Embodying Contradictions: Marianna Burgess, Native Americans, and Power Dynamics of US Imperial Education, 1870s–1920s

As a white educator of Native Americans and an advocate for Indian rights around the turn-of-the-twentieth century, Marianna Burgess embodied the complexities and contradictions of U.S. imperial education. Teaching among the Pawnee in her early twenties in the Nebraska Territory, Burgess eagerly joined the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania soon after it opened its doors in 1879, happy that Carlisle was far away from what she viewed as the “many counteracting home influences” of Native families. As a steadfast ally of Carlisle’s founding Superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, Burgess served in many roles throughout her more than two decades at the Indian school. She taught in the classroom, recruited Native students to increase enrollment, and, perhaps most significantly, oversaw the schools’ newspapers which served to both reinforce discipline on school grounds and elevate Carlisle’s mission of Native American assimilation. In 1904, Burgess resigned from Carlisle when Pratt was effectively forced out of leadership, and in the years afterward she remained involved in Indian reform. In the 1910s, Burgess urged fellow Quakers to recognize the plight of Native Americans and received two invitations: one from a former Carlisle student to speak at an Indian rights conference, and two, to become the editor of the Magazine of the Society of American Indians. Tracing Burgess’ involvement with Native peoples over time gives insight into the complexity of the personal and political relationships that whites and Natives negotiated during a period of profound racial tension and violence in American history, a time when Native peoples continued to fight for sovereignty.