Native American Colonial Colleges

Native American Colonial Colleges

The first proposal for organized education of any kind in the American colonies concerned the education of Native Americans. In keeping with the prevailing ideology of colonial conquest that suggested a European obligation to ‘pacify’ and ‘civilize’ indigenous people, British Virginians petitioned the crown for funding to develop an Indian college within a decade of the first permanent settlement at Jamestown. Though the plans for the proposed college in Henrico were officially endorsed both by the Virginia Company in 1618 and King James, the goal of establishing an institution to educate the "‘Children of the Infidels’" (qtd in Wright 3) was to be ultimately frustrated by fraudulent money management. In an unending effort to turn a profit in the colonies, the venerable treasurer of the Virginia Company, Sir Edwin Sandys, collected a net £2,043 but used the Indian college funds to ship indentured tenants for what were supposed to be college lands. With the first European effort to establish a college for Native Americans, a pattern of fraud and failure to enact official plans was set, a pattern which to was persist throughout the colonial era.

Harvard College’s financial survival was linked to moneys contributed by English benefactors who were apparently eager to play up their perceived pious obligation to convert the Native Americans to Christianity. At its founding, Puritan Harvard’s stated mission was to avoid the scenario of "‘[leaving] an illiterate ministry to the church when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.’" (qtd in Wright 7) However, shortly after the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was established to distribute funds for colonial educational establishments, H...

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...ld the said Indian academy. Instead he exhausted all of Occum’s collections in 15 years educating 160 students, a mere 40 of whom were Native American (Wright 10).

Dartmouth, like Harvard and the College of William and Mary, survived its first years by fraudulent use of moneys earmarked for Indian education. The environment in which the first colleges developed included huge rewards for those administrators who opportunistically capitalized on English fears of Native American uprisings. A strong correlation is evident between Native American unrest and instances of successful solicitations by colleges for Indian education. Administrators at colonial colleges repeatedly marshaled auspiciously timed appeals to charitable Britons’ sense of pious duty to socialize the ‘heathen’ races of North America, and generally met with success irrespective of sectarian identity.