To Change the World: The use of American Indian Education in the Philippines

In a Brule Sioux legend, Iktome, the trickster, warns the various Plains tribes of the coming of the white man: “You are the Ikche-Wichasha—the plain, wild, untamed people,” he tells the Lakota, “but this man will misname you and call you by all kinds of false names. He will try to tame you, try to remake you after himself.” Iktome, in essence, describes the conflict that occurred when American Indians encountered Euro-Americans, who judged the Indians in relation to themselves and found the Indians lacking. Having already misnamed the people “Indians,” Euro-Americans proceeded to label them, among other things, “savages.” By the latter half of the nineteenth-century, such terms carried scientific meaning and seemed to propose to Americans that Native Americans, having “failed to measure up” to the standards of white society, were doomed to extinction unless they changed their ways, unless they were “remade.” And that was, indeed, the aim of American endeavors at Native American education, to remake or, in the words of Carlisle president Richard H. Pratt, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” These educational efforts at restructuring Native American lifestyles were more than the culmination of the battle over definitional control; they were precedents for future American imperial expansion as the United States discovered, at the turn of the century, that “Indians” also lived overseas and that, just like those at home, they needed to be properly educated in the American way of life. The United States' experience with American Indians thus provided both justification for overseas expansion, particularly into the Philippine Islands, and an educational precedent that would enable Americans to claim that their expansion was different from European imperialism based on the American use of education to transform the cultures of their subjects and prepare them for self-government rather than continued colonial control.