Patrick D. Lynch and Mike Charleston

The entry of American Indian men and women into administrative positions in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) schools and public schools is a relatively recent development. Only 20 years ago there were very few American Indian administrators of schools or universities. The Meriam Report of 1928 (The Problem of Indian Administration) had identified the dearth of Indian professionals in the BIA as a major problem. In order to understand the significance of the training of Indian administrators for Indian schools, it is necessary to describe the context in which the entry of Indian people into administrative positions finally became a reality. Indian leadership in education is a recent phenomenon in part because Indian leadership prior to World War 11 was mainly a more general leadership of tribal organizations. Professional leadership had to wait for the development of an infrastructure of Indian people who were non-professionals working with students, teachers, and finally, the chance to help tribal organizations focus on the need for managing educational institutions.

Three cycles are convenient markers for discussing a century of development of leadership in Indian Education. The periods selected are 1889-1929, 1929-1969, and 1969-Present. The discussions of the first and second period necessarily require discussion of certain key policy events. Federal policy shifts reflect public opinion, therefore these time periods bracket apparently contradictory trends. Seeking logic to the dialectic in federal policy trends may lead to frustration unless one looks into the American social topography which is never smooth or logical.

Beginning an analysis with the year 1889 is appropriate for two reasons. First, new states of North and South Dakota, Montana and Washington were admitted that year. Second, the Allotment Act, passed in 1887, had begun to take effect, transferring 90 million acres which had been guaranteed to Indian nations by treaty into the hands of non-Indian farmers, ranchers and timber companies. The impact of Allotment on the social and physical ecology of Indians and non-Indians of the Great Plains has yet to be adequately understood or described. The severity and consequences of the droughts in the Great Plains of the 1930s and the late 1980s are part of the physical ecological consequences of Allotment, while the structure of schooling in the same area are consequences of the same event.

The schooling structure which was put in place along with Allotment was a combination of day schools and boarding schools. Although the education of Indians was segregated, the curriculum was similar to that of rural schools attended by non-Indian children. Indian children were taught to exploit land and resources in ways which were destructive of the environment as well as of their own cultures. The children of Indian people who had a strong value of man with nature (Kluckhohn, 1961) were taught to dominate nature.

One-room schoolhouses accommodated the children of non-Indian farmers and separate but similar day schools were established for the children of Indian farmers. On the Great Plains today, the structural consequences of too many small school districts which cannot support themselves adequately, or provide more than a skeleton of courses for their high school children, persist. The one-room day schools and the boarding schools were staffed by non-Indian people who were not expected to encourage Indian children to go to high school or college. Despite the great demand for teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the small school districts, there was no attempt by states or federal government authorities to train Indian teachers. In the many small districts, only non-Indians were elected to school board positions, partly because school districts were not viewed by state or local authorities as the proper schooling habitats for Indian children, and partly because many Indian people did not have citizenship, nor the right to vote, before 1924.

Carlisle Indian school began in 1878 as a para-military institution designed by Col. Pratt in Pennsylvania; it was moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where it became Haskell Institute in 1917, after the beginning of World War I. By that time, boarding schools were a way of life for many Indian children. The two aspects of Indian boarding schools which were the hallmarks of Carlisle would pervade other boarding schools until the late 1970s: a military discipline and a climate of deculturation of the Indian youth to non-Indian life.* Indian adults occupied mostly subordinate roles closely supervising children in such schools. A serious attack by the BIA on the use of Indian languages in schools began with the educational program at Carlisle, and by 1910 the languages were proscribed on entire reservations. On the Neah Bay reservation in Washington, Indian adults had to go after dark to an island where they could play their tribal sports and talk their language without interference by the reservation Superintendent and his police. Along with the loss of language, the loss of culture was to be expected as Indian children returning from several years at boarding schools reacted with shock to their reentry to tribal reservation life (Standing Bear, p. 235). The schooling experience of boarding schools and day schools was bound to shape the vision of Indian professional leaders who grew up in these institutions.

