Can the Subaltern be Educated? Examining Indigeneity in Colonial Schooling

• In Event: When What We Know Is Not Enough: Questioning Silences in Educational History

Abstract

Topic
The United States occupied and took control of the Philippines in 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War. At the onset of colonial rule, the US established an educational system designed to pacify Filipina/os and prevent anti-colonial rebellions, civilizing and transforming them into modern subjects (Kramer, 2006). US officials and educators perceived Filipina/os as savages needing White tutelage, and used experiences with US racialized minorities as template for initiatives abroad (Author, 2009). This paper extends my research on colonial and racialized education to raise questions about the type of education geared toward the Philippines’ indigenous communities.

Accounts of education provided to indigenous peoples is lacking in educational history. In the US and Canada, the primary mode of educating indigenous children and youth involved residential or boarding schools, which excised them from families and communities and resulted in socio-cultural and political fragmentation and destruction (Adams, 1995; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006). Although some versions of residential schooling were instituted in the Philippines, indigenous peoples in the US colony in the early 1900s received limited governmental and educational attention. Because US colonial education was aimed mainly towards “common” Filipina/o mestizos, the schooling provided to indigenous children and youth ranged from minimal instruction for self-sustainability at best to outright neglect at worst.

Historical Sources
This paper draws from extensive archival research in the US and the Philippines, with specific attention to the annual reports of the Bureau of Education in the Philippines, published from 1900 to 1926—beginning with the official establishment of colonial schooling and ending when Filipina/os took greater control of education. These reports, compiled by the Bureau’s US-led directorate, drew from various local accounts of school programs, curriculum, and issues, thereby offering deep and wide-ranging views of the bureau’s initiatives, implementation, and impact. I examined these reports, which ranged from 75 to 300+ pages each, by drawing from Subaltern Studies scholarship, which recovers marginalized subjects and their perspectives by reading against the grain of dominant records (Spivak, 1988).

Scholarly Significance
The context of settler colonial nations, like the US and Canada, in which Europeans occupied indigenous lands and became the national majorities (Thobani, 2007), is different from most global colonies, like the Philippines, where the majority of the population remained of mixed-race or native backgrounds. However, a parallel can be drawn from the ways in which indigenous peoples do not comprehensively figure in colonial and national histories. In the US and Canada, the histories of native and Aboriginal peoples are often not construed as part of the history of colonial education. They are largely considered within the rubric of race/ethnic and multicultural studies frameworks (Butler, 2001), which on the one hand foreground an anti-racist analysis of White supremacy, yet on the other hand do not fully account for issues regarding land, sovereignty, and genocide. I contend that the history of education can gain interpretive insights and currency when we consider both the experiences and conditions of indigenous peoples and the relevance of colonialism and empire as analytical concepts.

Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, University of Toronto - OISE