Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 - (Indigenous Education) by Margaret Connell Szasz (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, c1988.

Book Synopsis

Armed with Bible and primer, missionaries and teachers in colonial America sought, in their words, "to Christianize and civilize the native heathen." Both the attempts to transform Indians via schooling and the Indians' reaction to such efforts are closely studied for the first time in Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783. Margaret Connell Szasz's remarkable synthesis of archival and published materials is a detailed and engaging story told from both Indian and European perspectives. Szasz argues that the most intriguing dimension of colonial Indian education came with the individuals who tried to work across cultures. We learn of the remarkable accomplishments of two Algonquian students at Harvard, of the Creek woman Mary Musgrove who enabled James Oglethorpe and the Georgians to establish peaceful relations with the Creek Nation, and of Algonquian minister Samson Occom, whose intermediary skills led to the founding of Dartmouth College. The story of these individuals and their compatriots plus the numerous experiments in Indian schooling provide a new way of looking at Indian-white relations and colonial Indian education.

Review Quotes

"Szasz rightly understands both the strengths and the weaknesses of the formal, institutionalized, culture-bound colonial education that was offered to Indians. . . . The book is extraordinarily well researched and well written and is highly recommended."--American Historical Review

"Szasz, after several years of exhaustive archival research, has written a richly detailed overview of colonists' educational assault on Native Americans. . . . This study is a highly significant contribution to our understanding of Indian education in colonial America."--American Indian Quarterly

About the Author

Margaret Connell Szasz is a professor of Native American and Celtic history at the University of New Mexico and the author of Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker and Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination since 1928.