<i>White Man's Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation</i> (review)

Jacqueline Fear-Segal’s White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation analyzes the “foundation years of the Indian school system, 1875–1900” through the lenses of race relations to sustain the claim that Indian education aimed at the racial formation of Indian students as nonwhites (xviii). Grounded in theories of domination of subordinate groups, power relations, and nationalism derived from James C. Scott, Michel Foucault, and Benedict Anderson, this work considers how a discourse of race played a fundamental role in the shaping of Indian education and how Indian students’ lives were impacted by it. The author focuses on the educational philosophies of Samuel Armstrong and Richard Pratt and their relation to contemporary attitudes toward race to unveil the racial agenda imprinted in the dayto-day practices of the pioneering institutions they directed, Hampton and Carlisle. The author’s main argument is that Indian schools, including Carlisle, did not prepare children for entering U.S. society on an equal footing with whites but, rather, for racial segregation. The narrative of the book runs from a macro level of nineteenthcentury theories of race and Indian education to a few micro histories of Carlisle students, which, reconstructed through published records, illuminate the endurance of native cultures to this day. In between, the reader is informed about indigenous educational practices and perspectives on schooling; mission schools and the shift to a centralized government system, as exemplifi ed by the Santee Normal Training School in the Dakota Mission; Hampton and the social evolutionary character of its curriculum; the bicultural life of Thomas Alford, a Hampton graduate; and fi nally Carlisle, its universalist intent, and the many contradictions that spoke of a racial agenda embedded in this “Americanizing” institution, particularly the spatial layout of the campus, the Indian cemetery, and the publication Indian Helper. The book poignantly concludes with “Powwow 2000: Remembering the Carlisle Indian School,” an event that, for the fi rst time in over one hundred years, brought hundreds of Native Americans once more to Carlisle; this time to pay tribute, honor, and remember the lives of those who attended it. One of the strengths of this book is the use of photographs, maps, school buildings, and “structure and circulation elements (roads, paths, fences, entrances, and exits)” as primary sources for spatial analysis (xviii). Examined with methods derived from landscape history and human geography, they provide new insights into the hidden