Cherokee Education and Diaspora Jewels,

Cherokee Education and Diaspora

Introduction

• On March 10, 1881, Walter Adair Duncan, superintendent of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum, praised the Cherokee Nation's public education system in an editorial.

• The Cherokee Nation operated over 100 day schools, male and female seminaries, and an orphanage.

• Duncan emphasized the importance of formal education in giving meaning to "national life," calling it the "nation's heart-string."

• At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, education was valued as a means of connecting dispersed Cherokee individuals, families, and communities and reimagining Cherokee identity.

• Historians often overlook the lens of diaspora when examining indigenous histories, including the Cherokee education system.

• Scholars like Devon Mihesuah and Marilyn Holt have studied the educational institutions founded by exiled Cherokees and other tribes in the trans-Mississippi West.

• Nationalistic sentiments reached their peak during the 1880s due to Euro-American expansion into Indian Territory, leading to calls for the termination of Native sovereignty and communal landholdings.

• The Dawes and Curtis Acts (1887 and 1898) facilitated these shifts, ending Cherokee-run government and control over their education system.

• By 1900, the U.S. government appointed officials to oversee Cherokee education, aiming to assimilate American Indians into white society.

• The loss of control over educational institutions in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) was a significant blow to Cherokee leaders who sought to nurture Cherokee national identity.

• U.S. officials viewed assimilationist education as a humanitarian policy, with Christian missionaries and the federal government establishing schools to assimilate American Indian children.

• Formal education provided Cherokees with practical skills, literacy, and new ways to think about their identity in various locations.

• It offered tangible skills for making a living and creative abilities to communicate and maintain a sense of community.

• This essay explores educational institutions in the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, the Qualla Reservation in North Carolina, and the Sherman Institute in California.

• The analysis questions whether these experiences reinforced a sense of unity or severed the connection to Cherokee national identity.

• Not all institutions were