For centuries American Indians and the Irish experienced assaults by powerful, expanding states, along with massive land loss and population collapse. In the early nineteenth century the U.S. government, acting through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), began a systematic campaign to assimilate Indians. Initially dependent on Christian missionary societies, the BIA later built and ran its own day schools and boarding schools for Indian children. At the same time, the British government established a nationwide elementary school system in Ireland, overseen by the commissioners of national education, to assimilate the Irish. By the 1920s, as these campaigns of cultural transformation were ending, roughly similar proportions of Indian and Irish children attended state-regulated schools. In the first full comparison of American and British government attempts to assimilate "problem peoples" through mass elementary education, Michael C. Coleman presents a complex and fascinating portrait of imperialism at work in the two nations. Drawing on autobiographies, government records, elementary school curricula, and other historical documents, as well as photographs and maps, Coleman conveys a rich personal sense of what it was like to have been a pupil at a school where one's language was not spoken and one's local culture almost erased. In absolute terms the campaigns failed, yet the schools deeply changed Indian and Irish peoples in ways unpredictable both to them and to their educators. Meticulously researched and engaging, "American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling" sets the agenda for a new era of comparative analyses in global indigenous studies.

Based on the correspondence of missionaries in the field, this book offers valuable insight unto understanding Protestant attitudes toward the American Indians in the nineteenth century. By focusing upon the work of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S., the book portrays a major Protestant denomination's evangelical program to take the Indian from heathenism to gospel light. From its founding in 1837 the board sent over 450 missionaries to at least nineteen diverse and widely separated Indian tribes, with a goal of uplifting them into the Protestant tradition of Christian civilization. These zealous men and women sent back thousands of detailed and often highly personal letters from the Indian field, and this book is based primarily upon that store of correspondence. Seeking to fill the need for critical case studies of individual missionary organizations, this book depicts the missionaries as cultural revolutionaries in the deepest human sense. Moved by a nearly absolute ethnocentrism, they denounced almost every aspect of tribal culture. Among the Indians they found virtually nothing worth incorporating into the codes of Christian civilization. Yet these missionaries resisted racial explanations for what they saw as Indian failings and retained a conviction that individual tribal members were both eligible for eternal salvation and capable of attaining citizenship in the United States. In this book the author places the work of the Board of Foreign Missions in a historical context and presents the goals, methods, backgrounds and motivations of the missionaries. He also examines the cluster of ideas which constituted the Presbyterian definition for Christian civilization.

From more than a hundred autobiographical accounts written by American Indians recalling their schooling in government and missionary institutions this book recovers a perspective that was almost lost. In a system of pedagogy that was alien to their culture these and hundreds of others were wrested as youngsters from their tribal life and regimented to become American citizens. In the process of enlightening them to western codes and values, their memories of ethnic life were intentionally obscured for what was to believed to be the greater good of the nation. Drawing upon these Native American reminiscences reveals how young Indians responded to a system that attempted to eradicate the tribal codes that had nourished them. The Christian curriculum, the military-style discipline, the white staff of teachers and administrators, and the work-for-study demands were alien and bewildering to them, especially during their first days at the institutions. The former pupils recall myriad kinds of adaptability, resistance, motivation, and rejection, as well as the many problems readjusting to changing tribal life upon their return from school. Here the history of the eighty-year epoch of such institutionalized schooling is placed in careful focus. Recounting this experience from the pupil's eyeview and comparing it with contemporary sources by white authors make this book a testament to the critical value of long-term autobiographical memory in the writing of history.