Essie’s Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher

By Esther Burnett Horne and Sally McBeth (’81 Ph.D.)

From the publisher: This is the spirited story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, Horne grew up attending 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 teaching other Indian children. She began teaching at 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 documents both Horne's personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging and informative narrative about education and identity. Sally McBeth is an associate professor of anthropology and multicultural studies at the University of Northern Colorado.

Investment in Learning: The Individual and Social Value of American Higher Education

By Howard Bowen ’29, ’32

From the publisher: The value of higher education has been under attack as seldom before in American history. We are told of the overeducated American, of the case against college, and of the failure of education to contribute significantly to the reduction of inequality. In this environment, republication of an exceptionally comprehensive and judicious analysis of all that has been learned—and not learned—about the consequences of American higher education comes at a most appropriate time. Investment in Learning more fully covers the various aspects of this subject than any yet to appear. Howard Bowen is optimistic about higher education, but his viewpoint is based on profound knowledge of both the economic and social aspects of education. Unlike some economists who insist on a strict cost-benefit analysis of expenditures on higher education in relation to outcomes, Bowen argues that the non-monetary benefits are far greater, to the point that individual and social decisions should be made primarily on those broader indicators.

The Renaissance of American Indian Higher Education: Capturing the Dream

Ed. by Maenette Kape’ahiokalani Padeken Ah Nee-Benham and Wayne J. Stein (’88 Ed.D.)
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2003

Much of the effort of American Indian education in recent years has been to reverse the effects of the deadly programs of the past, when the schools most Indians had access to were procrustean institutions, to which they were required to adjust, or fail. The intent of this book is to document the story of the Native American Higher Education Initiative.

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