Education among the Chickasaws in Indian Territory: Early Beginnings to 1855

Before 1850, public education hardly existed among the Chickasaws in Indian Territory. The tribe received appropriations from the federal government, and part of that money was spent to support students who were attending schools in the Choctaw District, where most Chickasaws lived at the time. But students were few. For example, in 1843 the tribal agent noted that there were not more than seven or eight Chickasaws attending Choctaw schools. At least some of the brightest Chickasaw students were sent to the Choctaw Academy, founded by the Baptist Mission Society at Great Crossings, Kentucky, in 1818. In time, the federal subsidy that provided for those students expired. Afterward, a few attended Plainfield Academy in eastern Connecticut, a school established mainly to prepare young men for future study at Yale College.[1]

The scene changed when Christian missionaries arrived in Indian Territory. Baptists, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, and, above all, Methodists made up this group. Prior to Chickasaw removal from the southeastern United States, by far the most successful Christian missions among the Chickasaws were conducted by Presbyterians.[2] But during the 1840s and '50s, the most productive missionaries among them were Methodists. Part of their success resulted from a willingness to follow the Indians as they left their settlements in the Choctaw District and moved further west into what would become the territory of the Chickasaw Nation. In 1844, Methodist missionary E. B. Duncan planted a church at Pleasant Grove near Fort Washita. The settlement served as a base of operations for Duncan's circuit-riding mission among the Chickasaws. At the same time, Duncan's wife began a day school where she taught as many as forty children.[3]

Mrs. Duncan's school exemplified a strong tendency among Methodist missionaries to bring education as well as religion to Indian Territory. Early on, Methodist officials began negotiating with Chickasaw leaders regarding the educational needs of the tribe. Their collaboration led to the establishment of a system of schools for both elementary and upper-level students in the Chickasaw District. According to the agreement, the Indians contributed over 80 percent of the cost for these schools; the denominations contributed only a small fraction. The first school in the district was the Chickasaw Manual Labor Academy. An impressive two-story stone building was completed in 1851. The school admitted both girls and boys, with 140 students as early as 1857. Instructors taught a wide variety of subjects, including English, Latin, arithmetic, geometry, music, and religion. They segregated part of the curriculum according to sex: boys learned to perform "agricultural and mechanical arts," while girls learned "house-wifery, needle-work, domestic industry, and child care."[4]

Presbyterian missionaries established an academy among the Chickasaws in 1851, Wapanucka Female Manual Labor School. In 1854 the Methodists added Bloomfield Academy, a school for girls, and Colbert Institute. In 1857 the Chickasaw council approved legislation for the construction of a fifth school in their district, the Burney Academy near Lebanon. From the Chickasaw perspective, antebellum missionary schools in Indian Territory focused on literacy mainly for the sake of Bible reading and conversion to Christianity. To the Indians, those educational goals did not serve the best interests of the tribe. Most Chickasaw leaders understood that schooling was vital to the future of their nation, but they wanted their schools to provide a broad academic foundation. That is, they wanted teachers who would teach, not preach.[5]

Cultural differences between missionary teachers and Chickasaw students created another concern. The differences often resulted in harsh judgments and cruel discipline based on stereotypes. For example, in 1855 at Wapanucka Academy, one schoolmaster publicly whipped a group of girls. He offered the justification that,

These little rogues need something more than mere kindness to manage them. They are full of evil from the crown of their head to the sole of their feet."

Children sometimes ran away from school and did everything they could to keep from being sent back.[6]

Trouble between students and teachers is, of course, an age-old problem. Yet, in many instances white teachers in the Chickasaw Nation interpreted the friction in racial terms. One nonnative principal surmised that stubbornness was "a fundamental characteristic" of especially full-blooded Chickasaws. According to his stereotype, there was also a benefit to being a full-blood: "the higher the percentage of Indian blood the better artists they were."[7]

Notes

[1] Arrell M. Gibson, The Chickasaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 231-32. Regarding the Choctaw Academy, see Clara Sue Kidwell, "Choctaw Academy," in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 184. For more about the Plainfield Academy, see Orwin Bradford Griffin, The Evolution of the Connecticut State School System (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1928), esp. 28, 48, 176-81. See also the following URL:  https://connecticuthistory.org/plainfield-academy-grooming-connecticut-scholars-in-the-18th-and-19th-centuries/

[2] Gibson, The Chickasaws, 106-09.

[3] Ibid., 233-34. Gibson cites the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1845, 524-26.

[4] Gibson, The Chickasaws, 235.

[5] Wendy St. Jean, Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 1830s-1907 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 92. The same sort of tension between Indians and Euro-Americans cropped up at other times and places. See, for example, Linford D. Fisher's discussion of evangelization in eighteenth-century southern New England in The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 2.

[6] St. Jean, Remaining Chickasaw in Indian Territory, 91.

[7] Ibid., 95.