Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud and the Ambivalence of Native American Education

I'm still working my way through Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, learning bits and pieces about Native American history. Today I discovered a very interesting person, Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud (1887-1965). She was a big-time activist for Native American causes, one of the founders of a pan-tribal group called the Society of American Indians, an advocate for tribal sovereignty and Indian rights. She was put on a national advisory body by FDR and in 1952 some collective of American women's clubs named her the "Mother of the Year." 

What made Roe Cloud such an effective advocate for Indian causes? Her education in government boarding schools and Indian colleges.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on Roe Cloud, from which I glean the following: She began attending a Catholic boarding school in Minnesota at the age of nine. From 11 to 13 she studied at the Pipestone Boarding School, one of those "industrial schools" where students studied half a day and then labored the other half. Then she attended the Hampton Institute, from which she graduated in 1903. She stayed on for two more years to complete training as a teacher.

From there she went on to become a teacher at an Indian boarding school in South Dakota. She then went back to school for two more years to get a nursing certificate, then back to the reservations to work in a series of boarding schools. In 1916 she went to Wichita, Kansas and co-founded the American Indian Institute, a college preparatory school for Indian men. The curriculum, according to wikipedia, included both regular academic studies and "courses on indigenous cultures." While running the school Roe Cloud found time to take additional courses at Wichita State and complete her own BA. She also pushed her own children to pursue western education; one of her daughters was the first American Indian to graduate from Wellesley, while another claimed  that honor at Vassar. Her "Mother of the Year" citation prominently mentioned her daughters' educational success.

Meanwhile, we have this weird ongoing tirade in both the US and Canada about Indian boarding schools as an insidious assault on Native culture and identity, if not outright genocide. What do people like former Interior Secratary Deb Holland think about Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud? Was she some kind of race traitor? Or did she pursue her own education and push it on others because she saw that it was the only way forward for Native Americans?

Could it be that one reason many American tribes are now thriving, reclaiming lost lands and so on, is that they now have college-educated leaders? That the reason we have powerful Native American national associations, and an Indian press to push their point of view, is that so many Indians have been to boarding schools and universities?

As I wrote before about Indian boarding schools, I'm sure some of them were miserable places. Yes, the forced edication they carried out did much to undermine traditional Native cultures. But I, for one, do not think that Neolithic revanchism would be a good path for Indians in our time. I think Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud was right: that the solution to a problematic boarding school system was, not to abandon it, to for educated Indians to take it over and run it in their own interests.