A California professor has spent the past three days leafing through 70-year-old newspapers at Haskell Indian Nations University.
He's looking for information on 1927-32 graduates of Haskell Institute in hopes of finding those who went on to earn bachelor's or master's degrees.
Steve Crum, an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of California-Davis, has been doing research on Haskell's role in Indian education.
If he's lucky, a few may be able to shed some light on what it was like for an American Indian to pursue a degree at a time when Indian boarding schools gave students little hope of being more than carpenters, blacksmiths, cooks and secretaries.
"These people are pioneers, they did what no one had done before them," said Steve Crum, an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of California-Davis.
Crum, 50, has written a 10-chapter manuscript on the history of American Indian education movements, from pre-Columbian times to the late 1990s. He's at Haskell this week, searching for real-life examples to complement the historical narrative.
When he's finished writing, he'll search for a publisher. His "The Road on Which We Came: A History of the Western Shoshone," was published by the University of Utah Press in 1994.
Crum said that between 1927 and 1932, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs elevated four programs at then-Haskell Institute to junior-college status, marking a dramatic shift toward policies of self-determination.
"Up until this time, the BIA had done everything it could to carry out an assimilation campaign aimed at making Indians non-Indian," Crum said.
Students, he said, were routinely sent to boarding schools hundreds of miles from their families.
"The farther away the better," he said. "That's how assimilation worked, you were removed from your kinship system."
Haskell was one of 25 regional boarding schools operated by the BIA between 1900 and 1920.
But after 10,000 American Indians enlisted to fight in World War I another 5,000 were drafted the BIA's attitude began to change, Crum said.
"This was all part of the so-called Progressive Era," Crum said.
In the 1920s, the BIA agreed to let Haskell Institute graduates live on campus while attending Kansas University.
"In exchange for their room and food, they were given jobs," Crum said. "There were several who took advantage of this."
Today, thousands of Indian students go to college. But in the 1920s and '30s, few Indian students made the move from high school to college. Even fewer sought graduate degrees.
"You have to understand that for an Indian in these times to go to college or to graduate school, they had to be very, very motivated. They had no role models, no one before them had ever done such a thing," Crum said. "No one expected them to do this."
The BIA phased out Haskell's junior college program in 1932.
"Haskell didn't become a junior college again until 1970," he said. Haskell now offers bachelor's degrees in elementary education, business administration, environmental science and American Indian studies.
Crum said he is interested in hearing from or about Haskell graduates who went to college in the 1920s and '30s or who have earned graduate degrees. His e-mail address: sjcrum@ucdavis.edu.
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