Reading as Indian Policy

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By Professor Victoria Sutton

March 24, 2025

Guest Opinion.  One of the earliest residential schools for Native children planted the seeds for reading and writing as a powerful and fearful knowing, then later criminalized it commissioned in 1714, this year is the 310th anniversary of Ft Christanna in southeastern Virginia near the present day North Carolina border. Gov. Spotswood of Virginia named it to honor Christianity and his Queen. As one scholar has described it:

Fort Christanna has generally received only passing notice, and is considered too fleeting to merit much attention. Yet to pass over it is to leave a whole side of Virginians' interactions, policies, and preoccupations unexamined. The fort represented a transitional moment when the interests of the colonial government and Piedmont Natives converged.

A school was also built as part of Fort Christanna with a promise to educate Indian children.

One notable incident was the invitation to the Catawba and their Chief men to send eleven of their sons and daughters to the school. Upon their arrival to the school they had to leave their weapons in the Fort and camped outside; where at daybreak on April 10, 1711 they were ambushed by Tuscarora and Iroquois enemy tribes, killing five of them and taking five prisoner, with no protection from the Virginians who had taken their guns. The children had already arrived inside the Fort when the attack came on the adults. Despite the lack of security around the school, Gov. Spotswood convinced them to leave their children to be “educated” by the teacher, Rev. Charles Griffin.

There is no list of children who attended the school, but when the school closed in 1717, the teacher, Griffin, moved to another school called Brafferton in Virginia near Williamsburg. It is documented that he took some of the children with him, and there is a list of those students.

Funding for the Fort lasted only until 1717, and the school was dissolved. By 1740, the Native people who lived at Fort Christanna had moved nearby where many still live today, continuously occupying this region since 1717.

Another school, Sarum School was established in 1711 at the head of the Sarum River located about three miles from the Chief’s village and midway between the Chowan and Meherrin reservations. This school was built by the Anglican Missionaries to teach Native children to read and write in order to advance their religious conversion. It lasted only a few years and the owner of the land, Mr. Urmaster, gave his power of attorney to have it sold in 1720.

A Catawba/Saponi or Chowan woman (my great-great-great-great-grandmother), Elizabeth, taught her children to read and write. Their oldest child, William (brother of my direct ancestor), born in 1798/99 started a “subscription school” or private school in Ashe or Wilkes County called White Oak Academy, around 1825-30. His nephew explained that he started this school because he was not allowed to teach in “white schools”. His youngest brother earned enough money to buy a white shirt so he could attend his brother’s school for six months to learn to read and write. (This younger brother became a legendary hunter in the region.)

Meanwhile, the political environment was highly tense around the deeply embedded issue of slavery and a growing fear of a slave rebellion. Preventing people of color and enslaved people from learning to read or write was a legal prohibition intended to prevent such rebellions.

In the North Carolina Spectator, an early newspaper, on April 23, 1831 a front page article that continued to other pages waxed eloquently about how it was important NOT to teach people of color and slaves to read and write and how it would not help them in the end. This was the kind of rhetoric that had an impact on Native people who were all classified as “people of color” as a separate class from those of African descent, but all were regulated under the “people of color” statutes; unless confined to a reservation. (Native people in the southeastern U.S. were also enslaved until it was made illegal in North Carolina in the late 18th Century. In 1542, for both the southeast and southwest, the Spanish made it illegal to enslave indigenous people, the law requiring that “. . . from here on, no Indian can be made into a slave under any circumstance including wars, rebellions, or when ransomed from other Indians.” In both the Spanish, English and American cases, they found many creative ways to create exceptions or to work around the law.

On September 15, 1831, the Raleigh Star, a newspaper in the capital city, reported on a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the Nat Turner Rebellion, on August 21, 1831. Nat Turner had been “taught to read and write” and became a preacher, thus dangerous in the eyes of the slaveholders. The article reports on other insurrections planned or occurring in the City of Wilmington⁸ September 17, 1831 and in Sampson County, North Carolina. September 5, 1831, a slave was tortured until he confessed to organizing a rebellion in Duplin and Sampson Counties.

