Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (American Indian Lives) [Hardcover]

Esther Burnett Horne (Author), Sally McBeth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1998 | Series: American Indian Lives

This is the spirited story of Esther Burnett Horne, an accomplished and inspiring educator in Indian boarding schools. Born in 1909, Horne attended 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 educating other Indian children. She began teaching at the 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 documented both Horne’s personal history and the creation of this work. What emerges is an engaging and informative narrative about education and identity.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This collaboration between a Shoshone teacher and a white anthropologist presents the classic tensions inherent in European and Native American views of culture. And Horne's story materializes as one of a lifetime spent educating--not acculturating--young Native Americans. A descendent of Sacajawea, who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition from Missouri to the Pacific coast, Horne spent her formative years in boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The schools were designed to convert Indians to white American culture. But Horne notes that the very act of bringing together so many tribes ended in strengthening their sense of commonality and creating a pan-Indian identity that foreshadowed the Native American movement. In this fascinating life story, Horne sees Sacajawea as a personal metaphor, by which she makes sense of her own life as a Native American in a nation that reveres the written word over oral tradition. That reverence highlights a dispute as to how long Sacajawea lived. Horne recalls stories told of Sacajawea's living to old age versus the official recorded version that has her dying as a young woman. Vanessa Bush

Review

"This collaboration between a Shoshone teacher and a white anthropologist presents the classic tensions inherent in European and Native American views of culture. And Horne's story materializes as one of a lifetime spent educating -- not acculturating -- young Native Americans. . . . In this fascinating life story, Horne sees Sacajawea as a personal metaphor, by which she makes sense of her own life as a Native American in a nation that reveres the written word over oral tradition". -- Booklist --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (August 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803223862
• ISBN-13: 978-0803223868
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,425,912 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Essie's Story, February 5, 2009

By 

Kerry Ross Boren "Pariah" (Salt Lake City, Utah) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (American Indian Lives) (Paperback)

Essie's Story is an excellent source of history and information on the women of the Mountain West, of whom Esther Burnett Horne shines brilliantly.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book about a great women., September 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Essie's Story: The Life and Legacy of a Shoshone Teacher (American Indian Lives) (Paperback)

A life history of the great-great granddaughter of Sacajewea who was Indian boarding school teacher. The stories were great and left me with the notion of how could this women accomplish so much in one lifetime. A must read.