Forced Code-Switching as American Indian Policy
“Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” – Richard Henry Pratt
About 190 miles north of my hometown of Pittsburgh sits what remains of the historic Carlisle Indian School. Many may recognize the name Carlisle from its famous alum, professional football player Jim Thorpe. Opened in 1879, the off-reservation school was supervised by Richard Henry Pratt. He believed that American Indians, “must be taught to reject tribal culture and adapt to white society.”4 By “killing” the Indian in his students, he could save them from eventual slaughter at the hands of the United States.
Pratt had experience fighting and living with American Indians years before opening the Carlisle Indian School. He joined the army in 1867 as second lieutenant in the Tenth United States Cavalry and was assigned Indian scouts, providing him with his first real interactions with American Indians. Pratt spent the next eight years fighting Indians on the frontier.5
In spring 1875, Pratt was the officer in charge of overseeing the movement of Indian prisoners from Fort Sill in Indian Territory to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they would be charged. The seventy-two prisoners were a mixture of tribes and ages, having been charged with a variety of crimes stemming from the Red River War of 1874.6 The “war” was a military campaign to remove tribes from the Southern plains to reservations. Unable to try the men in a military or civilian court (the men were not soldiers of the United States and a civilian trial would render a quick and unanimous guilty verdict due to current Indian sentiment), the decision was made to imprison the men in St. Augustine, Florida.7
Pratt was instructed to “oversee the incarceration of the Indians,” a vague command. He made a bold decision to open a school for the prisoners with the goal of civilizing them.8 He immediately began dictating the setup of this new kind of school – the prisoners’ leg irons were to be removed, their hair cut, and old army uniforms provided. The prisoners were also taught military drills and expected to keep their shoes shined and their uniform folded properly. Pratt would lecture his new students each evening on “white man’s civilization,” taking them on field trips, and providing religious sermons from local clergymen. He saw himself as a benevolent teacher who could, through education, bring these men into mainstream society and in turn, save their lives. Word of Pratt’s methods spread and two articles on his transformative tactics were published in The Christian Crisis.
Pratt took what he learned from starting the school in St. Augustine and applied it to the off-reservation school method. He secured funding for Carlisle through an army appropriation bill and found the site for his new school at the military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which were going unused. He recruited 125 students for his first class to attend the school. In an 1892 speech, Pratt outlined why off-reservation education and forced code-switching was necessary for American Indian survival:
Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot
speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to
contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to
prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country.9
Pratt saw the inferiority of Indians as stemming from their culture, not their race. Believing that all people are born a blank slate, Pratt believed that by changing the environment surrounding Indians, i.e. their educational environment, civilized men and women would emerge.10 Although wildly misguided, Pratt saw complete assimilation as the only way to save American Indians from extinction.
Before and after photos were taken of each student at the Carlisle Indian School. In the before photos American Indians were shown in traditional hairstyles and clothing, while in the after photos, the same students now had their hair cut and were wearing a suit, supposedly conveying that the assimilation process was complete and they had become members of white Western society.
Luther Standing Bear, a Lakota Sioux, attended the Carlisle Indian School from 1879 to 1884. When he arrived at Carlisle, his teacher instructed him to choose an “American” name from the board; hence the Americanized first name of Luther. Standing Bear was widely known for traveling in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show as well as for his books on the Sioux people. He rallied against cultural assimilation as destructive and detrimental to both American Indians and the white society that imposed it:
The pressure that has been brought to bear upon the native people, since the
cessation of armed conflict, in the attempt to force conformity of custom and
habit has caused a reaction more destructive than war, and the injury has not
only affected the Indian, but has extended to the white population as well.
Tyranny, stupidity, and lack of vision have brought about the situation now
alluded to as the 'Indian Problem.'…The white man excused his presence here
by saying that he had been guided by the will of his God; and in so saying
absolved himself of all responsibility for his appearance in a land occupied by
other men.11
The assimilation and re-education of American Indians began well before the Carlisle Indian School opened its doors. The effort to educate American Indians was from the onset two-fold: preparation for mainstream society and conversion to Christianity. Shortly after Europeans arrived on the continent, Christian missionaries began proselytizing American Indians; European clerics agreed that the Indians were “savages,” “infidels,” and “heathens,” and therefore were not fully human and did not deserve rights.12 As was the case, Christian missionaries were encouraged by their respective countries to begin converting Natives. Large numbers were converted in some tribes, particularly in the New England territory, though many tribes vehemently rejected this attempt to subvert their beliefs and traditions.13
Not until late in the 18th century did the Christianization of American Indians begin to gain momentum. Both Washington and Jefferson promoted “civilizing” as the cornerstone to U.S.-Indian policy.14 In his 1892 speech, Pratt recalls this period, arguing that, “Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right.”15 Civilizing and conversion to Christianity soon became interchangeable concepts. Association between Christianity and civilization was the story of the American dream fulfilled and exemplified the height of man’s achievements; if you were Christian, you were civilized, and vice versa.
Adam Fortunate Eagle, a student at the Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota from 1935 to 1945, recounts his experience of attending an Indian boarding school and how church attendance was mandatory:
“Every Sunday we all have to go to church. Church is something I don’t
understand. My Aunt Anna told me my father was Episcopalian, my brother
Curtis is Catholic, and my mother and other three older brothers and sister are
Episcopalian. On Sunday morning Mrs. Burns asks me what faith I belong to. I say,
“Chippewa.”
She just laughs. “Well, young man, you’re going to church.”
“Oh geez, do I have to?”
