The Struggle for Schools: Education, Race, and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Creek Nation

Rowan Steineker

The Struggle for Schools: Education, Race, and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Creek Nation draws on archival research to analyze the intersection of education, race, and sovereignty in nineteenth-century Indian Territory, using the Creek Nation as a case study. Unlike the thousands of Native American students who attended federally-controlled boarding schools in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, Creek students participated in a system of education controlled by their own tribal government. Creeks embraced education as a national institution as one strategy to defend their political sovereignty from U.S. intrusion. The Creek government and other indigenous nations in Indian Territory excluded an estimated 30,000 white children of families who intruded into Indian Territory from all tribal schools. Meanwhile, former Creek slaves attended separate “colored” institutions funded and administered by the tribal government. Thus, this study argues that because the Creek Nation embraced education as a tool of indigenous nation building, the state of education in Indian Territory represents a counter-narrative to the broader history of American boarding school education. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, racial ideology, federal policies, and the ongoing system of settler colonialism reshaped schools in the region to reflect national trends. The federal government took control of Creek schools, advanced Euro-American education, and permitted African American segregation. This will be the first in-depth historical study of a tribally-controlled school system and the first examination of the intersecting experiences of Native American, African American, and Euro-American education in Indian Territory. It contributes to the scholarship the growing literature on education, race, and colonialism in the U.S.

About Rowan Steineker

Rowan Steineker is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at University of Oklahoma. She received a bachelor’s degree in History and Sociology/Anthropology from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri in 2009. In 2011, she completed her master’s in History at the University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include U.S. history with a focus on education, race, gender, and the indigenous experience. Specifically, her dissertation examines the intersection of Native American, African American, and Euro-American education in Indian Territory during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Her research has been supported by several university-level grants, Phi Alpha Theta, and the Newberry Consortium for American Indian Studies. She also previously served as an editorial fellow at the University of Oklahoma Press.