A case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court (Quick Bear v. Leupp, 210 U.S. 50, 1907) provided Indian parents and tribes the right to choose between religious and secular schools. The opinion, written by Chief Justice Fuller, proclaimed the right of an Indian nation to use its treaty funds for schools of its choosing. Its promise for Indian parents and nations to exercise educational choice according to their own purposes would require parents and nations to participate in making policy which provides the range of options. This process requires informed professionals who can elaborate the choices and provide the rationale for them. The promise of the opinion lay dormant for over 60 years, mainly because there was a dearth of Indian professional leadership to help the nations make policy statements about choice.

By 1909, the destruction of the Indian-operated education systems of the Eastern Oklahoma Indian nations was completed. The BIA assumed control of a few of the schools, such as Carter Seminary and Jones Academy, of the Five Civilized Tribes in 1906 (Tyler, p. 105), and others became public schools. The Tribally-owned Schools which excelled anything available to non-Indians in that state were shut down and the children were forced into inferior schools run by non-Indians. Typically, the Indian professional was trained in the classics, mathematics and the sciences, far superior to that of the typical "Old Boy" Oklahoma administrator armed with some summer normal school background, who took over direction of the public schools.

An act of Congress in 1924 conferred citizenship upon the one-third of the Indian population which had not yet gained that status. Indian enrollment in public schools in 1926 was over 37,000 compared to the 29,000 enrolled in federal schools (Stefon, p. 52). Both of these facts testify to the success of assimilationist policy of Indian people. Black children went to nearly completely segregated schools, while Hispanic and Indian children attended increasingly desegregated schools. However, there were chances for Blacks to become teachers and administrators in their schools, but this was not so in schools for Indian children. Unlike the educational policies of other colonial powers, such as the British in Sudan and India, this government did not have a policy for preparing even minor administrators for the colonial infrastructure.

The year 1929 for most Americans is memorable for the Great Crash on Wall Street and the onset of the Great Depression. It also marked the beginning of a new Indian Education policy. The Meriam Report detailed many of the consequences of the education policy which had accompanied the Allotment Act. The Report summarized the main defect of policy as something made for Indians without their consent or participation. An allied concern expressed was the lack of Indian administrators and teachers for Indian schools, a condition which was not to be addressed for another 40 years.

The educational reforms which were influenced by the publication of the Meriam Report were intended to create a system of education for Indian people which was more culturally relevant, and more attuned to the needs of Indian communities. W. Carson Ryan, Jr., Director of Indian Education from 1930 to 1935, and his successor, Willard Beatty, who served from 1935 until 1952, were both presidents of the Progressive Education Association, the "church" of the Deweyite educational reformers.

The Progressive leaders who experimented with the BIA schools saw the Indian community as the basis for the school curriculum. They emphasized the importance of day schools and pushed for a combination of experience relevant to Indian life along with the basics. The appointment of Indian people to positions in the Indian Service grew rapidly during the later Hoover and Roosevelt years; by July 1, 1934, there were 1,785 Indian employees out of a total of 5,325 (Tyler, p. 128). An appointment of a Klamath Indian as Superintendent of his own reservation was a first. The lower positions were for Indians and chances for promotion were limited by their lack of education and the perception of them by area administrators as of limited capacity. The Indian equivalent of the CCC, the ECW, became a training ground for low level Indian administrators; by 1934, half of the supervisors in the ECW were American Indians. The principle of Indian preference, which was recognized in the "Indian Service" during the late nineteenth century, was used during the RyanBeatty years to hire Indian people for positions in the BIA where they would otherwise have had no chance for employment. Indian preference was then and continues to be a sore point among many non-Indian employees of the BIA.