“You don’t have a choice.”16
Missionaries seeking to convert Indians to Christianity and subsequently, civilization, had help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a governmental agency created in 1824 as an arm of the United States to oversee American Indian tribes. The BIA enthusiastically supported churches and their mission to convert natives, outlawing and even breaking up traditional tribal customs and practices.17
By the 1870s, after seeing the success of Pratt’s St. Augustine school, many politicians believed that the fastest and most successful means of civilizing American Indians was through education.18 Three different models were proposed by policymakers of the time – the reservation day school, the reservation boarding school, and the off-reservation boarding school.19
At the reservation day schools, students stayed at home and traveled to school each day. Classes focused mainly on language instruction through reading, writing, spelling, and speaking, though instruction in math and the singing of hymns was also included. These schools were popular as parents were still able to have their children at home. Policymakers moved away from this model as it was, “not an effective instrument of assimilation.”20 The day school allowed students to remain in their community with their family, reinforcing language and cultural practices. Reservation boarding schools were similar to reservation day schools as they allowed students to remain on the reservation, but live away from home while receiving education. Policymakers were also not in favor of this method for total assimilation as it presented the same issue that day schools did - tribal culture was reinforced by community and family. Parents could visit their children more easily if the school was located on the reservation than off. Off-reservation boarding schools became the primary approach for full assimilation. Students were removed from their home, community, and reservation and placed in schools that were prohibitively far away so that parents could not readily visit their children and tribal culture could not be reinforced.
Three decades after the opening of Carlisle Indian School, “nearly 500 schools extended all the way to California. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) controlled 25 off-reservation boarding schools while churches ran 460 boarding and day schools on reservations with government funds.”21 By starting when these children were young they could, in theory, be effectively indoctrinated into the “American way of life” and came to espouse those values. By requiring the total assimilation of American Indian youth, the code-switch to mainstream culture was initiated.
Passed in 1887, the General Allotment Act (also known as the Dawes Act) was passed by Congress and gave authorization to the BIA to break up Indian reservations into allotments (small parcels of land for each tribal member with the remaining parcels being sold to non-Indians).22 By intermingling white Americans and American Indians, Natives would have no choice but to assimilate.
American Indians also had to endure a period where their tribal lands were chipped away at in the legal system through termination, or the ending of the government-to-government relationship between reservations and the United States. These reservations would adhere to the jurisdiction of the counties and states where the reservation was located. Termination was a substantial push towards full assimilation of American Indians into mainstream society. In the words of Earl Old Person, leader of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI):
It is important to note that in our… language the only translation for termination
is to ‘wipe out’ or ‘kill off.’ We have no… words for termination…. Why is it so
important that Indians be brought into the ‘mainstream of American life?’… The
closest I would be able to come to ‘mainstream’ would be to say in [my language],
‘a big, wide river.’ Am I to tell my people that they will be ‘thrown into the Big,
Wide River of the United States’?23
Relocation was another method used to force the assimilation of American Indians by encouraging their movement from reservations to urban environments with the promise of better jobs. The reality was poverty, substandard housing, and lower-level jobs that were not suited to the skills and talents of each individual. Indian children were also adopted into white families to further speed up the assimilation, or permanent code-switching, process.24
Through the efforts of many activist and interest groups, including the youth-driven American Indian Movement (AIM) and the more traditional National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the public was made aware of the ill effects of termination and relocation through protests and lobbying. Tribes began the process of fighting to secure their sovereign rights through legal channels using tribal leadership. The Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin was even able to reverse the termination of their reservation with the passage of the Menominee Restoration Act of 1973.
In the 1970s, self-determination, or the ability for tribes to receive direct funding and the freedom to make their own decisions without the involvement of the BIA, became the official U.S. policy for Indian affairs. With this funding came new schools, initiated and run by the tribes themselves. The era of boarding schools, termination, and forced assimilation was ending and a new era of schools run by reservations and American Indians was beginning.
One tribe that used this new funding to create their own school where Indian culture was celebrated was the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the Diné (Navajo) reservation. The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), started in 1964, provided funding directly to tribes to spend the funds as they saw fit without the bureaucratic hindrance or involvement of the BIA. Using funds secured from OEO, in 1965 the tribe built the school to be run by the Diné with Diné teachers and staff and a Diné-centered curriculum. The school, “…rose from the community’s will to give its children education that both respected and integrated Navajo culture and prepared young people for dealing with the majority society.”25 The Rough Rock Community School, as it is known today, expresses the importance of combining culture and education in its philosophy statement:
The objective of this school and the community as a whole is to teach and instill
our sacred Navajo Language and way of life into each of our Navajo children
who attends school here. These life and career enhancements are applied to the
discipline of our children to the degree that they can be competitive in any
society, whether they choose college or vocational school, knowing and
practicing their sacred uniqueness as Navajo individuals.26
There are some American Indian schools that have taken up the mantel of the Rough Rock Community School and investing in the education of their youth. Schools such as the Oneida Nation High School in Wisconsin have focused on cultural immersion where student culture is welcome and integral to education. Jessica House, a senior and a member of the high school’s Lady Thunderhawk basketball team, states that, “Basketball is my life and so is my culture… In order to play basketball at Oneida, you have to be in the culture. You have to participate… It’s important because I think it helps [students] know who they really are ‘cause sometimes you get so caught up in the other world.”27
The Oneida Nation High School outlines their rational for combining culture and education in their schools:
Culturally, we continue to improve our learning about who we are as a
On^yote.ak^ people. Our culture and language is the foundation of encouragement
to expand our confidence in whom we are as citizens of our nation. We strive
toward utilizing the language and cultural concepts on a daily basis to become
proficient thinkers, problem solvers and communicators.28
The Oneida Nation High School balances the culture of their students with preparing them for mainstream society. This is not the case for many high schools in the United States; students are taught that they need to code-switch to mainstream culture in order to have a future and that their native culture is a hindrance to future success.
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