Volume 3 Number 2
January 1964

Murray and Rosalie Wax

Revised version of a paper delivered at the sixty-second annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November, 1963. The data were obtained during the course of a research investigation sponsored by Emory University under a grant from the U.S. Office of Education (Cooperative Research Project No. 1361), the monograph report of this project is forthcoming (Spring, 1964) as a memoir of the journal Social Problems and will bear the title Formal Education in an American Indian Community. The responsibility for the text of the report and this paper belongs solely to the authors.

Indian education is a cross-cultural transaction, bringing together within the school the youthful members of the local Indian community and the educators who represent the national U. S. society (see Note 1). To understand the processes and problems of Indian education, the researcher must study both parties to the situation—the educators and the pupils—as well as the nature of their interaction (see Note 2). Many previous studies have been deficient in this regard because they have narrowed their gaze to the Indian children alone, as if their peculiar characteristics were sufficient to account for their scholastic successes and failures.

On Pine Ridge and many other reservations the educators are employees of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and participate in its unique society and culture. While many scholars have criticized Bureau policies and personnel and some social scientists have worked for the Bureau—indeed, an anthropologist is now its Commissioner—those who have known it from the inside have not chosen to describe its membership, social dynamics, or ideology. Yet, if we are to understand the dynamics of modern reservation communities, we must study not only the Indians but also those who are trying to educate, guide, manipulate, and otherwise deal with them.

At the upper levels of administration of the Pine Ridge Agency, Bureau ideology is now phrased as if it were a local variant of the national educational ideology of cultural deprivation (see Note 3). The Indian home and the mind of the Indian child are described as if they were empty or lacking in pattern. A leading Agency official expressed the view—and the problem as he saw it—in the following words:

The school gets this child from a conservative home, brought up speaking the Indian language, and all he knows is Grandma. His home has no books, no magazines, radio, television, newspapers—it’s empty! He comes into school and we have to teach him everything! All right. We bring him to the point where he’s beginning to know something in high school, and he drops out. . . . Because at this time he has to choose between Grandma and being an educated member of the community.

Another official put the matter to us this way:

The Indian child has such a meager experience. When he encounters words like "elevator" or "escalator" in his reading, he has no idea what they mean.

But it’s not just strange concepts like those. Take even the idea of water. When you or I think of it, well, I think of a shining stainless steel faucet in a sink, running clean and pure, and of the plumbing that brings it, and chlorination and water purification, or of the half-million dollar project for the Pine Ridge water supply. But the Indian child doesn’t think of water as something flowing into a bathtub.

As this person spoke, our minds were flooded with visions of the creek which ran a few hundred yards from the Sioux homestead where we had camped during the summer, and we recalled its coolness and vegetation, the humans and animals that had come there to bathe, the flights of mosquitoes at dusk, not to mention the ancient cars and the yelping of their enthusiastic escort of dogs. So, one of us gambited, "I guess the Indian child would think of a creek." But the administrator insisted on the universally miserable quality of Sioux experience, "Or of a pump, broken down and hardly working."

Carried far enough, this Ideology of Cultural Deprivation leads to characterizations of Sioux life which are deplorably fallacious. One person who had worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation for many years asserted in a public meeting that "Indian children have no home experiences in art or music" and that Indian children are not told stories by their parents. (Even a music teacher in secondary school stated that Indians had no musical experience.) Another person, also of many years experience, remarked, "We must go back to the (Indian) home to find the lack of patterns that should have been learned."

In the face of this repetitive and rigid usage of such terms as empty, meager, and lacking in pattern, we at length began to feel that these administrations were perceiving the Indian mind as the land-hungry settlers had perceived the continent:

The White people speak of the country at this period as "a wilderness," as though it was an empty tract without human interest or history. To us Indians it was as clearly defined then as it is today; we knew the boundaries of tribal lands, those of our friends and those of our foes; we were familiar with every stream, the contour of every hill, and each peculiar feature of the landscape had its tradition. It was our home, the scene of our history, and we loved it as our country. (see Note 4)

So far as we could see, this reservation Ideology of Cultural Deprivation serves the following functions: First, it places the responsibility for scholastic defeat on the Indian home and the Indian child; since the child is seen as entering school with an empty head, then surely it is a great achievement if he is taught anything whatsoever. Second, the Ideology is a carte blanche that justifies almost any activity within the school as being somehow "educational"; for, if the child is presumed deficient in every realm of experience, then the task of the school can properly be defined as furnishing him with vicarious experiences to compensate in every aspect of his life. Finally, the Ideology justifies the educators in their isolation from and ignorance of the Indian community; for, if the child actually had a culture including knowledge and values, then they ought properly to learn about these so as to build on his present status, but if he is conceived of as a vacuum on entering school, then the educators may properly ignore his home and community.

