In Indians in Unexpected Places, Philip Deloria introduces the concept of “expectation and anomaly” to challenge the way we understand modern Native American history. Explain the significance of this concept and use examples from the course (other than Deloria) to demonstrate how it helps us reconsider Native American history.
Deloria (2004) prefaced one of his books, Indians in Unexpected Places, with a grayscale photograph titled, “Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop, Denver 1941”. In his words, this depiction of a Native American woman in traditional garb, seated beneath a metal hairdryer and smiling at a hair and nail stylist, exemplified the concept of “expectation and anomaly”. He painted the scenario of a viewer who, upon looking at this photograph, would react in surprise: to them, the Native woman must be anomalous. In Deloria’s concept, an “anomaly” is a subject which the viewer “others” because it does not live up to their subconscious thoughts and views of that subject. An anomaly defies a stereotype, but the concept which an anomaly derives from is far more complex than one. On the other hand, the Native woman is anomalous to the viewer because of their innate expectations. In this scenario, the viewer’s “expectation” is defined by those subconscious views: more specifically than a stereotype, the viewer’s expectation that the woman would be anywhere but a “modern” beauty salon is based on their ideology. The viewer’s ideology, even if unintentional, is built on personal, limited experiences, and their ideology forms an “expectation” of a given subject that appears as some specific mental image. Then, when that expectation, far more specific than a stereotype, is defied, as the Red Cloud Woman does to the viewer’s misunderstandings, the subject who the expectation was associated with becomes anomalous.
The concept of the “anomalous” Native American is non-exclusive to Deloria’s writing, even if he coined the term. A critical retelling by Loewen (2018) focuses on the depiction of Natives in countless American history textbooks as “savage”, antithetical to the idea of “civilization”. Like Deloria, Loewen brings up the association of Natives with primitivism, and how the connotations of the words and descriptions about Natives in history create the expectation of a lowly, animalistic group rather than living human beings. When they are not degraded as sub-human, their culture is illustrated in fantastical, queer derogation. One textbook which Loewen cites points to a group of Native Americans and repeat how they “believe” in a religious idea, but one so vague that the author grandly proclaims all nature has a spirit. Their use of “believe” in conjunction with vague, fantastical storytelling undermines their description entirely: instead, it paints an expectation for the reader that Natives simply “believe” in something nonexistent, and that the concept of a religion at all, including Christianity—when in reality, they just mean a Native American religion—is ridiculous.
Both Deloria and Loewen’s examples of “expectation and anomaly” identify the effects of individual and social bias against, in this case, Native American history. Native history is written through an ethnocentric view, and when it is, it is rarely written in textbooks by Natives themselves. They both introduce their retellings of Native American history by contesting historical viewpoints rooted in non-Native ideologies that portray Native culture and Native existence as inferior. When, instead of consuming ethnocentric retellings, the reader criticizes the colonial idea of modernity and civilization and analyzes history through Native eyes, they will be able to understand Native American history for what it is instead of what it was through a stranger’s views.
The effort to assimilate Native peoples took many forms from the 1880s to the 1920s, particularly, federal boarding schools. These efforts were targeted to disrupt several aspects of traditional Native culture; despite these efforts, Native peoples found both public and private ways to push back. Explain the specific goals of the boarding school project and how Native children both resisted and embraced these goals of Westernization.
On the day that Richard Henry Pratt began the American boarding school experiment in 1879, he was recounted proclaiming in front of his Oglala and Plains Indian students: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man… teach the Indian that he is less than a man… to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood” (Treuer, 2019). This was the floral retelling of the goal of the boarding school project: degrade and erase any vestige of Native ideas and culture; replace the cultural void with Western ideals, loyalty to the United States, and a passion for “civilized” European hobbies; and ultimately return them to their old homes to spread Western ideals to the reservations and kill off what Native history remained. When a student was sent to the boarding school, they were forbidden from speaking Native languages, made to pray to a Western religion and dressed in European fashion; they were taught agricultural, industrial-economic, and government subjects to prepare them to enter the American workforce (Child, et al., 2000).
Despite all attempts to erase Native heritage, many children resisted it. Entrenching Native Americans in European arts and artistic appreciation failed to erase their memories of their own cultural art. Native students were enrolled in marching bands to emulate militancy, reinforce disciplinary goals, and learn European classical music performances. For his whole school, one early Carlisle band brass player performed a section of a hymn named “In the Sweet By-and-By” before cutting it off with a “War Whoop”, which was loudly repeated by the audience and admonished by the school paper. If artistic resistance was not found in the schools, it could be found when alumni departed for their homes. People continued to sing and perform Native art on reservations through the early twentieth century; some remarked that “some of the most active singers and dancers” on the reservations were alumni or vacationing students, such as alumnus Francis La Flesche from the Omaha (Troutman, 2009).
Just as many Native students embraced the boarding school ideals through musical talent and appreciation as they did resist it. Following their graduation, many students looked into music as a career or as a lifelong hobby. Francis Chapman, who participated in the 1904 St. Louis Exposition of talented Native student performers, later became the Chilocco Indian School’s band director; Dora Armstrong, who graduated from the same school, later studied music and became an opera performer in New York City (Troutman, 2009). Many other Chilocco students and graduates did similar, joyfully participating as mission choir performers, ministers, and church band performers.
Others thrived through boarding school ideals without focuses in art. In a mix of both resistance and embracement, some Natives who claimed homesteads following the 1866 act improved their lots through practical and academic skills acquired through boarding schools. They participated in the American attempts to erase tribal community through homestead claims, but they brought over their communities and cultures regardless (Treuer, 2019). Even though many used the Western ideals and skills taught in the boarding school project to maintain their land, they still retained the cultures they had before the boarding schools tried to remake them—and in this way, Native children both accultured and survived in the face of boarding school Westernization.