Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (American Indian Lives) - Hardcover

Horne, Esther Burnett; McBeth, Sally

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803223862 ISBN 13: 9780803223868

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 1998

Synopsis

This is the spirited story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, Horne attended Haskell Indian Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, and often visited relatives on the Shoshone Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. Motivated by teachers like Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson, Horne devoted her life to educating other Indian children. She began teaching at the Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in 1930 and has remained active in education to the present day.

Her experiences as student and teacher have enabled Horne to provide a detailed portrait of Indian boarding schools. We learn about daily life at Haskell and about the challenges and rewards of teaching for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at Wahpeton. Above all, Horne's life illuminates the ongoing struggle by Native teachers and students to retain their cultural identities within a government educational system designed to assimilate them.

Esther Horne and Sally McBeth developed this life history in a truly collaborative manner. McBeth carefully documented both Horne’s personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging and informative narrative about education and identity.

About this title

About the Author

Sally McBeth is a professor of anthropology and multicultural studies at the University of Northern Colorado.

Reviews

This collaboration between a Shoshone teacher and a white anthropologist presents the classic tensions inherent in European and Native American views of culture. And Horne's story materializes as one of a lifetime spent educating--not acculturating--young Native Americans. A descendent of Sacajawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition from Missouri to the Pacific coast, Horne spent her formative years in boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The schools were designed to convert Indians to white American culture. But Horne notes that the very act of bringing together so many tribes ended in strengthening their sense of commonality and creating a pan-Indian identity that foreshadowed the Native American movement. In this fascinating life story, Horne sees Sacajawea as a personal metaphor, by which she makes sense of her own life as a Native American in a nation that reveres the written word over oral tradition. That reverence highlights a dispute as to how long Sacajawea lived. Horne recalls stories told of Sacajawea's living to old age versus the official recorded version that has her dying as a young woman. Vanessa Bush

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803223862
• ISBN 13: 9780803223868
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 225