Employees/Extending the reach of the Bureau

This photo was taken from the book titled "Rapid City Indian School"
The superintendants were the school's public face. They were the most publicly visible members of its staff. They represented the school to Rapid City residents, businesses, and civic organizations, spoke to reservation officials, corresponded with parents and traveled to reservations to meet prospective students. It spoke of the reputation of Chauncey Yellow Robe, a native american, who graduated from Carlisle Indian School. He was employed at the Rapid City Indian in 1904 as an industrial teacher and was later advanced to disciplinarian. Mr Yellow Robe represented both the Indian past, rooted rooted in political and economic dependence, and one possible future, economic and social assimilation. He told of his struggles to maintain his employment status along with raising his two daughters as a single father. He was an excellent role model for the make students at the school, over the superintendents.
There were a total of 31 employees at the Indian School attending to a total of 250 to 300 children. Work at the school was year round; as a government institution with a stable budget, the school offered its work force, whites and Indians alike,, a level of job security unknown in the private sector. Nine of the thirty one employees were Indians. The titles held in these positions were: seamstress, assistant positions, shoe and harness maker, industrial teacher, cook, baker, laundress, financial clerk, the physician, matron and four teachers. Superintendent House not only avoided hiring women with children, but also preferred not to employ parents who had children attending the school. "Parents naturally want to exercise authority over their own children, and resent in a measure the authority exercised by a school, if same is done in their immediate presence", he stated to the commissioner of Indian Affairs. It is quite frequent to run into problems between the parent and the other employees when they come into contact with their children.
The employees most successful at the school were those who internalized the value and mission of the school.

When Rapid City Indian School opened 1898, Indian children attended day schools, reservation baording schools, and off reservation schools under threat of force, represented by reservation superintendents and Indian police. Hostile to Indian cultures adn suspicious of Indian parents, neither officials in Washington nor BIA employees in the field trusted Indian parents and children to see the value of government education. Rather than address Indian concerns, educators enforced their conviction that they knew what was right for Indians with the disciplinarian's strap and the school and agency jails.