Native Americans

Native Americans

Sources

A Moravian School. In the first decades of the new American republic, federal policy toward Indians sought to convert them into yeomen and eventually citizens through trading ties, intermarriage, and economic assistance. Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 continued the policies of George Washington’s administration, urging property ownership, obedience to law, and assimilation. Yet he also promised Georgia in 1802 that if the state ceded its Western claims (the territory that became Alabama and Mississippi) to the national domain, Indians within its borders eventually would be removed. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 provided land across the Mississippi River for natives who wished to pursue their traditional ways. Although the federal government did not provide schools, its agents, such as Return J. Meigs among the Cherokees, encouraged admission of skilled whites into Indian lands to demonstrate development of resources and to promote trade. In a remarkable educational experiment characteristic of their faith, Moravian missionaries from Germany and eastern Europe entered the Cherokee nation in 1801, settling at Spring Place in northern Georgia. Although the missionaries came to preach, they were encouraged to begin a school by Upper Town chiefs, who favored acculturation and resisted removal and relinquishment of land. Chiefs who brought their children to the Moravian school expected them to learn English and become interpreters and intermediaries between old and new ways. By 1806 white farmers in the area also brought their children to the school; slaves would not be educated until they became converts, but African Americans attended the Moravian meeting. Pupils at the school learned to read the Bible, spell, and sing hymns. Required to work in the cornfields and peach orchards, they also learned to be farmers. In 1818 missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) established another school in eastern Tennessee, and some of the original pupils of the Moravians traveled to Cornwall, Connecticut, to enroll

in the ABCFM’s parent school. On their return to the Cherokee nation, where they were wealthy planters and slave owners, some of these children who began their education at the Moravian school—John Rollin Ridge, Elias Boudinot, David and John Vann, and Elijah Hicks—became leaders of the Cherokee “renascence” of the 1820s. In the following decade they worked with Northern missionaries and lawyers in the appeal to federal courts to save the lands and sovereignty of the Cherokee nation when President Andrew Jackson implemented the shift in federal policy toward Indian removal across the Mississippi River.

Missionaries in the Far West. Jackson’s policy of Indian removal shifted the work of the ABCFM from Southern projects to the Trans-Mississippi West. In 1836 the newly married Marcus and Narcissa Whitman left their homes in western New York to travel as ABCFM missionaries to the Oregon country, territory far beyond the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase that still was claimed by Great Britain. Among the first white families to experience the Overland Trail, they journeyed with fur trappers and traders along the Platte River, across the Rocky Mountains at the South Pass, and down the Snake River and across the Blue Mountains to the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Walla Walla. Soon after, they established their mission there among the Cayuse Indians. Converted as a child in the evangelical revivals of western New York, Narcissa Whitman never doubted that her task was to bring Protestant Christianity and Anglo-American civilization to the Indians. The Cayuses and their neighbors the Nez Percés still were following an annual cycle of winter settlement and travel in

the other seasons to hunt, fish, and gather food. Although they welcomed the missionaries, they had little intention of living a settled life and relinquishing their cultural practices and beliefs. At the mission school she conducted in her kitchen, Narcissa Whitman instructed Cayuse children in English and the Nez Perces language, which she gradually learned. Her husband Marcus conducted services, tried to practice medicine, and struggled to persuade native men and boys to be farmers. Yet, in despair after the accidental drowning of her daughter, Narcissa was troubled by her lack of fitness for missionary life. When the Cayuses failed to accept the Protestant message, relations between the Indians and missionaries deteriorated. When prospective settlers from the United States entered the area in the mid 1840s, the Whitmans began to view their calling as the education of white children. In 1846, after the United States acquired the Oregon Territory through treaty with Great Britain and larger groups of emigrants entered the area, the Cayuses directed their resentment at the mission. Devastated by imported diseases, especially a lethal measles epidemic in 1847, Indians attacked the mission and killed the Whitmans and some of their associates. This disaster ended the work of the ABCFM in Oregon; Narcissa Whitman, who was greatly admired in the Eastern states, became a martyr.

Sources

Julie Roy Jeffrey, Converting the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991);

William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1986).