill this mission, it asserts a fundamental and prior right to control the training of the young which stands in front of the rights of either parents or the state. According to this doctrine, the state is limited in the sphere of education to training civil servants and the military and to collecting taxes for the support of church schools. Parents are obliged under threat of ecclesiastical penalties to place the education of their children under church control, and they exercise valid authority over their children's schooling only in so far as they comply with the church's wishes (see Note 2).

The history of the Catholic Church in Indian education dates from earliest times. Note has already been made of the subsidy granted a Catholic priest in the treaty of 1803 with the Kaskaskia Indians (See Note 2). The Catholic Church also came to dominate sectarian education under government auspices and eventually commanded three-fourths of all the funds appropriated by the Congress for this purposes (see Note 3).

As early as 1874 the Catholic Church set up the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in Washington, D.C., to obtain government funds for the support of its schools. (11:874)

This Bureau was headed up by the highest church official in the United States, Cardinal Gibbons. The ensuing battle took place out on the Indian reservations, where the church was threatened with loss of control over -education as well as loss of tax funds, and in the nation's capital where the church-state ideological struggle raged between the Indian Affairs Office and the Catholic Bureau.

Typical of the skirmishes on the reservations was one in the state of Washington. There, on the Lummi Reservation, 15 older students were selected from the government's day school to be transferred to an advanced training school at Chemawa, Oregon. In spite of reported approval by parents, students, and the government's day-school teacher, who happened to be a Catholic, before the transfer could be effected a Catholic priest interceded and forbade the parents to let their children "go to their inevitable perdition." The priest charged in a newspaper article later that sexual morality was rumored to be low at the new school and that the graduates were "generally proud, haughty-polished heathens." In turn, the government's agent on the reservation said he would be unable to "enforce orders of the Indian Office when said orders are supposed by J. B. Boulet (the priest) to be antagonistic to the interests and influence of the Roman Catholic Church," and he recommended that for these "outrageous and treasonable" acts the "foreign missionary" be "denied the right to set foot on any reservation of this agency. . ." In the Territory of New Mexico the government had trouble obtaining pupils for a new school at Albuquerque. "Serious opposition," the Commissioner wrote the Catholic bishop of Santa Fe in 1892, "has been both direct and indirect and has come very largely from the priests in the pueblos and especially from the head of the Catholic school in Santa Fe, a school supported mainly if not entirely from the Treasury of the United States." (9:153-156).

Not only opposition from Catholic clergy, but from "renegade" Indian bands-which menaced Indians as well as whites for transferring students--prompted the government to re-examine its compulsory attendance policy, and the decision to abandon it was made in 1892 when it was scarcely a year old. Nonetheless, attendance at the advanced schools was reported to have increased steadily as the Indians came to appreciate their value (9:10, 166).

Although the government abandoned the threat of force in its attendance policy, the Indian Affairs Office still asserted that Indian parents "have no right to designate which school their children shall attend," and said their first duty was "to build up and maintain the Government day schools." This ruling was later abrogated by President McKinley, however, on petition of the Catholic Church. (15:66)

In response, the Commissioner wrote the Bureau at once, officially severing relations with the Catholic Church. In part, his letter stated the following:

Letters in reply came at once from the Catholic Church. Included was one from Cardinal Gibbons stating in part the following:

The Commissioner concluded the correspondence in a reply to Cardinal Gibbons containing the following:

Thereafter, relations remained severed, and the government refused to make any further contracts with the Catholic Church's Bureau for support of sectarian schools. Appropriations already in hand and earmarked for private schools were sent out directly to the schools until an such funds could be stopped under the Congressional Act of 1895.

Although the severing of relations with the church and the declaration by the Congress that it would never thereafter make any "appropriations whatever for education in any sectarian school" might have seemed enough to end the whole matter, the church did not give up easily. The next and final phase of the conflict was brought before the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled in two cases, affirming the right of parents to obtain with their own money religious training for their children, and renewing the intent of the First Amendment to protect the people both in the free exercise of their religion and against the legal establishment of religion.

After the program was under way, Indians of the Sioux Tribe challenged the use of tribal funds (held in the Treasury for the Indians by the government) for the support of religious schools as a violation of the 1895 declaration of the Congress. It can be assumed, the Supreme Court said in its decision, that the 1895 declaration "does announce a definite, fixed, and permanent policy," but "the Government is necessarily undenominational, as it cannot make any law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" (15:81-82). The Supreme Court was not prepared to say that the Constitution forbade Indian parents to use their own money to obtain religious training for their children and concurred completely in the decision and interpretation of the First Amendment made by the lower court:

These concluding memorable words of almost half a century ago affirmed the right of parents to obtain religious training for their children at their own cost and laid down the relation of the state to religion in the "no-aid-or-hindrance" doctrine which asserted anew the First Amendment's mandate separating church from state and state from church.

1 "Christian Education for Youth" Five Great Encyclicals, The Paulist Press, New York, 1949.