“Columbia’s Roll Call”: Hampton Institute’s 1892 Pageant & the Native American Struggle for Citizenship

When I first arrived at the Library of Virginia for my summer internship in public history, I was given two projects: to write a biography for Monacan poet, educator, and activist Karenne Wood and to research the Brafferton Colonial Indian School in Williamsburg. While researching Brafferton Indian School, my research led me to the world of Hampton Institute by a brief mention of their boarding school in a podcast episode about Brafferton. Living in Hampton for the first 18 years of my life, sharing tribal affiliations with many of the institute’s students, and having mixed Black and Indigenous ancestry, intrigued me and led me to want to learn more. I ended up intensively researching Hampton for the rest of my time here, leading me down rabbit holes such as Columbia’s Roll Call, Hampton founder Samuel Armstrong, and the origins and ideologies behind the early years of the school.

Indian boarding schools were notorious for their extreme efforts towards assimilation, and Hampton was no different. Between the years of 1878-1923, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, (now Hampton University), operated as both an Indian boarding school and an educational institution for Black students. During this time, all the government funding Hampton received was for the Native students, but not the Black students.¹ To guarantee  the Hampton Institute’s yearly funding, annual pageants were held, where the Native American students had a chance to prove the success of the school’s assimilation efforts to government officials and the community. These pageants took place on the school’s “Indian Day,” described as “the one day in the year when Hampton Institute gives itself over to the Indians.”² The day served as a yearly commemoration of the signing of “An Act to Provide for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty to Indians on the Various Reservations” (1887), also known as the General Allotment Act or the Dawes Act, after its author, Massachusetts Senator Henry L. Dawes.³

Many thought the Dawes Act was a good thing for Native Americans, including Hampton Institute, going so far as to call it “Indian Emancipation Day” in the school’s student newspaper The Southern Workman.⁴ This policy was very detrimental to the Native communities, causing conflicts with their communal styles of living and farming, and decreasing the size of reservations. It also stipulated that in order to receive a portion of the allotted acreage, native people were required to give up traditional way of life to assimilate into American society.

The Dawes Act represented the imposition of white ideas about property by forcing Native Americans to accept the dissolution of their reservations into allotments and to take on the habit of civilized life to destroy tribal community and culture. Native Americans were treated as individuals, not members of a tribal community. In exchange, the government offered to confer to any Native person who submitted to the provisions of the act the rights and privileges of citizenship and promised equality before the law.

The ideology behind the Dawes Act was “that if a person adopted ‘White’ clothing and ways, and was responsible for their own farm, they would gradually drop their ‘Indian-ness’ and be assimilated into White American culture.”⁵

The assumption that assimilation would improve the lives of Native Americans undergirded Hampton’s role as an Indian boarding school. This ideology was promoted through their “Indian Day” pageants, especially the one of 1892, which happened to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s famous expedition which inspired that year’s pageant, Columbia’s Roll Call.  The white teachers and other faculty at Hampton hoped that a pageant, like Columbia’s Roll Call, could persuade funders to continue giving money to their institution. Additionally, using pageants and other performances, the faculty demonstrated that their Native students had assimilated into the wider American culture thus boarding schools like Hampton should continue to receive funding. It is important to note that the actor performing in the pageant were indigenous students.

“Columbia,” the main character of the play, serves as a personified symbol of the United States. The pageant opens with her taking “a seat upon her throne” on a stage decorated in patriotic colors.⁶ The play celebrates some of America’s most famous white historical figures, including Columbus, Captain John Smith, the Pilgrims, missionary John Eliot, William Penn, and George Washington. Throughout the pageant, each of them is honored by Columbia with a “badge of red white and blue” symbolizing citizenship.⁷

Columbia calls for a celebration of the Nation’s past and the founding figures of American colonization, and so they are each individually introduced and celebrated. Throughout all the white settlers’ speeches, performed by Indigenous students, there is a consistent theme that America was originally uninhabited and saved, spiritually and economically, through European contact. This is shown through the introduction of Columbus, “who in the first ship broke the unknown sea.”⁸

John Smith is introduced with lines…

Is written on Virginia’s sacred ground,
In letters that shall never disappear.
Who in the old world smote the turbaned crew,
And founded mighty empires in the new.⁹

These lines reflect overwhelming white perspective of exploration and colonization at the expense of native people, referring to John Smith’s involvement in the Long Turkish War and comparing it to his actions in America. The continued metaphor of America as uninhabited devalued the successful social structures and political systems that were already here, and discredited their influences on the U.S. Constitution.¹⁰

Within the play, the character William Penn gives a speech on how he helped the Native Americans bury “the tomahawk, made war to cease,” also inferring the lack of civilized life among the Native Americans.¹¹ This example creates a binary narrative where the establishment of the United States was founded solely on civil means, and that the Native peoples only chose resistance through violence, which contradicts the prideful confession of Smith.

