USA TODAY International Edition
A legacy of splitting kids, parents
3 past US episodes show race, religion played key role in forced separations
Just before sunrise on a summer Sunday morning, 120 government agents swoop down on a remote community in Arizona. By the time they are done, 36 fathers will be arrested, and 86 women and 263 children, many of them crying, will be herded onto buses and shipped hundreds of miles away, where some of the children will be placed in foster care.
This was not a scene along the U.S. border with Mexico in 2018. It happened in 1953, in a place called Short Creek, on the Arizona-Utah border, during an attempt to crack down on polygamy.
Children as young as 5 sob uncontrollably in government dormitories. They have been uprooted from their families, some forcibly, and sent hundreds, even thousands, of miles away for the explicit purpose of stripping them of their culture and heritage. They are forbidden from speaking their native languages, and government employees are prevented from hugging or consoling them.
Beginning in the late 1800s and for more than a century, the federal government forced tens of thousands of Native American children into Indian boarding schools.
The first such school, the Carlisle Industrial Indian School in Pennsylvania, was founded by Capt. Richard Pratt, whose model was followed across the country. It was Pratt who coined the saying “kill the Indian, save the man.” His goal was to educate Native American children in the Anglo ways and eventually send them home to “Americanize” their peers.
Three nuns shepherd 40 orphans 2,000 miles across the country to place them with Catholic families in two small Arizona towns. The adoptions are arranged in advance and approved by the local priest. Local women, however, object that one race is being placed with families of another and demand that local law enforcement round the children up. Angry mobs form, and the nuns and the priest are nearly lynched. The orphanage and the Catholic Church sue on behalf of the original adoptive families.
This happened in 1904 in the Arizona territorial mining towns of Clifton and Morenci. The children, from an orphanage in New York, were mostly blond and blue-eyed, while the Catholic families with which they were placed were predominantly of Mexican Indian descent.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Mexican mothers were not fit “by mode of living, habits and education” and that the children would be better off being raised by their own kind.
Other cases of systemic family separation can be found throughout American history, the most notorious being slavery and the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War II.
None of these offers a perfect parallel with the current controversy over the separation of migrant families at U.S. border detention facilities. But the long lens of history provides lessons those who were there say are relevant today.
The raid on Short Creek
Alvin S. Barlow was 15 when the raid came. It was July 26, 1953, and the people of the isolated polygamist community in northwestern Arizona had been expecting it.
Early in the morning, sentries posted outside town sounded a signal – a blast from a stick of dynamite – and the raid was on. Dozens of Arizona Highway Patrolmen, sheriff ’s deputies and state liquor agents descended on the town and began rounding people up with the stated purpose of re-establishing the rule of law in Short Creek.
Arizona Gov. Howard Pyle had for months been barraged with complaints about the town over the polygamy issue. The complaints involved allegations of forced child marriage, rape and incest.
The townspeople claimed they were exercising their right to practice their religion, a major tenet of which includes plural marriage, which is outlawed by the federal government.
But there were also allegations of rampant welfare fraud.
Arizona historian Marshall Trimble said the political pressure from Mohave County officials was intense because their coffers “were being bled dry.” “Something had to be done,” he said. Trimble was a teenager living in Ash Fork and remembers lines of Highway Patrol cars passing through town.
He didn’t know where they were going or the significance at the time, but he recalls talking years later to a woman who had been among those rounded up.
“That was like their proudest moment,” he said. “She said ‘I rode the bus. They were going to take our children from us, and we said we’re going, too.’ ”
The men were taken to jail in Kingman. The women and children were brought to Phoenix, where some were placed with families and others eventually placed in government housing.
At least half a dozen members of Barlow’s family were rounded up, and he was one of the oldest males left.
He eventually joined his family in Phoenix and recalls the trouble he had making the adjustment from a school with 104 students in a small close-knit community, to Phoenix Union High School, with nearly 6,000 students.
Another thing Barlow remembers is talking to the carloads of reporters who accompanied the raiding party. The news of the raid made international headlines, and it shared space on the front page of The New York Times the following day with other big item: the truce that ended the Korean War.
But that publicity was Pyle’s undoing. Although the public wanted something done about polygamy, the images of women and crying children being rounded up were too much to bear.
Pyle was defeated in the next election, and the infamy of the raid led the community to change its name to Colorado City. Most of the serious charges against the men in the community were dismissed. Most pleaded guilty to minor conspiracy charges and had their sentences suspended.
“These were lives. These were real,” said Barlow, now 80. “And it was a confrontation, and it happened because a man had the courage to live his religion.”
Indian boarding schools
Dr. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie recalls working in an Indian boarding school near Winslow and being scolded after a fellow staff member turned her in for trying to console a crying child.
She also remembers years earlier, when she was that crying child.
Yazzie is a survivor of the 100-yearplus legacy of Native American children who were uprooted from their homes, families, culture and traditions.
For Yazzie, it was a traumatic choice forced upon her parents by a lack of educational opportunities near their home near Crownpoint, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation.
But for older Native Americans, including Yazzie’s mother, boarding school was a far more dystopian experience, with children spirited away from their families and subjected to what is now seen as a cruel form of social engineering designed to systematically root out their culture.
The results have scarred generations of Native Americans.
“My mother was kidnapped by a white man and a Navajo man,” Yazzie said. “My grandmother never knew where she went.”
The Irish Orphan Abduction
This dark episode in America’s racial past unfolded in October 1904. Orphanages in New York were overwhelmed with tens of thousands of children, many a product of the reviled Irish underclass, and a mechanism for disbursing them throughout the country already existed in the form of the infamous Orphan Trains.
Homeless or orphaned children, mostly Irish and Catholic, were systematically rounded up – usually through truancy laws – and placed aboard trains to be shipped West to be adopted, a practice that had been used since 1854. The adoptions rarely materialized, and the children often became wards of the state or were left to fend for themselves in strange cities.
Fifty years after the first Orphan Train, one of the large orphanages in New York City, the New York Foundling Hospital, bundled 40 Irish orphans ages 2 to 6 aboard a train along with three nuns from the Sisters of Charity, several nurses and an agent from the hospital.
This began an 11-day journey to the Arizona mining towns of Clifton and Morenci, where their adoptions by 33 willing Catholic families had already been arranged.
“What people in New York didn’t understand was that the Catholics in Clifton and Morenci were mostly Mexican,” said Dr. Linda Gordon, a New York University professor of history and humanities who wrote a book about the case.
When the white, Protestant women of Clifton and Morenci saw the fairhaired toddlers being placed into the arms of dark-skinned families, Gordon wrote, they were outraged and demanded that lawmen intervene.
Somehow, the train ride had transformed the children from reviled Irish to cherished white, she wrote.
As mobs began to form, armed men went to the home of each family and took the children back at gunpoint and placed them with white “mothers.”
“There was a furor, and then a vigilante action in which all of the children were kidnapped,” she told the Republic.
The nuns managed to gather about half of the children and head back East, leaving 19 children behind with their new white families.
The Foundling Hospital sued for the return of the rest. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that “the children were distributed among persons wholly unfit to be intrusted with them, being, with one or two exceptions, half-breed Mexican Indians of bad character.”
Cases of systemic family separation can be found throughout U.S. history, the most notorious being slavery and the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War II.