Indigenous Policy Journal
| Adrea Lawrence |
| Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Indiana University |
| August, 2006 |
Abstract |
| This historical study inductively examines how federal Indian policy was implemented at the Santa Clara Pueblo in northern New Mexico in the early twentieth century. Through the letters of Clara D. True, the day school teacher at the Pueblo from 1902-1907, and those of Clinton J. Crandall, her supervisor who also managed the Santa Fe Indian School, the author has adapted critical ethnographic analytic techniques to aid in constructing a microhistory of how True and Crandall carried out federal Indian policy during her tenure at Santa Clara. Although True and Crandall ran United States government schools for Pueblo Indian children, they also were expected to mitigate and implement other aspects of federal Indian policy. During the five years True was at Santa Clara, she, Crandall, and the Santa Clara community dealt with issues of disease, disputed land claims, citizenship, and, of course, education. The author has found that while schooling was part of the federal government's program of assimilating American Indian students into mainstream U.S. society, education occurred largely beyond the walls of the classroom. While True and Crandall were supposed to carry out federal Indian policy, the author found that they often appropriated and reformulated policy according to the unique circumstances at Santa Clara Pueblo. Likewise, the author has found that members of the Santa Clara community subtly negotiated their relationships with True and Crandall based on their previous experiences with Spanish and Mexican colonization. This study concludes that (1) policy implementation was often situated, ad-hoc policy making; (2) federal Indian policy in New Mexico was racialized, but did not reflect an exclusively dichotomous Anglo-Indian construct---Mexicans were also included, particularly when land and citizenship were in question; (3) Anglos could not reconcile how to civilize a group of indigenous people who, in many respects, resembled their own communities. |