Volume 3 Number 1
October 1963

Elizabeth E. Hoyt

As a sequel to our analysis of young Indians’ essays on "My Hopes for My Life on Leaving School" (see Reference 1) we are now making a study of what has happened to the children who have left school during the last five years in the Tama Indian settlement in Iowa. There are more than sixty such children

The Tama Indian settlement is made up of about four hundred Indians, mostly Fox, in a geographical region in which there are relatively few other Indians. It is not strictly a reservation, for the Tama Indians bought their lands from whites about the middle of the last century, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs has offices and a school on the settlement.

No Indian settlement or reservation is really typical, and the Tama settlement is untypical in several respects. First, it is untypical in that it is isolated from other Indian groups and in the middle of a prosperous white state. It is untypical in that the people have fairly easy access to opportunities for employment in nearby towns and cities, and untypical in that along with hilly and river land, it contains considerable agricultural land well above the margin for economical production. It is untypical also in that its easy accessibility to whites has meant that it has many visitors and also well-wishers who would like to help the Indians. Federal, state, and county aid available to all citizens is, of course, available to the Tama Indians, and some federal and state aid programs are set up for Indians alone. In addition, so many private groups have worked, or are now working, with these Indians that there may be no better place to observe motives of the helpers and to study the reactions of Indians to aid. We are especially interested in reactions that affect education.

One might expect from these various apparent opportunities more avail able to the Tama Indians than to most other Indians in the United States that Tama would present a superior example of economic-cultural adjustment. That does not appear to be the case. The percentage of unemployment on the reservation was reported in a recent HEW survey to be fifty per cent (see Reference 2).

We are finding that the percentage of dropouts is higher than the national average for Indian children in the United States and the percentage of young people unemployed is also high.

There seem to be three possible reasons for the condition of the Tama Indians as compared with some others. It could be said, of course, that the original stock was more lacking in intelligence and initiative than other Indians; this is a matter difficult, if not impossible, to prove either way. It would not seem to be supported, however, by the fact that the ancestors of the present Tama Indians had the initiative to trek back from Nebraska, where they had been "exiled" by the United States Government, and by working as laborers, to buy back the land of which they had been deprived, and set themselves up as hunters and trappers on their own homelands again.

A second reason may be that relatively close contact with white people without incorporation into white life over a period of time from past to present has a more disorganizing effect on Indians than isolation. It is frequently suggested that the most organized life among Indians is in the tribes (as in eastern Oklahoma) which have been most integrated into white life and in the tribes (as the Navahos) which live in greatest isolation from whites (see Reference 3).

There is also a third possible reason. It may be that some of the programs of aid, in which Tama is relatively rich, have actually injured the Indians. This possibility was first suggested to the writer by the person in charge of one of the Indian aid programs which operates from coast to coast. The program distributes food, gives second-hand clothing or sells it for a few cents, and provides recreation for Indians. "I wonder," he said, "if we do not look at the apparent and immediate rather than the long-time effects of our work. We must help Indians to health and I believe we should assist them in education, but when we attempt to give them other things, we may disorganize more than we help." It is well known by social workers in white society that we have to be extremely careful about the things we give to white clients. In Indian society the problems include the familiar ones plus problems of a different cultural reaction. Thus the situation becomes doubly difficult.

At all events, the Tama Indian Settlement has had various aid programs given by well-meaning whites, and it is notable that they are usually programs planned to confer more or less formal economic or educational benefits on Indians rather than to receive them into homes and introduce them to white culture as friends. It is not that there is any marked prejudice in Tama but the opportunities of the young people to become acquainted with white culture from the inside are limited. Apart from the school, the most obviously warm reception is in the taverns. Visitors are cordial, but for whites to be cordial with Indians on Indian territory is a different thing from cordiality to Indians in white institutions.

When whites come into an Indian community with a program for Indians the Indians as a cultural group not entirely familiar with the attitudes and objectives of whites are at a disadvantage at assessing the motives and the consequences of these programs. Usually when the whites offer material aid at least some Indians accept it, for they understand material gifts though they may not understand the assumptions on which they are given nor the consequences to which they may lead. If one of the motives of the givers is conversion to a sect or a religion the Indians soon understand that, and they may or may not then accept the services which the white group offers. But when the motives or theories of the whites are less evident, the Indians are confused. They respond to friendship, but they are not quite sure what friendship with whites is. Indians were exploited by the anger and greed of early white settlers, and it may be that they are still to some extent exploited by the prideful assumptions of white well-wishers who, without realizing it, regard Indians with a partial or a myopic view.

