WHITE MAN'S CLUB: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation, by Jacqueline Fear-Segal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 422 pp., $55.00 hb.
Perhaps only once in a decade does a book come along that truly sets the standard for the rest of the field. White Man's Club is such a book. Beautifully written and superbly argued, it is replete with fresh insights and analysis of a subject that remains one of the most enduring and meaningful and often painful in the history of American Indian and white relations. Students of the Indian boarding school movement will be especially interested in the insights provided by Fear-Segal, particularly those that address how the dominant nineteenth century views of race played a major role in the creation and functioning of off reservation boarding schools. Here the author juxtaposes the philosophies and attitudes of Samuel Chapman Armstrong with those of Richard Henry Pratt and their respective schools, Hampton and Carlisle. In searching for clues to help cast light on the boarding school experience, Fear-Segal places every available sliver of evidence under a detective's microscope. Pictures, maps, plats, blueprints, letters, student files, newspapers, cemetery design and headstones, campus entranceways and building layouts, and oral histories-all are laid here alongside the official federal record to produce a true tour de force. As just a single example of the level of Fear-Segal's investigative powers, standing barely visible and unnoticed on the bandstand in a photographic image of the Carlisle parade ground on page 271 is a little uniformed young man maybe four or five years of age. The author, utilizing student and family records, reveals the identity of this student and she constructs a history of his family and their importance to the school that otherwise would have been lost in the multigenerational ruptures that were produced by attendance in off-reservation boarding schools. In this way, this book has equally as much to say about how to do history as it does about the history it contains.
Winters in New England are lengthy and bitter, and the college-age students at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School (Springfield College today) in Springfield, Massachusetts in the early 1890s could become somewhat boisterous when weather conditions prohibited their going outside to participate in sports.