In spite of the New Deal era training of Indian tribal administrators, there was no drive to prepare Indian teachers or administrators to take direction of BIA schools, or to compete for positions in public schools with significant numbers of Indian children. Indian tribal leaders received training in modem governance and the operation of facilities on Indian reservations, but professional training programs were not part of the development program of the 1930s. This left the BIA schools and parents of Indian children in public schools with little enlightenment during the crucial years of the 1950s when the termination battles raged. Young Indian people who did prepare themselves for teaching and administration during the New Deal era did so without official encouragement. Their individual stories are examples of overcoming powerful obstacles in colleges and in the job markets in order to win places where they might work and finally help their peoples.

Two statutes enacted in 1934 were milestones for Indian education: the Indian Reorganization Act and the Johnson-O’Malley Act. The IRA attempted to rationalize the governance of Indian nations and was resisted by more traditional groups. It did have the effect of orienting many Indian people to the kind of political system typical of American society, thereby providing them with a means of coping with such structures. The "JOM" allowed for contracts between the several states and the federal government which would be incentives for the states to welcome more Indian students into their public schools. The JOM became famous as a pool of money ostensibly to help Indian children which in fact came to be used in many states for non-Indian schools (An Even Chance, 1971). The abuses of JOM which became embedded in many states might have been mitigated had there been a network of Indian professionals who could have studied and commented on the workings of the Act. The structural abuses of the administration of the Act were not exposed until the wave of Indian leadership of the 1960s came on the scene.

World War 11 was the end of the Progressive era in Indian affairs. By the time the Indian veterans of World War II returned home and began to look for jobs, the policy climate of Congress had turned from acquiescence with the Collier programs to one of hostility to the federal relationship with Indian people. During the 1940s, powerful senators of Western States such as Utah and North Dakota attempted to dismantle the BIA. Beginning in 1943, John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, had to fight in the Congressional hearings against lower funding for the BIA and to prevent termination of federal services. He resigned in 1945.

The Commissioners appointed by presidents Truman and Eisenhower were openly pro-termination. The former director of the resettlement camps for the Japanese during World War II Dillon Myer, was appointed by President Truman to be Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1950. Myer closed out the progressive programs of the Collier era, including the attention to skills required to improve rural living, and substituted a low level of general academic preparation. The objective of BIA schooling during the 1950s was to prepare Indian children to live in urban areas and join the urban labor pool under the Relocation Act. Tribal leaders found allies to fight termination, but there were few Indian professionals who could pose alternatives to the kind of inferior education which Dillon Myer and his successor, Glen Emmons, an Eisenhower appointee, had prepared. The effects on the achievement of Indian children attributable to the policy of inferior BIA schooling could be measured in surveys even in the 1980s. Instead, BIA schools were famous as bureaucratic factories where one could find out why boarding schools, for example, could not provide study help to students at night. Ramirez (1980) found greater bureaucratic and less professional orientation on the part of BIA teachers than of public school teachers.

In 1965, a federal program was created which provided the leverage for change in Indian communities. As part of the "War on Poverty," Indian community action programs (CAP’s) came into being in each Indian community. Part of the rationale underlying the "War on Poverty" was the proposition that communities of poor people could best articulate their own needs and invent their own programs. With the CAP’s, Indian communities had funds which they could use in order to improve their conditions without interference from the BIA officials. Stimulating the formation of the CAP’s and their activities was the Indian Desk of the Office of Economic Opportunity in Washington. Dr. James Wilson, a Pine Ridge Sioux, left a professorship in Chadron State Teachers’ College in Nebraska to organize the Indian Desk, as it was modestly called. Wilson’s office was alive with ideas for providing entry into the anterooms of the "Establishment" for Indian people. These, Wilson knew, were law schools, business schools and educational administration programs. Wilson was not a bureaucrat, but an action person, a rare individual who could translate dreams into reality. Even more rare was the fact that an Indian was finally overseeing a key national program, and a program that allowed experimentation with ideas.

