Indians as Consumers

Chemawa Carpentry Students 

 

Indian girls learn a skill

Indian boys learn carpentry 

The main purpose of Carlisle and Chemawa, and the many others that would follow in the next decade, was to teach the Indians how to learn a skill in industry and agriculture so that they might more easily assimilate into white society.

Merril E. Gates, president of Amherst college and of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friend of the Indian illustrated Indians as consumers when he said that "we need to awaken in him wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the devine angel of discontent...discontent with the teepee and the starving rations of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into trousers-and trousers with a pocket in them, and with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!"

*Robert F. Berkhofer, "The White Man's Indian, Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present," (Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 2011).