Stellenbosch Theological Journal 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17570/stj.2021.v7n1.a23
Online ISSN 2413-9467 | Print ISSN 2413-9459
2021 © Pieter de Waal Neethling Trust

Daniel and friends at the Carlisle Indian School

Robert D. Miller II, OFS
The Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., USA
University of Pretoria, South Africa
millerb@cua.edu
Abstract
This essay explores the first chapter of the Book of Daniel as an example of resistance
against an empire. Using the experience of Native Americans, especially children at the
Carlisle Residential Indian School, the tropes of naming, diet, and the body in Daniel 1
are read as a call to resistance and gamesmanship in the narrative environment of the
Neo-Babylonian Empire and the authorial context of the Selucid Hellenistic Empire.
With reference to similar situations in South Africa and elsewhere, this reading of the
story in Daniel 1 sees a promise of God’s support in religious fidelity accompanied by
cultural code switching.

Keywords
Book of Daniel; postcolonial criticism; Shadrach; Meshach; and Abednego; Antiochus’
persecution; Code switching

Introduction
As theologians and philosophers address the legacies of imperialism and
colonialism, the biblical text – much as it has been wielded in support of
empire1 – can provide a basis for constructive thought. The Old Testament
book of Daniel stands out as a unique instance of resistance against empire,
written in response to the Selucid Empire that dominated Western Asia
in the 3rd to 1st centuries BCE.2 Daniel’s first chapter, C. L. Seow suggests,

1 Edward Said, “Exodus and Liberation: A Canaanite Reading.” Grand Street 5, no. 2
(Winter, 1986): 86–106; Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan “How liberating is the Exodus and
for whom?” in Exodus and Deuteronomy, edited by Athaliah Brenner and Gale A. Yee
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 3–28.
2 Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early
Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), xxi and passim.
2 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

serves as an introduction to the entire book, “set[ting] the stage for the
narrator to begin addressing the question of how God may continue to
function in and through history, even though history seems to have failed
as the obvious arena of divine activity.”3 In this essay, I will argue that the
chapter also introduces the book by addressing how the Israelites are to
navigate empire, to employ code switching and gamesmanship to survive
and remain faithful to God. I will illustrate this via a Fourth-World lens,
through the experiences of modern indigenous peoples, primarily in North
America with reference to other parts of the word.4

Narrative and historical context

The genre of the book of Daniel differs markedly from other books of
the Minor Prophets, and instead alternates apocalyptic material with
narratives: six stories, one each in chapters 1–2; 3; 4–5; 6; 13; and 14. The
book is late, as is evident simply from linguistic dating: much of Daniel is
in Aramaic, and many Persian and even Greek loan words appear. Dates
usually given by scholars range from 300 to 150 BCE, which is not to say
there might not be older material included, particularly in chapters 4–5.
The narrative context, the setting of the story world, is the aftermath
of the Fall of Jerusalem – the first fall of the city to Nebuchadnezzar of
Babylon, which occurred historically in 597 and led to the deportation of
some 10,000 captives to Babylon, primarily the upper echelons of society.
At least two centuries separates the narrative from the narration, therefore,
and it will be important to read the text in both worlds, although the story
world will be the first framework explored.5 We will return to the world of
the text’s author shortly, but already should point out one shared feature

3 C.L. Seow, Daniel, Westminster Bible Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John

Knox, 2003), 20.
4 I deliberately avoid the term Postcolonial, both because I do not employ its (European)
Deconstructionist underpinnings but more so because it gives agency to the colonizer
while reducing the indigenous to merely “colonized.” See Niall Reddy and Michael
Nassen Smith, “Response to the UCT Curriculum Change Framework.” New Agenda:
South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy 73 (2019): 22–28.
5 See Marie-Laure Ryan, “From Possible Worlds to Story Worlds,” in Possible Worlds
Theory and Contemporary Narratology, ed. Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, Frontiers
of Narrative (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 62–64, on story worlds
vs. authorial worlds.
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 3