Tama affords an exceptional opportunity to look into the reactions of Indians to the help designed for them. In the last three or four years at least ten private groups have been working to help the Indians in Tama, and one of them, the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology, came in with an educational program probably more ambitious, elaborate and costly, in relation to the number of Indians to be affected, than any other educational program for Indians in the United States. This program has been widely publicized as an outstanding example of action research, and a volume has been published on its assumptions, its contacts and the initial working out of its plans (see Reference 4). The University of Chicago Department of Anthropology had been interested in Tama for years, and had brought students there. Its major field work began in 1955 and came formally to an end on December 31, 1959. Two foundations contributed large sums to the programs.

The University of Chicago’s work at Tama had two main programs related to education, the first more general, the second concrete. Both programs rested on the assumption that Indian communities are permanent institutions for the foreseeable future (4:318); and it is mistaken to encourage and hasten termination of Indian tribes, that is, their incorporation into the larger American society. On the contrary the communities should be aided to continue as Indian communities, but free of the supervision of the Bureau of Indian Affairs which is "unnecessary and paralyzing" (4:322). Nevertheless, subsidies are needed to put the Indians in a position to administer successfully their own affairs as relatively independent enclaves within a white society. It appeared to be presumed that such subsidies would eventually come from the government, but the University of Chicago secured from private sources some subsidies for the purpose of demonstrating what the Indians could be helped to do for themselves.

It is important to note, however, that the University’s anthropologists felt more sure of what should be done to help the Indians than the Indians themselves did. "Whites seem to be better able to appreciate this general situation than the Fox" (4:322). The program, therefore, was to educate the Indians in what they should want for their own welfare and then to educate them in the means of securing their intelligent independence.

The first, and more general, program was to develop a crafts project which would furnish economic support but have a still greater significance in tribal education. It was conceived to be educational in three different senses: first, a model to demonstrate the possibilities of the Fox community to both whites and Indians; second (not perhaps so clear), "a situation which allows Fox individuality to clarify goals by ‘trying them on’; third, a vehicle to create entry into civic groups and channels of public communication" (4:333). It was assumed that the crafts enterprise would develop leadership and responsibility. "The learning situations . . . are effective and the organization which results can hope for stability" (4:327). "Tama Indian Crafts serves as a model of what the whole community can be when the federal government, while continuing to finance vital services so long as that is necessary, ceases to preempt the running of those services" (4:329).

The second and more concrete educational program was for making college education more readily available to the young Indians. All who wanted to go to college and were qualified to go were to be assisted. The hypothesis here was that these Indians, given such an opportunity, would avail themselves of it and come back to resume their status as resident members of the community. By their college experiences they would be able to contribute to the welfare of the whole tribe. It was foreseen that as a result of the Chicago program "higher education will have been permanently established as an integral part of the life of this Indian community." (4:255) Young tribal members able to enter college had only to apply for financial aid. The program seems to have been conceived as a somewhat urgent one for educating the young people and so for helping the tribe, and nothing was said about any obligations the Indians might have to help themselves. Or it may have been that their self-help was assumed.

At the time the Chicago program entered Tama in 1955 there were three Tama Indians in college. In the spring of 1957, with the greatly increased subsidies secured by the program, the number was ten. The State collegiate institutions granted rebates to Indian students, Grinnell and other private colleges offered special aid, and the agencies which had been helping Indians in Tama before the Chicago program also continued to help them.

Of the ten Indians in college in 1957 the stay of some was brief, but four eventually graduated. None of these, however, came back to the settlement to live. This hypothesis of the program was completely unsupported.

In the fall of 1962 there were two Tama Indians in college, one a Freshman on a grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The other, a Junior, had been on the University of Chicago’s program. Some of the young people in Tama still thought that the University of Chicago would pay the college bills of all who could enter and apparently assumed that it was a part of white culture to finance Indian college education, at least in Tama. The existence of a hundred-thousand dollar subsidy for Indian education, which had been publicized as the University of Chicago’s fund, was still an effective belief among the young people and also in the tribal council, even though all the subsidy had been used and it had never approached a hundred thousand dollars. When the facts were finally known, the Indians were confused.

As for the Tama Indian Crafts program, that still existed in the fall of 1962, 2 ˝ years after the University of Chicago had left Tama. It was, however, in major financial difficulties. Only four people had worked on it in recent months, and they had been only partly paid. A group of Tama business men wanted to take the crafts project over, but the Indians most closely identified with the program continued to hope that some help would still come to them from the outside. The majority of the Indians, however, were not sympathetic to the project, which they thought had not fulfilled its purpose. Its educational advantages, set forth in such detail by the University of Chicago, were not clear to them, and in its economic advantages they had not participated.

As the University of Chicago’s program in Tama drew to its close the field director commented at some length on the program, which, he said, had been to him personally so rewarding that he felt "more of anticipation than regret, more of interesting hypothesis than of dissatisfaction." Nevertheless he saw that two improvements might have been made, the first that the projects might have been planned better, and the second that there might have been a better program of evaluation (4:422). Over these two conclusions, at least, there is likely to be no argument or dispute.