Before continuing with a description of the Pine Ridge scene, we should like to add that we believe that a similar constellation of attitudes—and relationships currently plagues schools in urban settings (see Note 5). Children who come from lower class and impoverished ethnic groups are regarded as empty and culture-less—rather than as having a culture and social life of their own which educators must learn about in order to be competent in their jobs. Children from lower class Negro homes are especially subject to this mishandling, since many "liberals" refuse on political grounds to recognize that their families have a distinct subculture.

On the Pine Ridge Reservation—and perhaps in other reservations and urban lower class settings—the Ideology of Cultural Deprivation seems closely associated with the secularized version of the Protestant ethos. On the one hand, the Indian mind is seen as empty, and on the other hand the Indian will is seen as lacking. In citing materials to document and illustrate the one view, we must inevitably do the same for the other. Besides, the person who is regarded by Bureau personnel, both in Pine Ridge and often elsewhere, as the intellectual authority for their educational philosophy was himself a dedicated exponent of that ethos, who seems to have exhorted the Sioux and regulated his official life according to its maxims.

As principal of the Little Wound Day School in Pine Ridge during the school year 1936-37, Pedro T. Orata kept elaborate records and produced a four volume report for the Bureau. Later, he condensed this into a book, Fundamental Education in an Amerindian Community, which was still being quoted on Pine Ridge during the 1960s. From the pages of this book there emerges so extreme a contrast between his own ethos and that of the traditional Sioux community in which he worked that the effect is at first sometimes comic and then later pathetic and tragic. For example, he does not merely complain (as one might expect) that the farmer paid by the government was working hard daily while any number of able-bodied Sioux were sitting about the local store, but he assesses as "the most difficult problem" the fact that "They (the -Indians) sat there all day and seemed to enjoy doing so!" (see Note 6).

How extreme his views were can be understood from the tale in his pages about a winter crisis: South Dakota in twenty degrees below zero, knee-deep snow on poor roads; an epidemic of flu in the community that had disabled four of his six teachers and two of his bus drivers; two radiators frozen in the school and below-freezing temperatures in the classroom. Of the 140 pupils, twenty had made it to school. Undaunted, Orata exhorts his staff:

Could we have done better today? When the boys (Indian pupils) stood around the furnace room and loafed, don’t think they were not getting educated. They were. They were learning to loaf. There is no such thing as absence of education, at any time. . . . If those boys were not learning to work, they were learning to loaf. . . . If those boys repeated what they did ten times, what would happen?

And the dutiful "straight man" on his staff answers, "They’d be sitting in the furnace room all the time" (see Note 7).

From the perspective of Orata or of his contemporary disciples on Pine Ridge or in the BIA, Indians must adopt the Protestant ethos if they are to be morally acceptable or socially employable. Insofar as Indians do not have this ethos, it is not that they share some other value system, but that they have none.

So far we have been concentrating on the form of this Ideology that seems to have become established among Bureau employees. However, we should mention a recent discussion which we fear may help to contribute to a new variant of it. Under sponsorship of the Association on American Indian Affairs, Drs. E. E. Hagen and Louis C. Schaw, a social psychologist and economist, have written a report on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Reservations in which they characterize the Sioux as being passive, apathetic, and hostility dependent (see Note 8). In opposition to these terms, we must state that our own observations are that Bureau personnel are as hostile toward the Indians as the latter are toward them (and on both sides there are individuals who are not hostile); also, that Bureau personnel are utterly dependent upon the continued existence of the "backward" Indians, because if Indians managed their own affairs then the local Indian Agency would provide no employment (this dependency is therefore especially marked among the lower and less skilled echelons of the Bureau). Our own observations again are that "apathy" is a convenient label to apply to people who don’t happen to agree with the program that a government official or other reformer happens to be pushing. Frankly, when we went to Pine Ridge, we did expect to see apathetic people. Instead we saw people whose lust for life reminded us of the descriptions of Restoration England, and today we are inclined to feel that it is the urban lower middle class who are culturally deprived and whose children have such meager experiences.

1. Murray Wax "American Indian Education as a Cross-Cultural Transaction," Teachers College Record, LXIV, 8 (May, 1963) 693-704.

2. Everett C. Hughes & Helen M. Hughes, Where Peoples Meet: Racial and Cultural Frontiers (Free Press of Glencoe, 1952). See especially the chapter, "North America: Indians and Immigrants," pp. 1831.

3. Frank Reissman, The Culturally Deprived Child (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

4. Francis LaFlesche, The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), p. xx. LaFlesche was born about 1857 and wrote this passage about 1900.

5. Compare the criticism of the concept of "cultural deprivation" to be found in Dr. Eleanor Leacock’s "Comment" in Human Organization Monograph, 11 (1960), pp. 30-32.

6. Pedro T. Orata, Fundamental Education in an Amerindian Community (Lawrence, Kan: Haskell Press, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1953), p. 51.

7. 1bid., pp. 135-7.

8. "The Sioux on the Reservations: the American Colonial Problem" (preliminary edition; Cambridge: M.I.T. Center for International Studies, May, 1960), p.VI-8 et passim.