And Now My Friends, Your Children Please...
"Let all that is within you die!...You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized, until the Indian in you is dead"….urgings of a school official at an Indian school graduation ceremony.(68)
One night while channel surfing, I came upon a scene where women were running with their children trying to hide them from an authority of some sort who finally caught and dragged the children from their mother's arms kicking and screaming the whole time. The mother was lamenting and banging her fists against the automobile's window screaming "They're my kids! They're my kids!", to no avail. The film was "Rabbit Proof Fence". Watching this scene I was struck by the similarity of the "civilizing" methods used in Australia, and the American idea and policy of "Kill the Indian…Save the Man". And so Dear Reader, for me as a mother and grandmother who feels compelled to pass on my own cultural heritage to my descendents, this struck a chord deep inside me. How was it possible that there was such a policy to take people's children far away and attempt to replace centuries of a people's culture with another? Today, according to article two, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide states:
"In the present Convention genocide means any of the following acts with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial, or religious group, as such. Furthermore, Section e: "…transferring children of the group to another group". (Children under age 18). Two elements exist: intent and action. Action is often inferred from a systematic pattern of coordinated acts.(69) For the Indian Schools in the United States, please note that they were federal institutions.
After the U.S. Army forced the Sioux chiefs to cede their lands which at that time encompassed North and South Dakota and also parts of what we today call Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, and in return gave them a reservation almost as large as only South Dakota, once again the cry, "There's GOLD in them thar hills!" was heard. In response, the government came and took back the Black Hills. The Sioux considered this land to be sacred and were understandably angry. Freeze frame. Now, a soldier comes and asks for their children. That soldier was one Captain Pratt, who arrived just as the group is making ready for the coming winter (remember those brutal winters?). Now they have to worry about the very life- blood of their tribe—their children. Pratt met with the chiefs who were against this new move. Spotted Tail spoke but was told that because they couldn't "… read and write or cannot speak the language of the country, (are uneducated) these mountains, valleys and streams have passed from you. Your ignorance against the white man's education will more and more hinder and restrain you and take from you".(70) When Pratt left, the chiefs deliberated among themselves. They finally agreed to send the children away. The strategy was to take the children of the chiefs as a way to control the tribes. Years later, many of these children would regret the loss of their heritage.
At the schools, the children were torn between American ideas of individualism and their own large extended family, including parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins who all took an active role in the Indian Education of the children. Just as American children wanted to grow up to be a doctor or lawyer, someone who was considered to be of importance, so too did Indian children have dreams and aspirations. Becoming a warrior was a key theme for young Indian males who deemed those men to be of "great influence, entitled to honor and privilege".(71) But Indian ways were under attack also from the U.S. government's encouraging of the killing of the buffalo as a way to get the Indians to stay on the reservation. Buffalo was the source of Indian wealth. They wasted nothing. They used every part of these approximately two thousand pound animals, which provided them their basic needs that we all have: food, clothing and shelter. By the time the tribes were turned into wards of the government, they were on the reservation, under the control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wearing white people's cast-off clothing and receiving monthly rations of fatback, coffee and hardtack.(72) Flip the script. How were Whites on those vacated lands faring?? Were they in charge of their children's education? Were the ideas of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that the Declaration of Independence afforded to all men, working for them?
How did the children respond? Some became so homesick that they died. Some became ill and passed contagious diseases to one another exacerbated by the unsanitary living conditions in the dormitories. One group, the Spokanes, sent twenty- one children to school and sixteen of them died there. In Idaho, at the Fort Hall School, eight students out of sixty- eight died of Scarlet Fever. They succumbed quickly but thirty of the others were sent home to die. There were so many deaths that each institution had its own cemetery!(73) Many ran away. Some were never seen or heard from again by either their families or the schools. One froze to death trying to go home. His name was Pius Little Bear.(74)
What were the punishments for infractions? Lockups of children as young as seven or eight years old, some for as long as several days or even weeks for the more serious infractions; hard labor on the rockpile. And, maybe forcing your "sister to stand for hours with her nose pressed against a circle on the blackboard".(75)
The central repeated lesson in all classes, for all of the children, was that the White man's way of life was superior to all others. One student internalized this lesson in an essay in which he wrote: "The White people are civilized. They have everything and go to school too. They know how to read and write so they can read newspaper. The Yellow people they are half civilized. Some of them know how to read and write. Some of them how to half take care of themselves. The red people are big savages: they don't know nothing".(76)
Students worked long hours helping to build some of the very structures they learned in as carpenters and bricklayers. The girls were the laundresses and seamstresses for the institutions. The children also did much of the farming work. If they did not do their work they were punished. Indian girls were generally taught homemaking skills, as women's work in White society was the same for all women. These girls ended up being maids in White homes. The boys did not fare too well as they had difficulty getting work with the
skills they had learned at school fueled by Whites mistrust of Indians, and were therefore offered only the most menial jobs. Some students actually liked the work, and many enjoyed getting wages for the work they did. And, there were some real success stories such as: the two girls who grew up to be doctors, returning to the reservation which were "ghettos, isolated and poor" (77) and helping their people. Then there were the all- star athletes such as Jim Thorpe (who has a town in Pennsylvania named after him). And there was the coach who believed in his athletes. His name was Pop Warner, a White man. But sadly Dear Readers, while most returned to their families on the reservation upon graduation, some, such as Polingaysi Qoyawayma, returned home and could no longer fit in. Nothing was good enough for her anymore. She had been too indoctrinated in the White man's ways right down to sleeping and eating arrangements. She would leave and live with White missionaries.(78) For others, such as Don Talayesva, it was a complete rejection of White culture and return to native ways due to hostility and pressure from his family, who were "Blanket Indians", traditionalists. But for some, it was a way to use their education at those schools to fight for Indian rights. In fact some of them became tribal leaders (with women for the first time in leadership roles). And due to the efforts of such former students such as Charles Eastman and Zitkala-Sa, members of an Indian activist group known as the Society of American Indians (nicknamed the Red Progressives), were ultimately responsible for a landmark victory, citizenship for all American Indians through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
Note that the BIA had strict rules against the mistreatment of the children in their care but many schoolteachers and officials, like our President Andrew Jackson, ignored this.
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