After the colonists receive all their praise and the choir sings “Hail Columbia,” the “Indian Petitioner” enters, our first Native American character, coming to “kneel before the throne” and asking what she may do for her own badge of honor.¹² The petitioner starts by addressing Columbia’s wrongdoings, and for the first time in the pageant, the audience is exposed to a different perspective on the development of the United States. The speech soon returns to its original tone when the petitioner asks, “let us dwell among you/…For the life of our fathers has vanished/And we long by your side to be men.” She continues,

Our clans that were strongest and bravest,
Are broken and powerless through you;
Let us join the great tribe of the white men,
As brothers to dare and to do!
We will fight to death in your armies;
As scouts we will distance the deer.¹³

These following lines express a desperation for acceptance with the white settlers, and a willingness to assimilate. The petitioner continues to beg, “Share your labor, your learning, your worship,/A life, larger, better, to win.”¹⁴ The Indian petitioner can be interpreted as a symbol for the Native American race, and in this instance, she is proposing a deal on the behalf of her people, that they will convert to the white man’s ways in exchange for brotherhood. This alliance does not seem to stem from a desire for equality but more so the mere ability to live. The petitioner admits how their ancestors have “vanished,” and they’ve become “broken” and “powerless.”¹⁵ This poem exemplifies the same mechanisms of coercion that boarding schools like Hampton used to assimilate children, even 200 years after the first waves of American colonization, when children were taken from their families and punished for cultural expression until, out of desperation for their own wellbeing and safety, they complied with conversion.

Despite the petitioner’s heartfelt poem, Columbia does not seem convinced, asking her “These are the heroes that have made me great and established my throne in the New World. What children of your race can match [the honored settler’s] mighty names[?]”¹⁶  To prove that Indigenous people have “succeeded” in the “New World”, Native Virginians are presented next, including responses from “Friend of Columbus,” “Pocahontas,” and “One of Eliot’s Indian converts.”¹⁷ Of these these three, two remain nameless, like the Indian petitioner, and the other is referred to by her historically inaccurate name.¹⁸ The convert recites a Bible verse in “Indian tongue,” with no specific language given, before being led to his badge.¹⁹ The Native Americans are limited to one look, one name, and one language, just as the play was limited to one narrative: that Native Americans have wronged the white race and must prove themselves worthy.

This ideology is pushed in each speech and song, all written by white writers, through which the last Native American character, Washington’s friend White Mingo says, “our old troubles are all made up now. I hope you have forgotten them.”²⁰

Columbia affirms the worthiness of Native Americans from the past, but asks the petitioner “what of the present” and future? This is followed with examples of students attending boarding schools and taking up different career paths, a huge embrace of assimilation to United States’ ideals of success.²¹ All the Indians wrap up singing a verse of the song, “Spirit of Peace”, with the lines, “See His lost sheep in the Wilderness stray, Seeking a shepherd…Will the Good Shepherd go, Seek for them there?”²²

Finally, the pageant ends with American Indians earning citizenship for their race. It is important to note that Indigenous people of the United States did not become citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. This play exemplifies how Native Americans were expected to prove themselves worthy of citizenship through the Dawes Act, as Senator Dawes said himself in response to the pageant, “Citizenship is of no more value to the Indian than to us unless he is fitted for it,” which not only means learning the white man’s ways, but unlearning all the ways of Native culture: “all the instincts of savage life, all the tastes and supersti[t]ions with which that life had been en[v]eloped; all these have had to be stripped from the people before the foundation stone of civilization could be laid.”²³

Students were taught that their cultures were something to be left as history, only to be used for educational purposes or pageants like Columbia’s Roll Call.²⁴

Samuel Armstrong, founder and president of Hampton Institute from 1868-1893, put great emphasis on these ideas in his writing, with self-help being considered equal to assimilation.²⁵ But as Booker T. Washington said, “no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion”²⁶