of both worlds, the 6th century Babylon and the 3rd century Seleucid
Empire: the Jewish people immersed in a more intellectually prosperous
and “civilized” society with overt and covert challenges to perseverance in
the Israelite faith.
The story in Daniel chapter 1 presents the narrative context in which it and
all of the stories are envisioned.
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, King
Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came and laid siege to Jerusalem. The
Lord handed over to him Jehoiakim king of Judah, and some of
the vessels of the temple of God, which he carried off to the land of
Shinar and placed in the temple treasury of his god. (Dan 1:1–2; New
American Bible Revised Edition [henceforth, NABRE])
This is the fall of Jerusalem, and among those exiled are Daniel and his
friends, Hannaiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Verse two is explicit that it was
the Lord (Adonai, not the Tetragrammaton) who handed all of Judah over
to Nebuchadnezzar. In the following verses, the royal servant Ashpenaz
refers to Nebuchadnezzar as his “Lord.” This episode, then, is in part about
which “lord” one ought to serve.6

Civilizing the savages

The king told Ashpenaz, his chief chamberlain, to bring in some of
the Israelites, some of the royal line and of the nobility. They should
be young men without any defect, handsome, proficient in wisdom,
well-informed, and insightful, such as could take their place in the
king’s palace; he was to teach them the language and literature of the
Chaldeans. (Dan 1:3–4; NABRE)
Note that the criteria for selection prioritize the physical body – handsome
and without defect – over the intellectual potential, a point to which will
we return.

6 The episode fits the genre of “court contest story” known in Ancient Near Eastern
literature; Lawrence M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, Harvard
Dissertations in Religion 26 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 10–11; Hans-
Peter Müller, “Märchen, Legende und Enderwartung.” Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976):
77–98.
4 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

The Jews were not only militarily overwhelmed by Babylon; they were
surely culturally overwhelmed. Much like their emersion in Hellenistic
culture three centuries later, they had gone from a cultural backwater of
the hills of Judah to a society that had known literature for millennia, laws
like Hammurabi’s Code, science that could predict eclipses and comets,
and medical, geographic, and mathematical knowledge beyond anything
Judah ever imagined. The co-occurrence in Dan 1:2 of “Babylon” and the
unusual “Shinar,” i.e. Sumer, recalls the indictment of “civilization” in
Genesis’ Tower of Babel story.7
The apparent cultural hegemony of Babylon and Persia in Daniel is
analogous to that of Hellenism in the 4th–3rd centuries.8 The Seleucids
augmented empire with the “power of the uniform”: a streamlined
government, “uniform predictable temporality extended over a defined,
linearized space. The combination of date-wearing officials, date-stamped
documents, and dated built infrastructure.”9
A similar regime also confronted Native Americans. As Scott Momaday
writes, “The Indian can recognize and understand malice, and he can
bear pain with legendary self-possession. What he can neither recognize
nor understand is that particular atmosphere of moral and ideological
ambiguity in which the white main prevails, a traditional milieu which
is characterized in part by a sense of finality in thought, an immediacy in
judgment, and a general preoccupation with efficiency.”10
The Daniel narrative presents the Babylonian king setting about to remove
these young men’s native culture and make wise men out of them.11 The
assumption behind such an action is actually that the Jews were at least

7 John Samuel, “Economic and Political Justice,” in Bible and Theology from the Underside
of Empire, ed. Philip Vinod Peacock, Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth, and Vuyani Vellem
(Stellenbosch: SUN Media, 2017), 129.
8 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 225.
9 Paul J. Kosmin, Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2018), 3, 50, 57, 101; Leah McKenzie, “Patterns in Seleucid Administration:
Macedonian or Near Eastern?” Mediterranean Archaeology 7–8 (1994): 62.
10 N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1997), 59.
11 Shane Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour: A Social-Scientific Reading of Daniel 1–6,
Biblical Interpretation Series 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 49.
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 5

in some sense equal to the Babylonians, and that by immersing the

young men into the mainstream Babylonian culture, they might advance
themselves and thrive in the dominant society. In many ways, this is the
same philosophy and policies used in the Indian Boarding Schools in
America, particularly the Carlisle Indian School outside of Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.12 Founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, it depended on
the belief of nurture over nature, that American Indians were not inherently
savage in comparison to European Americans.13 The problem was not race
or some defect in the blood, but environment. The Indian, said Pratt, “is
born a blank, like the rest of us.”14 Carlisle immersed some 10,000 students
from 104 Western tribes into Anglo-American culture, as far from their
homes as possible, while removing Native culture to make “wise men.”15

