6 Numbers and Nuclear Families: Gender and Work in Indian Boarding School Mathematics Curricula, 1879-1932

Mentor: José Gutiérrez (Education, Culture & Society, University of Utah)

Abstract

In this paper, we address the thread of cisheteropatriarchal structures in the mathematics curriculum from the Indian boarding school system during the administration of Estelle Reel. Specifically, we focus our analysis on how gender is associated with housework in math word problems. We argue that these problems reflect how ideologies of gender oppression are a fundamental aspect and extension of settler colonial capitalism within the United States (Nakano Glenn, 2015). Theoretically, we draw upon prior Marxist feminist work that parse out the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy (Federici 1975; Vogel 1983). Further, we directly connect these theoretical approaches in the analysis of the mathematical content to broader U.S. federal policy and reformist efforts (Stremlau, 2005) during our period of study, 1879-1932.

Introduction & Background

This paper presents an extension on ongoing research on math education in the Indian Boarding School System between 1879-1932 (Gutíerrez et. al, 2021) by focusing on how gender ideologies surrounding women were unmistakably central in the math word problems during the time. Elsewhere, we elaborate on how this content reflects federal policy of land dispossession (Smith et. al, 2022), which was also intimately connected to federal policies concerning indigenous women (Sepulveda, 2018; Stremlau, 2005). The aims of this paper are to 1) describe the particular ways in which gender appears in the mathematical curriculum of Indian boarding schools and 2) interpret the meaning of these problems within the context of larger settler colonial capitalist patriarchal systems to contribute to our understanding of how mathematics can act as a form of propaganda in reproducing these structures. We delineate our framework of analysis, methods, and significance in the following sections below.

Theoretical Framework

Drawing upon TribalCRIT (Brayboy, 2005), Social Reproduction Theory (Vogel 1983, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2017), and Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2015) analyses of settler colonialism as the basis of race-gender formation in the United States, we suggest that the presence of cisheteropatriarchal ideologies in mathematics education (both during the time studied and now) are fundamentally grounded in the ongoing and ever-present structure of U.S. settler colonial capitalism and forced assimilation. In particular, one of the goals of U.S. federal assimilation policy at the time was to “fracture […] extended indigenous families into male- dominant, nuclear families, modeled after middle-class, Anglo-American households” (Stremlau, 2005, p. 265), which required women’s socialization into reproductive labor roles central to capitalist patriarchy (Federici 1975). By focusing on the thread of social reproduction in the boarding schools’ mathematics curriculum then, this paper will demonstrate not only the indivisibility of this overarching structure, but also the necessity of critical mathematics pedagogy approaches that pay due attention to the insidious practices of settler colonial capitalism that undergird education to this day.

Methodology

As part of a larger ongoing historiography of mathematics education in Indian boarding schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Gutíerrez et. al, 2021), our research team came across a wealth of archival evidence related to mathematics education in the Estelle Reel Papers from her time as the Superintendent of Indian Schools. The main data source utilized in this paper came from the “Arithmetic” folder, a collection of math curricula in the boarding school system, which most likely originated from Reel’s summer training program for teachers around 1906-1907. Data consisted mainly of math word problems that were formulated for use in classrooms in different schools across the Indian education system, although there were some samples that followed more of a script that teachers would presumably use for interactive learning with their pupils (see tables).

Data analysis began with a process of open coding (Saldaña, 2012) and transcription of all materials to concretely observe general trends within the mathematics curriculum from the time. We are writing code books, identifying emerging categories representing distinct ways math problems reflect settler colonialism, and conducting statistical analyses based on the coding schema created from this process. We employed textual analysis methods (Carley, 1994) in the interpretation of problems that would fall into this purview to parse out the sociopolitical implications thereof.

Analysis

With regards to the actual math problems themselves, gender, as it pertains to women, could generally be categorized into two main groups. The first group, or what we term as explicitly gendered, encompassed problems that would mention unambiguously feminine-coded subjects (usually through names or through descriptors like “girls” and “women”) following patriarchal norms in a clear-cut manner.

An example exercise that fell under this category is the following (see table 1 for more examples):

“If 1 girl washes 117 cups after supper, how many cups can 2 girls wash?”

