As neocolonial institutions designed to assimilate American Indians to European American cultural and religious values, social institutions, and economic practices, most schools run by the federal government and missionaries during the first part of the twentieth century sought to suppress all or most aspects of their young students' Indian identities. However, the case of Bacone College proved to be different. Established in 1880 by Baptist minister Almon C. Bacone with the goal of training American Indian students to be teachers and preachers, by the 1920s Bacone was pursuing a unique fund-raising strategy that emphasized the Indian identities of its students and provided innovative curricular and extracurricular programs in Indian arts, histories, and cultures. Within this unique historical context, students at Bacone had an unusual amount of freedom to publicly engage ideas about what it meant to be Indian and educated. This article is organized into four sections. In the first section, the author gives a brief history of Bacone College and its unique programs that emphasized American Indian cultures, and she asserts that these programs provided a space in which students could actively engage ideas about Indianness. In the second section, she discusses peer relationships and student life during the period from 1927 to 1955. In the third section, she examines how students used Indian play to articulate the meanings of being educated and being Indian. Finally, she examines how Indian play was connected to the creation of new Indian identities among students at Bacone, and she discusses the importance of the case of Bacone in terms of current theories of schooling, hegemony, counterhegemony, and resistance. (Contains 62 notes.)