Questions on the Sherman Institute

“Sherman Indian High School: 100 Years of Education and Native Pride”

Opening its doors in 1901, The Sherman Institute was the first off-reservation school for Indians in the United States where native Americans were taught vocational training courses so as to enable them to create civilized individuals out of the wild Indians that they were accustomed to being. Over time, its approach has experienced some changes, which are depicted in the film, but knowing that the film was made with promotional purposes in mind, made me keep a level of detachment from the information that was being shared.

The film’s purpose seems to be to show that the Institute was a positive environment where students were happy and provided for with various resources and activities that the children otherwise would not have had. It also traces the school’s development in a progressive direction. It shows not only that the students that went to this school enjoyed it immensely, but enjoyed it so much that they wanted their children and other relatives to attend the school and other former students loved it so much that they returned as adults to serve the school as staff members. The students talk about the “care” and “respect” they received from faculty and the “trust” that was placed with them making me retrace my assumptions that all the students that attended this institution, stripped from their families, culture, language, and identity, were completely miserable. There is direct communication between these students and the audience and their words make us believe “maybe it wasn’t so bad.” But maybe the whole strategy of the Sherman Institute and American policy regarding Indians lies in its strategy to “civilize” them in collective groups. The students learned to cope through the building of a community, a family, a response to the implementation of these policies that did not directly counter them and the achievement of their purposes. Many students describe the school as family, fondly remembering all their “brothers and sisters,” and crediting the Institute with their positive growth. One student felt that “Sherman molded him to be who [he] is today, and a dedicated faculty member reflected on how the education at Sherman “makes the them [the students] whole” by “ taking the best from both” cultural worlds. The students and former students communicate the happiness that they were able to experience at the institution as well as the sense of loyalty and dedication they still feel for it.

The words that they use and the feelings that they felt to describe their experience at Sherman remind me of those that we have been using in class as basis for evaluating pedagogy. The students are “happy,” “cared for,” “respected,” and “trusted,” and given a “modern education,” while their knowledge of and identification with their native language and culture are diminished. And over time, the native American teachers too, are actively participating in this process. We have discussed in the classes since our reading of Pierce, Vygotsky, Berger and Luckman the question of what is taught versus what it learned. Was it the intention of this school to develop in the way it did? Did it mean to make these students feel happy? Or allow them to create a community that did? It seemed that beyond the first generation of students, when they were forcibly placed in the school, the school did not have much trouble with the students, who had by then, come to identify and function in a “civilized” manner and even learned to enjoy their lives within this new social structure. We have discussed through the reading on “Other-mothering” that the action of caring can include caring with hidden objectives, even to the person who is conducting the caring. Can we look at the students returning as faculty as people who are fooled by this and enjoying their positions not just as purposeful teachers, but as cogs-in-a-machine that Foucault describes? Has the hidden curriculum been established in the minds of these students and teachers and function without the need for the discipline that the first generation required? On the other hand, what was the Indian program? Were the Native Americans successful in determining their survival and negotiating their identity through the tool of a cultural counterforce? Who was the winner here?