A Dissonant Education: Marching Bands and Indigenous Musical Traditions at Sherman Institute, 1901–1940

At the end of the nineteenth century, the US government established a system of off-reservation boarding schools in an effort to assimilate Indigenous youth into the American nation-state. Music emerged as one of the most enduring strategies that these schools employed to reshape the cultural sensibilities of young Native Americans. A lively music culture could be found, for instance, at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, which was home to a marching band and dozens of other music groups throughout its history. Although school officials created these institutions for the purposes of assimilation and cultural genocide, this music program often had a more ambiguous place in the lives of students. To understand the role of music within Sherman Institute during the early twentieth century, this article examines the school’s marching band and the place of Indigenous cultural expression. While the school had students march to the beat of civilization, young Native Americans found various strategies to combat assimilation using the same instruments. At the same time, they also used the cultures of their communities to navigate life in an environment that the government created to destroy those very cultures.

Profit and Loss: ‘Indian’ Art at Sherman Institute, a Native American Off-Reservation Boarding School

In the early twentieth century, the US’s federal policies regarding the production of Native American art in off-reservation Indian boarding schools shifted from suppression to active encouragement. Seen as a path to economic stability, school administrators pushed their students to capitalize on the artistic traditions of Native cultures, without acknowledging or valuing these traditions as part of an extensive body of Indigenous knowledge. Although this push contributed to the retention of some cultural practices, administrators, teachers, and other members of the local community often exploited the students’ talents to make a profit. At Sherman Institute (now Sherman Indian High School) in Riverside, California, Native students of today are free to creatively express their own cultures in ways that strengthen their communities and promote tribal sovereignty. In this article, I will argue that the art program at Sherman Institute served to extinguish Indigenous knowledge and expertise as expressed through culturally specific weaving practices.

Embodying Hospitality and Paternalism

This chapter analyzes how mission writers and boosters imagined the mission era as a model for their own. It argues that mission writers and boosters cast Junípero Serra and his brethren as embodiments of premodern values of meaningful work and leisure and unbounded hospitality, positioning the Franciscans as precursors to Southern California's modern hospitality industry and exemplars of paternalist labor management practices. It also demonstrates how some mission boosters cast assimilationist campaigns and institutions, such as the Sherman Institute, as modern-day embodiments of the Franciscans' spirit. The chapter claims that, like the celebration of Jacques Marquette, the celebration of Serra provided an economic origin story for the region. It illustrates how Serra was imagined to be laying the groundwork for modern capitalist development.

Indian School, Company Town

During the early twentieth century, administrators at Sherman Institute, a federal Indian boarding school in Riverside, California, sent hundreds of students to work at Fontana Farms, a Southern California mega-ranch. Such work, they argued, would inculcate students with values of thrift and hard work, making them more like white, Protestant Americans. At Fontana, students faced low pay, racial discrimination, and difficult working conditions. Yet, when wage labor proved scarce on home reservations, many engaged the outing system with alacrity. In doing so, they moved beyond the spatial boundaries of the boarding school as historians have imagined it, and they used a program designed to erase native identities in order to carry their cultures forward into the twentieth century.