The second, or what we named as implicitly gendered, included scenarios where some form of “feminine behavior” or a “feminine domain” as understood in a Eurocentric context was being exhibited, but without an immediately discernible subject and in some cases without a subject at all. These were generally more difficult to classify because of a lack of a definitive reference to women or girls, but could still be ascertained by drawing upon the cultural discourses of what was thought to be essential to “proper womanhood” at the time. A problem that might be grouped under this classification would be the following (see table 2 for more examples):

“I washed 138 dish towels and ironed 50% of them. How many dish towels did I iron?” (pg. 1)

Interestingly, however, was that across both groups a common through line in the representations and discourses of “womanhood” and “girlhood” was the primacy of reproductive labor (Federici, 1975; Vogel, 1983; Red Nation, 2020). The continual appearance of this thematic element is consistent with Trennert’s (1982) study of indigenous girls’ education in non-reservation boarding schools, where he notes that “[…] by the 1840s, the federal government had committed itself to educating Indian girls in the hope that women trained as good housewives would help their mates assimilate” (p. 272), presumably into the dominant mode of production based on how “men’s laziness” was a primary concern in these efforts. Thus, as a part of this larger attempt to enforce cultural assimilation among indigenous peoples into the growing capitalist society of the U.S., women’s education was largely focused on housewifization (Mies, 1986), to the point that even mathematics curricula reflected this agenda.

Explicitly gendered problems were generally self-explanatory, in the sense that these directly conveyed women and girls doing feminine tasks and thereby reinforced Eurocentric concepts of womanhood as tied to social reproduction. Even situations where the named feminine subjects did not do housework still had traces of reproductive labor in their content. For example, one exercise from a first-grade class in Fort Shaw presented a scenario where a girl named Rose played with dolls and broke one. While this may seem like an innocuous inclusion, presenting the act of playing with dolls as feminine can be read as socialization meant to place care work as staunchly in the domain of “women’s labor.” In this way, Eurocentric capitalist patriarchal norms were highly salient in the math curriculum through constructing a Manichean gender system that placed women as the primary source of socially necessary labor in the maintenance and reproduction of the working class.

Figure 1: Explicitly Gendered vs. Implicitly Gendered

Like explicitly gendered problems, some of the implicitly gendered exercises were also straightforward in their content, albeit with the caveat that it wasn’t immediately clear who was doing the domestic labor (see example above). However, problems without a subject at all posed the most analytically interesting situations, in how they carried the implication of the permanence of women’s supposed role as reproductive laborers. Take, for instance, the following problem from a third-grade class at Haskell:

“There are 21 machines in the sewing room and each machine has 3 spools of white thread and 2 spools of black thread. How many spools of thread are there in all?”

In this case, while there is no subject doing “feminine” tasks, domestic labor still undergirds the mathematics practiced through asking students to count the number of spools of thread in the sewing room as an allusion to the production of clothing prescribed to women under capitalist patriarchy. And while this can be read just as a reference to the regime of domesticity in indigenous girls’ education in boarding schools, the fact that “womanhood” was tacitly attached to the physical object of the sewing machine itself socialized girls into understanding the Eurocentric gender binary as a fundamentally real phenomenon.

Reproductive labor as it was configured in the exercises was also typified as either waged/paid labor or unpaid labor. Paid labor included situations where domestic duties and tasks were performed for some form of financial compensation, such as one problem from Fort Shaw where students were asked to find the total amount of money they would receive for doing the laundry of faculty members. As Gutíerrez et. al (2021) has already elucidated upon, the hyperfocus on vocational training in the boarding school system meant that any explicit math education indigenous students would receive would also be embedded in this larger scheme, with girls specifically having a curriculum oriented around domestic servitude for white settlers (Lomawaima, 1994). With this in mind, these paid labor situations in the mathematics curriculum can easily be read as a form of training to make indigenous girls fill subservient domestic positions for whites, with the understanding that their labor should be traded for settler currency.

Unpaid labor situations also involved the performance of reproductive labor, but without a named form of payment, as in multiple cases where girls would do housework presumably by virtue of their gender (see table 2). And though these unpaid contexts could be interpreted as another facet of girls’ vocational training, they also arguably held an equally important role in socializing indigenous girls into the base unit of economic production in Eurocentric capitalism, that being the nuclear family. While at the time there were technically no federal policies explicitly focused on gender-based assimilation of indigenous peoples, family structures in the “civilizing mission” of the United States was a prominent and clear concern among white reformers at the time (Stremlau, 2005; Denetdale, 2017). As Estelle Reel (1901, quoted in Jacobs, 2005) herself put it, “The homes of the camp Indians are to be reached mostly through our schoolgirls, who are to be the future wives and mothers of the race, and on their advancement will depend largely the future condition of the Indian. All history has proven that as the mother is so is the home, and that a race will not rise above the home standard”. However, a core tenet of the nuclear family structure is the prescription of domestic work as a devalued, mystified “labor of love” that women are effortlessly able to do (Federici, 1975). Taken together with the eminent focus on families in reformer efforts, then, what appears is the idea that these unpaid contexts in the mathematics curriculum were a crucial part of conditioning indigenous girls into understanding themselves as naturally attuned to these tasks so they would later enter into the unpaid reproductive labor role in the nuclear family without much issue. At the same time, the undervaluing of these tasks also disrupted indigenous understandings of home maintenance as sacred and honorable, further contributing to the elimination of the native at the forefront of settler colonialism (Stewart-Haiwara, 2007; Tuck and Yang, 2012).