August 10, 1835, a Dr. Reuben Crandall, in Washington, D.C. was arrested and charged with three counts for violating a statute similar to the one in North Carolina, that prohibited distributing anti-slavery literature. Apparently, Dr. Crandall was unpacking some botanicals in his lab, wrapped in paper, and his assistant asked if he could read one of the pieces of paper which happened to be a pamphlet from the Anti-Slavery Society. Dr. Crandall said yes, he could take it and read it. Based on this and some other evidence without corroboration, he was arrested by District of Columbia warrant officers on August 10, 1835. Much fanfare was made and a crowd gathered as the warrant officer announced the object of the warrant possessed dozens of such illegal pamphlets. The crowd was worked into such a fervor (gaslit) that one was heard saying, “Carry him across the street and hang him to a tree!”  He had a jury trial that lasted ten days in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia in April 1836. Dr. Crandall was found not-guilty of any of the three counts of the indictment at the end of that trial.

Just three months later, in July 1836, Ashe County issued a warrant for my g-g-g-g-uncle’s arrest for sedition and insurrection, for violation of a North Carolina law that prohibited anyone from teaching people of color how to read or write. In this case, William was identified as a person of color in the complaint, as well, because that was one of the elements of the crime (unconstitutional then, unconstitutional today). The N.C. statute had separate punishments for white people who violated the statute from free people of color who violated the statute. The punishments for people of color violating the statute were much more severe and involved whipping. Specifically, the statute gave the court discretion to administer whipping punishment that was “not to exceed thirty-nine lashes; nor less than twenty lashes,” for free people of color, while a slave received an automatic thirty-

There are other similar cases of other Lumbee people in North Carolina being prosecuted under several of these so-called “people of color” statutes.

In 1842, Ashe County again tried to prosecute William under the anti-miscegenation statute; despite evidence that his wife was “of the same people”, (and today still known as being part of the Native American community of North Carolina). This animosity may be a continuation of the failure to succeed in imprisoning him with the 1836 insurrection and sedition trial and lingering resentment that led to this charge. He counter-sued for libel against the complainant, and appealed the decision to the N.C. Supreme Court, because he had been prevented from putting on evidence that would prove the falsehood of the libelous complainant. This was an example of the multi-tiered system of “justice” in North Carolina in the mid-1800s with Native Americans and other people of color.

With a jury of his peers in Ashe County, he was convicted and fined one dollar and fifteen cents plus costs. Drury Senter, his accuser, was a local Baptist (Primitive Baptist) preacher relatively new to the area, moving to Ashe County in 1823. Later, Drury’s daughter married a man who was “of color” and he dis-inherited her from his will (though it is not stated that was the reason).

People of Color History

This forgotten tier of the justice system was eliminated after the Civil War, but the effects of it still linger, today. These statutes regulated all Native people who were not regulated by living on reservation lands, and there are many. North Carolina has the second largest population of Native Americans in the U.S., and so these statutes were intended to control and regulate more stringently anyone not white. The punishment for William was forfeiture of his farm, and that has downstream effects for building wealth for generations to come. This happened first in the East during colonization and spread Westward with similar unethical, unpatriotic and inhumane policies.

The control of education remained a common thread of state and federal Indian policies that were experienced by Native Nations across the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii and across three centuries of time. The Residential Schools evolved as a policy to take Native children from their homes and force their assimilation by forbidding their language and traditions. These schools were presumptive places to learn reading and a skill but the reality is they were often used as unskilled labor in local households documented around the Carlisle School. Only in the last four years have we as a Nation confronted this sordid past.

Efforts to control reading have become more creative with periodic attempts to ban books, which in almost all cases is not compatible with the free speech and expression protection of the U.S. Constitution. Recent attempts to reclassify a book written from a Native perspective of their own history as fiction rather than non-fiction is yet another creative way to obfuscate Constitutional protection of free speech, yet control the written narrative of Native Nations.

A strong tradition in the Lumbee Indian Tribe, the Navajo Nation and several other Tribal 

Nations is the goal of education. Education is seen as a way of upward mobility and survival on an equal playing field. Many like the Drury Senters of the past, would like to have prevented that.