12 By focusing on this experience of over a century ago, I in no way intend to normalize

a narrative “in which Indigenous people are always already gone” and “irrelevant
within US modernity”; Joanne Barker, “Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of
Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis,” Social Text 36 (2018): 25, italics original. There
are today over five million Native Americans in the United States alone.
13 My use of the term American Indian outside of quotations (as opposed to, e.g., Native
American) is questionable but reflects the predominate usage by Indians themselves
(cf., for example, https://indiancountrytoday.com/). The preference would instead be to
use the distinct national term: Navajo, Lakota, etc., but in this case, Pratt, Carlisle, and
the schools as usual made no distinction among groups.
14 King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 108.
15 Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American
Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert Marshall Utley (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 2003), xxii; Tabitha T. Booth, “Cheaper Than Bullets: American Indian Boarding
Schools and Assimilation Policy, 1890–1930,” in Images, Imaginations, and Beyond:
Proceedings of the Eighth Native American Symposium, South-eastern Oklahoma State
University, ed. Mark. B. Spencer (Durant, OK: South-eastern Oklahoma State University,
2010), 55; Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues:
Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, Indigenous Education (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 13; David Wallace Adams, Education
for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995). For an autobiographical account,
see Todd Leahy and Nathan Wilson, “My First Days at the Carlisle Indian School by
Howard Gansworth: An Annotated Manuscript,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of
Mid-Atlantic Studies 71(2004):491. There were about twenty-five Carlisle-style schools
in the United States. In Canada, attendance at residential schools, of which there were
some eighty, became compulsory in 1850, with prison the penalty for noncompliance;
King, Inconvenient Indian, 113. The total number of Indian children sent to Carlisle-
style schools may have been around 200,000 with another 150,000 in Canada. Up to
half of them died in the schools from disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse. See
King, Inconvenient Indian, 120.
6 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

Pratt’s detractors averred that a savage would always be a savage, and

in some ways Pratt’s endeavour marked a turn from the preference for
extermination.16 On the other hand, Pratt’s views were not novel. George
Washington had already believed in the potential for Indians to become
civilized, based on a six-point plan he devised with Henry Knox.17 Pratt
was himself a former officer who had both fought Indians and overseen the
Fort Marion Prison for Indians in St. Augustine Florida.18 And the forced
removal of children to the schools would not have been possible without
the “amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America
to mount [such] a series of benevolent assaults.”19 It is noteworthy that both
Pratt and Nebuchadnezzar chose children to “educate”; there was no hope
of indoctrinating those E. F. Wilson, founder of the similar Shingwauk
Residential School in Ontario, called “the old unimproved people.”20
Nevertheless, Pratt’s (and Nebuchadnezzar’s) “equality” was hardly
equality. What Thomas Jefferson had called their “ferocious barbarities”
had to be eradicated.21 “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” was
Pratt’s exact phrase.22 As Njabulo Ndebele points out with similar “good
native” narratives in Africa:
The liberal ideology displayed … ascribes to itself a false universal
validity … to domesticate its potential allies by defining them in its
own image … This liberal ideology is caught in the trap of language:
it has not really freed itself from a language the vocabulary of
which reflexively describes the prejudices of the time … If we define
success, for example, according to the standards and formulations
of the oppressor … we have, in a very fundamental manner, become
the oppressor. He can even give us independence.23

16 King, Inconvenient Indian, 101.

17 King, Inconvenient Indian, 103.
18 King, Inconvenient Indian, 110.
19 King, Inconvenient Indian, 102.
20 King, Inconvenient Indian, 109.
21 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. James P. McClure, December 29, 1813.
22 King, Inconvenient Indian, 107.
23 Njabulo S. Ndebele, “Actors and Interpreters: Popular Culture and Progressive
Formalism (1984),” in South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the
Ordinary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 77–78; see also Ndebele,
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 7

We shall see that Daniel and his friends do and do not define success
according to the standards of the oppressor, inviting the Judean reader to
similarly navigate their status adroitly.24

