STOLEN IDENTITY
Tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans were sent to boarding schools in an assimilation program one bureaucrat saw as part of ‘a final solution of our Indian Problem’, in New York reports.
Samuel Torres of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition was at a cemetery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in June, with a somber task: to return to Alaska the remains of Sophia Tetoff, 17, who had died in 1906.
She had died of tuberculosis at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the country’s first government-run off-reservation boarding school for Native American children. Five years earlier she had been forcibly taken there at the end of a 25-day, 6,500-kilometer journey from her homeland by the Bering Sea.
As layers of earth were taken away and the top of the coffin was exposed, Torres, the coalition’s director of research and programs, burned medicinal herbs, the sound of a traditional chant rising with the ascending smoke.
In the months before and after the repatriation of Sophia Tetoff ’s remains, the remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, were discovered on the grounds of three former boarding schools for indigenous children in Canada. What is little known is that in 1879, the year Carlisle opened, Canadian government representatives visited it and other boarding schools and returned to Canada lauding what was seen as a “humanistic and philanthropic way to solve the Indian Problem”, to quote Torres, himself of Native descent.
“If we can’t name the trauma, if we don’t know the extent and scope of that trauma, we’ll never heal from it,” he said, referring to the history of the Native American boarding schools, operated for nearly a century until the 1970s under a US policy of assimilating indigenous people.
“To kill the Indian and save the man” was the mandate given to the Carlisle school by its founder, US army general Richard Henry Pratt. This was, Torres says, after centuries of genocidal war, in which Pratt had probably taken part, had failed to annihilate the race.
“Prior to this education-for-assimilation period, the federal policy toward Native Americans was extermination,” Torres says. “There were wars, but there were also many massacres where the US army would go into native communities, wait for the hunting parties to leave and then kill the elderly, women and children remaining in the villages.”
In 1819 the US Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act encouraging “activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans … to stimulate the civilization process”. Mission schools flourished, but it would take another 60 years before the government officially took matters into its own hands, when the Carlisle school opened.
Having previously overseen the “civilizing” of a group of Native American prisoners of war in Fort Maison, Florida, Pratt shared the view of the commissioner of Indian affairs, Hiram Price, who said in 1885, “It is cheaper to give them (the American Indians) education than to fight them.”
To wean indigenous children of their “Indianness”, Pratt said, they must be removed from their tribal context. Thus the opening of boarding schools, many thousands of kilometers from students’ homes on Indian reservations. (One bitter irony is that these reservations were formed on the basis of treaties that gave the US federal government huge expanses of land against a promise that it would provide, among other things, education to indigenous children.)
That, Torres believes, is genocide, if one considers the United Nations definition, which includes “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.
In 1891, 12 years after Carlisle opened, the federal government made attending boarding school compulsory for all indigenous children. Those at these schools could be as old as 17 or 18 — in some cases young married women with children were forcibly enrolled — or as young as 4 or 5 since they were considered the most malleable.
Although the number of federally run assimilation-era Native American boarding schools is put at 26, the government also ran many on-reservation boarding schools and provided funding to private boarding schools run by religious denominations. The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has identified about 370 of them.
Between the 1880s and 1930s, through its non-Indian agents, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs trawled the reservations for students to fill the schools. The bureau, which was also responsible for distributing food, land and executing other provisions in treaties with Native American tribes, routinely withheld provisions from those who refused to send their children to the schools. In some cases its agents — who had a quota to fill — simply kidnapped children. It has been estimated that by 1926 nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children were in the system.
Before the Carlisle school closed in 1918, more than 10,000 Native American children from 140 tribes had been through it. Many, including Sophia Tetoff, never got out alive. Native Alaskan children became targets for the country’s assimilation campaign after the US bought the territory from Russia in 1867.
Deb Haaland, the US Secretary of the Interior and the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said the discoveries of unmarked graves in Canada had left her “sick to my stomach”. Haaland, whose greatgrandfather was a survivor of the Carlisle school, launched the Indian Boarding School Initiative in late June.
The stated goal of the initiative is to identify boarding schools, their students and any possible cemetery or burial ground connected with them, what Torres calls “the tangible side of things”.
