Erl Augustus Caesar Bates (1889-1973)
Erl Bates was a professor and director of Indian Extension in New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University. As a graduate of Cornell University’s class of 1910, Bates realized that Americans Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy received an inferior education. As an attempt to remedy this situation, he and Alfred R. Munn, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell, began teaching agricultural and homemaking practices to the Iroquois. These classes eventually developed into Cornell’s American Indian Program.
This revised curriculum enabled the newly educated Indian youth to compete and place in competitions at the New York State Fair. A group called White Parents, claiming the Indians were not US citizens (Citizenship Act passed in 1924), contested Indian participation and attempted to take away the students’ prize money. Finally in 1931, Bates, Cornell’s Indian Board, the College of Agriculture, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (former governor of NY), secured funds to create the Seven-Reservation Fair located directly on the New York State Fair ground. Their efforts allowed students to continue to compete and, at the same time, preserve their Confederacy’s heritage.
Information courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions Inc. September 2006