Naming and renaming

What happens next in Daniel 1 is exactly what happened at the Carlisle
Indian School: “The Chief Chamberlain changed their names: Daniel to
Belteshazzar, Hannaiah to Shadrach, Mishael to Meshach, and Azariah
to Abednego” (Dan 1:7; NABRE). These are not meaningless names:
Belteshazzar means “May Marduk Guard his Life,” Abednego means
“Servant of Nabu” – the two most important Neo-Babylonian gods.25
Considering the importance of naming and renaming in the Old Testament,
the intention is to create new men, Babylonian men.26
The Carlisle Indian School required students to take English names,
technically by either choice or assignment, although the names from which
they chose had no meaning for them.27 Thus, Plenty Kill (Ota Kte), son of
Standing Bear, one of first at Carlisle when it opened, when asked to choose
name from list on the blackboard randomly pointed, re-naming himself
Luther, and father’s name became his (and his future family’s) surname:

“The English Language and Social Change in South Africa (1986),” in South African
Literature and Culture, 105; Ndebele, “Towards Progressive Cultural Planning (1987),”
in South African Literature and Culture, 125.
24 For American Indian examples of such navigation, see J. Kehaulani Kauanui, ed.,
Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal
Leaders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
25 Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, “Daniel,” in Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature;
Daniel; Additions to Daniel; Hosea; Joel; Amos; Obadiah; Jonah; Micah; Nahum;
Habakkuk; Zephaniah; Haggai; Zechariah; Malachi, ed. Leander E. Keck, The New
Interpreter’s Bible 7 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 1017; Tokunboh Adeyemo, “Daniel,”
in Africa Bible Commentary, ed. Tokunboh Adeyemo (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
2006), 1015–1038.
26 Philip Chia, “On Naming the Subject: A Postcolonial Reading of Daniel 1,” in The
Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006),
176; David M. Valeta, “Court or Jester Tales? Resistance and Social Reality in Daniel
1–6’. Perspectives in Religious Studies 32 (2005): 319.
27 Barbara Landis, “The Names,” in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous
Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 91, who makes the connection to Adam
naming animals in Eden.
8 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

Luther Standing Bear.28 The names were then sewn on the backs of their
shirts.29
Daniel 1:7 states that the chamberlain “determined” [yasem] their names.
It is not the normal idiom for naming people, but the word reappears in the
next verse, where “Daniel determined not to defile himself with the king’s
food.”30 So again, for the reader the point is to contrast two fundamental
options: in the narrative, the Babylonian, and the Israelite; for the reader,
the Gentile and the Jewish.

Colonizing the diet

Following on the change of names is the change of diet, as it was at Carlisle.
Carlisle’s food was described as a grey, tasteless porridge, hardly what the
Indian children were used to in the West.31 Why the Babylonian king’s food
should be a problem for Daniel is not actually clear.32 Most foods would be
edible by the Pentateuchal dietary laws unless they were offered to idols,
but the vegetables, which Daniel says are acceptable, would also have been
offered to those idols.33 Nor can the issue be simply who will provide: king
or God; which patron will Daniel choose?34 After all, it is the Babylonians
who supply all the vegetable food the lads will eat.35

28 Luther Standing Bear, My People, the Sioux, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006), xxi. The result was many traditional individual personal names
became running Indian surnames, in spite of the linguistic absurdity; Ella Deloria,
Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship, 1944; repr. Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998), 154.
29 Standing Bear, 137.
30 Edmond F. Desueza and Judith Jones, Conversations with Scripture: The Book of Daniel,
Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series (New York: Morehouse, 2011).
31 King, Inconvenient Indian, 112.
32 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 210.
33 Wendy Widder, Daniel, Story of God Commentary 20 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,
2016).
34 See Danna Nolan Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty: Plotting Politics in the Book of Daniel
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 19.
35 The food does not, therefore, symbolize Babylonian culture in its entirety, as per
Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 53.
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 9

The issue is rather identity, what Ndukwe Egbuonu calls “government

attempts to deculturize and denationalize members of another race.”36
Food is tied up with ethnicity.37 Part of the way to indoctrinate someone
in a new culture is to force them to change their diet, just as the British fed
local recruits in the Indian Army bacon, ham, and sausages at breakfast
and roast beef for dinner, in order to deculturize both Hindu and Muslim.38
In India, as at Carlisle, the colonizer’s goal was cultural erasure. As Steve
Biko wrote about Christian missionaries in Africa, “The basic intention
went much further than merely spreading the word. Their arrogance and
their monopoly on truth, beauty and moral judgment taught them to
despise native customs and traditions and to seek to infuse their own new
values into these societies.”39
While such motivation does not fit the historical Neo-Babylonian conquest,
it well describes Hellenism in Judah.40 Thus, we can easily juxtapose Biko
with 2 Maccabees description of the Selucid cultural influence. Here is
Biko:
Children were taught, under the pretext of hygiene, … to despise
their mode of upbringing at home and to question the values and
customs of their society. The result was the expected one – children
and parents saw life differently and the former lost respect for the
latter … Who can resist losing respect for his tradition when in