It is the intangible that has proved to be the most “deleterious”, with cycles of nefarious influences “rippling out” across generations, says Eric Anderson, professor of American Indian studies at Haskell Indian
Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Anderson, whose mother was Native American, has taught at the university for 13 years. It opened in 1884 as an off-reservation Native American boarding school, before becoming, in the post-assimilation years, a high school, a community college and ultimately a university exclusively for Native American students.
“All my students are connected, at least tangentially, to the boarding school experience through their ancestors, and very few of them speak their own indigenous languages,” Anderson says. “In some cases they came from tribes where there are virtually none, none at all, of fluent speakers. The boarding schools had essentially beaten the language out of multiple generations.”
He was referring to the punishment students were often subjected to for talking in their native tongue, even among themselves. This included having their mouth washed out with soap, being held in dark solitary confinement for days, or forced to run a gauntlet whereby the victim went down in between two lines of fellow students, who swung their belts at the victim, egged on by the teacher. All present were in no doubt of their fate if they broke the same rule.
As their language died, so did their songs, music and rituals, “things that contain not just an epistemological outlook but also stories, histories, moral codes and values”, Anderson says.
In fact on the very first day at the
Indian children … in the residential schools … die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian Problem.”
Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian government’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs
school they were stripped of all “outward Indianness”. Their long hair, a source of pride for all American Indians, was viewed as a sign of savagery and instantly sheared — boys’ mowed to military style and girls’ reduced to short bob.
Their embroidered and fringed leather outfits and moccasin boots, sewn by mothers and grandmothers, were removed and replaced in many cases by military-type uniforms. In fact many boarding schools, including Carlisle, were built on old army barracks, some used in wars against the Indians. In some cases shoes provided were so small that the wearers were left with deformed feet.
The children, who at this point could barely speak a word of English, were given English names, before being baptized and told that “God was a starving white man, with long hair and blue eyes and a beard”, says John Smelcer, an American author who writes about the boarding school experiences in both poetry and historical novels.
For Lindsay Montgomery, author of the book Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, two things she has studied speak powerfully about this experience. One is a medicine pouch beaded with the image of a Christian church, made by a boarding school student employing indigenous handicraft; the other is a set of leather dolls students made that wear traditional Indian dresses, which “would have helped children imagine themselves”.
“There we can see some space, however tiny it was, where Native kids could express their own traditions in which they took pride,” says Montgomery, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
But such space was not always available. During Montgomery’s research for the book she came across the story of an Indian girl named Clara who attended Tulalip Boarding School in Washington State. Caught teaching her fellow students how to weave traditional Indian baskets, she was hit repeatedly on the knuckles with a metaledged wooden ruler until her fingers started to bleed.
Both the medicine pouch and the dolls came from the collection of one man, Jesse H. Bratley who, around the turn of the 20th century, worked in Native American schools across five reservations in the American West. He believed that by bringing indigenous children into English-speaking Western society he was doing them good, even as he became enamored of their culture, collecting ceramics, dresses and shields now held by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. This was typical of Bratley’s era, Montgomery says.
“In his autobiography, Bratley talked about how Native culture was fast disappearing and how he needed to go out and document it, which he did through his collections and photographs. But there’s a disassociation between the living culture and the exotic one he sought to preserve and which he preferred to view in a museum.”
Montgomery pointed to the “fantasizing” of American Indian culture that continues in the US to this day, fueled by popular media and institutional racism.
In 1904 Bratley attended the World Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, where a replica boarding school was an exhibit. But there was no sign of the pervasive physical, mental and sexual abuse, overcrowding and poor sanitation that inevitably had any infectious disease running rampant, and ultimately the many deaths, the vast majority of which remain undocumented.
According to the Meriam Report of 1928, which painted a damning picture of life at the boarding schools, students sometimes had no access to soap, and had to share towels, cups and beds. This led to major outbreaks of trachoma, measles and tuberculosis. The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 also hit the boarding schools hard.
In most cases school officials failed to notify parents of the sickness until their children died, often in agonizing solitude. Many were buried in school cemeteries, in wooden coffins made by their classmates.
“Indian children … in the residential schools … die at a much higher rate than in their villages,” Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian government’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, said in the 1920s. “But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian Problem.”