In every Indian community, the local CAP provided a new element that was at least as important as funds for projects. That new element was the emergence of new Indian leadership, unfettered by BIA supervision and limited mainly by its own imagination. The life of the CAP program was short. In the 1970s the program was terminated. However, the new leadership was on its way by that time and there was no stopping its determination to move Indian policy, at least for education, in new directions. The Indians who cut their teeth on OEO-CAP projects were ready in the next decade to assume leadership in their nations and in Indian policy-making roles in the federal government.

The year 1969 witnessed the publication of what is often called the Kennedy Report on the education of Indian people (Report No. 91-501). It was the first of many reports on the condition of Indian people and federal institutions serving them. The 40 years since the Meriam Report had seen no official encouragement of the preparation of Indian educational leadership.

Congress enacted the Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975 which allowed Indian nations the choice of contracting to run Indian schools, or starting tribal schools. Choices for Indian parents in some places

began to include tribal schools, BIA schools, Mission schools, and public schools which enrolled the greatest proportion of students.

Indian control of schools had meaning only if administrators who were Indian were ready to assume the administration of schools with largely Indian enrollments. In many countries, from Sweden to Ecuador, indigenous people are provided with schools but not with indigenous teachers or administrators who understand those children. Indigenous people in such countries are said by education officials to be "not ready" for university instruction or roles as teachers, especially in high schools.

In October of 1969, one of the authors went to the BIA offices in Washington to discuss with officials a program to train Indian people to become school administrators. The response of the official in charge of professional training was that the BIA needed no more administrators; all the positions were filled. The positions were of course filled, with mainly non-Indian administrators. It was obvious that the BIA would not support or encourage special administrator training efforts for Indian people, even for its own employees.

The day after the meetings in the BIA offices, the meeting with Jim Wilson of the Indian OEO office went quite differently. He had already initiated discussions with people at Harvard and the University of Minnesota concerning the initiation of administrator training programs for Indian people. Within another month these discussions had ripened into plans for programs at four universities, including Penn State and Arizona State universities.

By March, 1970, plans for selection of participants in the Penn State program were made. The Indian Community Action Programs were notified and it was in these locations that many of the first Penn State participants saw notices of the program. The Area Superintendent and the Area Director of the Anadarko BIA Area sought out and nominated people for the program. There was hostility to the program in certain BIA area offices from the beginning, among them the Juneau and Window Rock, Navajo, area offices whose Superintendents were completely opposed to the program or any subsequent internship experiences for the Indian participants.

The four university programs were begun with funds provided by the Office of Economic Opportunity. The concept of the OEO Indian office Director was simple: provide resources for the beginning of a program, so that Indian people being admitted to some of the country’s best universities would be proof of the existence of plenty of Indian talent to the BIA and the Indian nations. When these participants returned to their schools in the fall, their students and co-workers, friends and relatives could see that Indians could enter the front doors of leading universities.

The Indian students in the administrator training programs were informed by George Scott, of the BIA, that there was a policy allowing paid leave time for study. This had largely been used by non-Indian employees of the BIA prior to 1970. Scott was part of the new Indian leadership of the BIA in 1970 which was headed by Louis Bruce. Bruce was a charismatic figure, a University graduate from upstate New York who had become an important Indian leader during a period when there were very few such people. There was a sharp contrast between the posture of the Louis Bruce group in Washington and most Area Directors of Education who were resolutely opposed to the sponsorship of Indians for administrative positions.

The program required participants to spend two summers on campus and the intervening year in an internship position in the BIA or public schools, agencies or area offices. Their experiences ranged from complete involvement in the Anadarko area and Haskell Institute and a suburban Portland district to isolation in the Juneau and Window Rock areas.

