Missionaries and the Potawatomi peoples of Kansas

Despite a significant amount of scholarship dedicated to the role education has played in the United States government’s policy aims for American Indians, most of the historical policy analysis relating to American Indian education has focused on federally administered boarding schools in operation after 1875.

However, well before the establishment of the first federally operated boarding school, American Indian communities were inundated with missionaries, and their mission schools typically served as the initial point of introduction to Western education for many American Indian tribes. With the goal of critically engaging the Lockean-inspired political philosophy and policy initiatives of government officials and the educative work of Catholic missionaries serving the Potawatomi in Kansas during the mid-nineteenth century, this study will reconstruct the history of policy implementation at a well-established Kansas mission school by using primary source work from archives, including legislative and treaty records, journals, and official school reports from 1840-1861.

By examining how religion, and the federal government’s assimilationist American Indian policy, influenced missionary education at the schoolhouse level, this study aims to strengthen the literature on American Indian education policy and history by contributing to an understudied period of American Indian educational history.

Bio

Dr Issac O. Akande of Wichita, Kansas (USA) is a Lecturer at CDU in CIFEA. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership where he studies the history of education and education policy.

He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas studying political science and history, and a master's degree in education from the University of Oregon. He previously taught high school social studies for three years in the state of Kansas, including a stint working for the Kickapoo Tribe of Kansas.

His research interests include multicultural education, education policy, settler-colonial studies, and Indigenous studies with an emphasis on the histories of education policy towards Indigenous peoples after European contact.