iii. Missionary education at Wales: the Lopps

The Lopp’s school house from the Perry D. Palmer Photograph Album, ca. 1903-1913, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, UAF-2004-120-21

The establishment of federally-funded schools was an essential part of the American colonization of Alaska Native territory.  Schools undermined family ties, indigenous language skills, and the passing down of seasonal hunting and ceremonial practices.  Each community experienced the U.S. education system differently, as the schools were run by individuals with different attitudes toward indigenous lifeways who, because they worked in remote, isolated settlements, operated with significant autonomy.

The school at Kingigan opened in 1890 under the leadership of William Thomas Lopp and Harrison Thornton; they worked with a group of students ranging widely in age and gathered from several different villages in the region. Two  years later Ellen Kittredge, a teacher with experience working with former slave communities in the south, responded to an advertisement in a religious publication for an assistant teacher. She joined Lopp in Wales and married him soonafter; during the subsequent ten years she served as an assistant teacher while raising the Lopp’s children.

Education and Assimilation

The Lopps and Thornton had different approaches to working with members of the local communities.  When Thornton was assassinated in 1893, the school closed for a year and Tom (as he was called), turned his attention to training local Inupiat men as reindeer herders, again bringing in students from several surrounding villages.  The Congregationalist Lopps’ work linked religious instruction, secular education and a capitalist economic system in a manner consistent with the goals of Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary who had first come to Alaska in 1877 and who was appointed General Agent of Education in the Alaska Territory in 1885. It was under Jackson’s leadership that new schools were established and he also pioneered the reindeer industry, bringing in Siberian herders across the Bering Sea to serve as instructors. Jackson’s projects, while ambitious, were not unique. Christian religious organizations have played a role in Native American education since the eighteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, this work was officially tied to the federal government’s Indian service under Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy,” which distributed the responsibility for establishing and running Indian schools to the Catholic church and several different Protestant denominations.

The history of U.S. Indian Education is frequently characterized with the words of Richard Henry Pratt, director of the Indian boarding school in Carlisle, PA, who described his task as “killing the Indian to save the white man” inside. As Jackson put it in 1893, his teachers’ focus should be “the general uplifting of the whole population out of barbarism into civilization.” (Jackson 1893: 1260)  However they felt about the value of indigenous cultural tradition, most Anglo educators believed that Native culture was declining and that preparing indigenous students for integration into mainstream American society was necessary. It is certainly not coincidental that federal officials also understood that breaking historical communal, spiritual and political ties in Indian country would facilitate the seizure of Native territory and the undermining of rights granted to tribal nations in treaties with the United States.

The Lopps and the local community

The Lopps were complicit in the Indian service’s work, but during their time in Alaska, they gained great respect for Inupiat culture, coming to see how well it was adapted to community needs and local conditions.  While some teachers posted in Wales, including Thornton and, later, Susan Bernardin, had disdain for indigenous culture, the Lopp family learned the Inupiaq language, wore pieces of Iñupiaq clothing, and attended ceremonials. Letters written by Ellen Kittredge Lopp recount numerous social encounters during which information and ideas were exchanged, suggesting perhaps that cross-cultural understanding was accomplished more effectively through visiting, sharing meals and exchanging gifts than in a formal classroom.

The openness toward the Lopps that was demonstrated at Wales likely stemmed from something more than their own acceptance of Inupiat culture.  As Ernest S. Burch has recorded, ecological shifts were occurring in Northwestern Alaska in the late nineteenth century, forcing communities to alter older patterns of subsistence living.  The arrival of U.S. whalers had significantly depleted the population of bowhead whales.  Caribou herds were also shrinking and changing their migration patterns.  Burch has also noted that Inupiaq openness toward Christianity and Western education did not take off until influential Native converts began advocating for it.  Finally, Burch has argued that what appears to be religious conversion in Northwestern Alaska native communities may in fact have been the acceptance of some aspects of Euro-American culture without fully abandoning beliefs, values and practices that were passed down in Inupiat communities.  ((Burch 2013 (1988)).  Certainly the persistence of dances such as the Messenger Feast suggests he may be right, at least for the communities in which the Euro-American educational and military leaders didn’t put a stop to ceremonial practice.  (Hawkes 1913, 2)

Visual cultures of education

The Lopps believed in the importance of visual culture in education.  Both Lopps were image makers–Tom was a photographer and Ellen drew.  Drawing assignments were part of the Indian School curriculum, where they served as exercised that built an understanding of mathematical principles (shape, line, proportion) and conventional representational strategies (scale, recession, shading) and also cultivated self-expression.  Some schools encouraged artists to create drawings for sale.  Others had students make drawings for inclusion in displays at fairs and exhibitions designed to promote the Indian schools.  (Hutchinson 2009)

In addition to seeing images while in school, the Lopps expanded the community’s exposure to visual culture during leisure time.  One of the chief items of intercultural exchange in Alaska in the early twentieth century was print material, including prints and illustrations. Books, newspapers and magazines arriving in the mail or passed on by sailors on whaling or Customs Service ships were voraciously consumed by all members of the Wales community, especially during the long dark days of winter when no ships arrived with news and few traveled outside the village. Tom Lopp was also instrumental in building a local taste for visual culture, as he had both a darkroom and a printing press and he not only used them himself, but also trained students to make illustrations and set type for the Eskimo Bulletin, a newsletters sent to supporters in Protestant congregations in the lower forty-eight states. As Chris Green explores in his essay, these media are no doubt linked to the making of the drawings in this exhibition.

Sources for this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Jackson

Ernest S. Burch, “The Iñupiaq (sic) and the Christianization of Arctic Alaska,” (1988) reprinted in Erica Hill, ed. Iñupiaq ethnohistory:  selected essays by Ernest S. Burch. Fairbanks:  University of Alaska, 2013.

Ernest William Hawkes, The “Inviting-in” feast of the Alaskan Eskimo.  Ottawa:  government Printing Bureau, 1913.

Elizabeth Hutchinson, The Indian Craze:  Primitivism, Modernism and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915. Durham:  Duke University Press, 1999.

Sheldon Jackson, Report on introduction of domestic reindeer into Alaska. January 10, 1893. — Referred to the Committee on Appropriations and ordered to be printed.  Government Printing Office:  Washington, DC, 1893.

Ellen Louise Kittredge Lopp, William Thomas Lopp, Kathleen Lopp Smith, and Verbeck Smith, Ice Window: Letters from a Bering Strait Village, 1892-1902. University of Alaska Press, 2001

Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government And The American Indians. Lincoln : University Of Nebraska Press, 1986