The first participants received their masters’ degrees in August, 1971. Gerald Gipp, the first doctoral graduate of the Penn State program, became the director of the Penn State program as soon as he received his Ph.D. in 1974. Since that time, the program has been administered by American Indian directors; Grayson Noley succeeded Gerald Gipp who was appointed by President Carter to head the Office of Indian Education. In 1986, Mike Charleston became director after Dr. Noley became head of education for the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. The first group of doctoral graduates of other institutions included such distinguished leaders as Will Antell and Rosemary Christianson of the University of Minnesota and William Demmert of Harvard.

The effects of different school systems on the attitudes of teachers toward Indian children have been studied by Gipp (1974) and Tippeconnic (1975). Gipp found that federally employed teachers in the two Dakotas held a more custodial ideology about Indian pupils than did public school teachers. However, Tippeconnic found in a sample of schools in New Mexico and Arizona that public school teachers held a more custodial ideology about Indian students. Based on their findings, one could hypothesize concerning the different formative effects of public schools and BIA schools on the students of those environments who later became professional administrators. Indian administrators might have different orientations to the idealized administrator roles in schooling according to their early experiences, which might be more powerful than their socialization in administrator training programs.

The esprit of the successive groups has been an important characteristic of the program. Change is a group process. For those who are dedicated to improving an institution, working with others of like mind and spirit towards goals is necessary. Strong esprit facilitates communication, assessment of organizations and the weighing of ideas for improving Indian Education. Graduates of the various university programs worked together to establish formal and informal national networks which played powerful roles in defining the shape of Indian education. The involvement of these networks, such as the National Indian Education Association, became necessary to initiate any changes in Indian education.

The program began at a time when a new wave of American Indian leadership was emerging. It was one of four programs with a semi-official mandate from a leader (Wilson) who himself was change-oriented, and who provided the participants of all the programs with encouragement to improve educational opportunity for Indian people. The graduates were committed to an agenda of change instead of simply replacing older non-Indian administrators. New roles had to be created if Self Determination were to be something more than a slogan.

The 1960s were a decade of social change unequaled by anything since the Civil War. The climate of rising expectations of the previously-excluded minority peoples provided an opening for Indian people to emerge as a people with a legitimate historical claim upon public policy to realize their aspirations. This rare historical opening called forth a new kind of Indian leadership. That leadership would go through other phases during the rest of the 1970s and the 1980s. In the early 1970s the emerging Indian leadership for education was idealistically committed to equality within the Indian communities and freedom of Indian people to define their own futures.

Some of the earliest participants may have been too idealistic and too unready to cope with the harsh realities of Indian politics once the Indian communities began to exercise control over their systems. In their early experience, the constraints on Indian accomplishments had been placed in their way by non-Indians. The contentions among Indian people, inevitable in any changing culture, exacted its toll of some of these idealistic people.

Gipp, G.E. (1974). "The Relationship of Perceived Community Educational Viewpoints and Pupil Control Ideology Among Teachers." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.

Indian Education: A National Tragedy -A National Challenge, Report No. 91-501, 1969 (1969). Report of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, United States Senate, Pursuant to S. Res. 80. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office.

Kluckhohn, F.R., & Strodtbeck, F.L. (1961). Variations in Value Orientations. Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson & Co.

Meriam, L. et al. (197 1). The Problem of Indian Administration. New York, NY. Johnson Reprint Corporation.

NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (197 1). An Even Chance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Quick Bear v. Leupp, 210 U.S. 7 (1907).

Ramirez, B.A. (1980). "Professional and Bureaucratic Orientations and Sense of Autonomy Between Teachers in Public and Bureau of Indian Affairs Schools in the Navajo Nation." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.

Standing Bear, L. (1933). My People the Sioux. New York, NY. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Stefon, F. J. (1983). "Native American Education and the New Deal." A Ph. D. Thesis in American Educational Policy Studies. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Tippeconnic, J.W. 111 (1975). "The Relationship Between Teacher Pupil Control Ideology and Elementary Student Attitudes in Navajo Schools." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Pennsylvania State University.

Tyler, S. L. (1973). A History of Indian Policy. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.