36 Ndukwe N. Egbuonu of the American Council on African Education, with reference

to Africa, Dec 20, 1953; quoted in John Gunther, Inside Africa (Plainview, N.Y.: Books
for Libraries Press, 1974), 883. See Landis, “The Names,” 102, re. deculturalization
at Carlisle. Alongside this issue is perhaps also the motif of the eating vessels, taken
from Judah in 1:2, finally reappearing in the infamous banquet of 5:2; Mary E. Mills,
“Household and Table: Diasporic Boundaries in Daniel and Esther.” Catholic Biblical
Quarterly 68 (2006): 415–16, although nothing is said about eating vessels in Daniel’s
exchange here.
37 Rachel Vernon, “A Native Perspective: Food is More Than Consumption.” Journal
of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5 (2015): 137–142. For a
modern case study and discussion, see Psyche Williams-Forson, “‘I Haven’t Eaten If
I Don’t Have My Soup and Fufu’: Cultural Preservation through Food and Foodways
among Ghanaian Migrants in the United States.” Africa Today 61 (2014): 71–87.
38 Amitav Ghosh, “Nashawy,” in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947–1997, ed.
Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (London: Vintage, 1997), 409–421.
39 Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 94.
40 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 51.
10 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

school his whole cultural background is summed up in one word –

barbarism?41
Compare 2 Maccabees 4:13–15 (NABRE):
The craze for Hellenism and the adoption of foreign customs
reached such a pitch, through the outrageous wickedness of Jason,
the renegade and would-be high priest, that the priests no longer
cared about the service of the altar. Disdaining the temple and
neglecting the sacrifices, they hastened, at the signal for the games,
to take part in the unlawful exercises at the arena. What their
ancestors had regarded as honours they despised; what the Greeks
esteemed as glory they prized highly.
Nor is this biblical hyperbole. Diodorus Siculus records the words of the
1st century BCE philosopher Posidonius about the “impious” Jews’ “hatred
toward mankind” and “altogether contrary customs … misanthropic and
transgressive laws.”42

Negotiated resistance
In the story world, however, Daniel is no passive subject in this
denaturalization. Navigating shrewdly, he proposes a test. Verse 12: “Test
your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to
drink. Then see how we look in comparison with the young men who eat
from the royal table.” We have been told already in verse nine that God has
“given” [vayitēn] Daniel favour and sympathy with the chief chamberlain,
just as God had given Jerusalem into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar in verse
2, and in verse 17 will give wisdom to Daniel.43

41 Biko, I Write What I Like, 94. What Carlisle ignored was the thorough education in
responsibility, decorum, and social duty taught in Indian communities of the West,
which were also kept impeccably clean; Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 43–45, 63–65.
42 Library of History, 34/35.1.1–15. In the Roman period, Tacitus will repeat such views:
“Everything that is profane there is sacred among us, and what is allowed among them
is forbidden to us … Their rites are unfavourable and greatly defiled as a result of their
depravity … Their faith…included hostile hatred against all others” Histories 5.4–5.
43 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 47; Chia, “A Postcolonial Reading of Daniel 1,”
178–80; Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 211.
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 11