It appears to the writer that almost any group that has entered an Indian community to help Indians is handicapped in one or the other of two ways. If it regards the Indians as the guardians of a particular culture and way of life, and wants to help preserve that way of life and culture, as the University of Chicago group did at Tama, it must think of the Indians not merely in terms of the value of that life and culture but also in terms of the psychology that goes with them. It is unreasonable to expect them to draw their concepts from Indian society and at the same time to respond to new "opportunity" as whites would do. The philosophy and the psychology of life ordinarily go together. To be specific, white children grow up in an atmosphere of economic enterprise and responsibility. They early learn from their parents and neighbors that individual earning is regarded as normal. As soon as they can carry responsibility they have paper routes, shovel snow and cut lawns for the neighbors, sell cookies or do baby-sitting. And when the time comes for them to go to college, if they want to go and the economic means are not forthcoming from parents, they hope for scholarships, but also they are ready to work for themselves. This particular kind of work psychology and personal-responsibility psychology is not characteristic of Indian groups. They may have something better than this, in their willingness to share with one another; but they do not have this in Tama. It has happened in Indian settlements other than Tama that groups going in to "work with" Indians have found themselves doing most of the work. Yet it is not that Indians are lazy when the work situation is congenial to their psychology; in some conditions they exert themselves more than we. It might be expected that if they have different philosophies from ours they would also have different ways of reacting to the opportunities which seem so obvious to us.

If, on the other hand, the group trying to help Indians assumes that it is a good thing for Indians to be integrated into the prevailing white society, and formally encouraged to do so, another kind of difficulty comes up. Indians are tied to their parents, their grandparents, and their people even though they may not be practicing their people’s old rites, even though they do not hold to their people’s old values except here and there. The children who wrote the essays which started us on our Indian study did not mention ties to the old culture as such. What they did mention was their affection for their families and their people. The white children did not mention these ties of affection. It is not to be supposed that the white children were lacking in affection for their families, but they did not specify them because no issue was involved. At this point we note the weakness of the social worker and psychiatrist who are familiar only with whites. They tend to assume that the problems of sub-cultures, whether Indian or white, are the same. Some of these problems are the same, but there is an additional complication in the case of Indians, due partly to the peculiar role of their family ties and partly to the unhappy history of Indian relations with whites in the not too-distant past. An Indian child, like a white child, is hopeful; but whether the Indian is or is not conscious of it, he carries with him a liability. In the world of whites his home experiences do not help him as the home attitudes and experiences of white children help them. One or two unfortunate contacts or episodes in the world of whites may set him back so seriously that he returns to the emotional security of his home. If he can be helped in his home environment, well and good; but almost inevitably those whites who try to improve his home environment fall into the trap of trying to work with him in their way, not in his.

The case of these two educational experiments at Tama is a clear case of the presumptions of a certain type of anthropology combined with good will. It dramatizes our difficulties with American Indians, and it also has application to our experiments with many peoples in under-developed countries. It is very easy to assume that we know what is best for Indians and for other people different from ourselves, and when money is forthcoming it is easy to set up projects to "help" them. Especially if the goal is education, we think we can hardly go wrong. And when a project fails, we can always, of course, say that the money was not enough, and so shift the responsibility from ourselves to the sources of public or private funds.

The fact is, however, that for genuine education we need much more than good will and the assumptions of one branch of social science; and money can ruin as well as aid. Anthropology, or at least one kind of anthropology, was outstanding in the University of Chicago’s program. Economics was weak in it; psychology was weak; and sociology was weak. None of the disciplines by itself, however, could have done a good job by itself. The issues at stake in this kind of experiment demand an integrated and concerted approach in social science, and this, at present, is very hard to secure. But every failure makes clearer the need of an integrated approach and helps the impartial observer to see one or more or all of the neglected elements, all of which are necessary for human understanding and constructive change.

1. Hoyt, Elizabeth E., "An Approach to the Mind of the Young Indian," Journal of American Indian Education, 1, 1 (1961) pp. 17-23.

2. U. S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, Division of Indian Health, Comprehensive Environmental Sanitation Report of the Sac and Fox Indian Settlement, Tama, Iowa, (Bemidji, 1961) p. 6.

3. As a method of recognition of tribal differences, see Mitchell, Mary J., Chemawa Indian School, "Attitudes of Indian Children as Revealed in the Free Writing Tests," unpublished study.

4. Gearing, Fred, and others, Editors, Documentary History of the Fox Project, 1948 1959, A Program in Action Anthropology Directed by Sol Tax (Chicago, 1960).