Daniel poses this not as a request but an experiment. He knows his

tenuous position and depends on the favour of someone he already
thinks is a potential ally.44 Note, Daniel defines “success” according to
the oppressor’s standards, “how we look in comparison,” but resists the
cultural erasing dietary regimen.45 He has taken, if not the upper hand, at
least an autonomous hand in the liberal colonial game, further greasing the
rails by providing the guards, in verse 16, with the food and wine that was
supposed to go to him and his friends. The guards are manipulated into
permitting Daniel to select the diet by a ten-day bribe of meat and wine,
while assuming the Jews will lose the bet.
Of course, the result of this is verse 15: “After ten days, they looked
healthier and better fed than any of the young men who ate from the royal
table.” They go on to be the king’s chief advisers.46 What works in a short
story bears little resemblance to reality: unlike Daniel and his friends,
Carlisle graduates were only equipped for menial jobs and entered white
society at bottom.47 Already in 1928, a 847-page report by Henry Roe Cloud
(Winnebago) found the Indian boarding schools “grossly inadequate”:
students were trained in “vanishing trades, and others are taught in such a
way that the Indian students cannot apply what they have learned in their
own home, and they are not far enough advanced to follow their trade in a
white community in competition with white workers.”48 In fact, graduates
of Carlisle and the two dozen schools founded on its model failed to master
English, but at the same time lost much of their native languages (the
speaking of which was forbidden), leaving them unskilled outcasts if they

44 Carol Newsom, Daniel, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
2014), 49.
45 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 48, instead sees these standards as those of the
book’s Hellenistic Jewish audience, accepted without argument.
46 Providing further evidence against the claim that the “rejection of the Babylonian food
is representative of a rejection of the Babylonian education, as well,” as per Kirkpatrick,
55. The young men quite clearly do accept Babylonian education.
47 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 138; Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons:
American Indian Families, 1900–1940, Bison Books (Lincoln, NE.: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000), 35; Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the
Multicultural Modern, New Americanists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004),
89; Momaday, The Man Made of Words, 102, with recollections by Plenty Horses;
Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 133.
48 King, Inconvenient Indian, 115–16.
12 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17

instead returned home.49 The resultant disappointment voiced by liberal

white people resembles similar sentiment expressed by oppressors over
the oppressed and formerly oppressed throughout history.50 On the other
hand, Carlisle’s changed emphasis in the early 20th century from cultural
erasure to football powerhouse, culminating in the person of Jim Thorpe,
Sac and Fox NFL star running back and Olympic gold medallist, replicates
the acquiescent commoditization of the colonized body we saw in Daniel
1, where both Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel prioritize physical appearance.
The story in Daniel 1 has a message for postexilic Diaspora Jews and for
Judean Jews living under foreign domination.51 In fact, its message is the
same as the message of the rest of the book’s stories, and the same message
as Daniel’s apocalyptic sections:52 No matter what, do not give up fidelity
to the Jewish religion. One can be an observant Jew in a foreign land. God
remains in control, and God will deliver his people.53 Nevertheless, although
the evil kingdoms of the world will eventually fall to God, rebellion is not
encouraged.54 Daniel’s friends, in fact, retain their Babylonian names
throughout the book, and they do become good servants of the emperor,
while stubbornly keeping their Israelite piety in the face of fiery furnaces
and lions’ dens whenever the faith itself is challenged.55 For the reader,

49 Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 143–44; Momaday, The Man Made of Words, 103, for
the experience of Plenty Horses. Again, this history should not reinforce a narrative
whereby “Indigenous people have disappeared naturally because they were unable
to keep up with the demands of civilizing progress and social evolution”; Barker,
“Territory as Analytic,” 25.
50 Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 332.
51 Mills, “Household and Table,” 413.
52 Valeta, “Court of Jester Tales?” 309.
53 Hence the echoes of Exodus 15–16 where Israel was first tested regarding food, as
noted by Michael Seufert, “Refusing the King’s Portion: A Re-examination of Daniel’s
Dietary Reaction in Daniel 1.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43 (2019): 644.
There are also numerous links to Exodus 24 (where, e.g., young men also eat and drink),
especially between the Septuagint versions of Exodus and Daniel; Paulus Wyns, God
Is Judge: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Golden Grove, Australia: Biblaridion,
2011), 29–30.
54 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 229.
55 See Paulin J. Hountondji, “Tradition, Hindrance or Inspiration?” Quest 14 (2000): 6, on
how relations of the conquered to their original cultures are biased by “collective self-
defence imposed on us by a hostile environment.” Thus, in both the Babylonian Exile
and Hellenistic period, Judaism became more rigorous in both practice and dogma.
 Miller • STJ 2021, Vol 7, No 1, 1–17 13

then, the advice is keep the traditions, trust in the Lord, and code-switch
as much as necessary.56

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