In my first post opening up this history of trauma for native peoples in the US and Canada, a history to often intentionally forgotten by the dominant white settler culture, I described learning about the Pipestone Indian School in southwestern Minnesota, and the roots of this model in US government policy starting with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This school, founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt in 1879. According to the history told in Denise K Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa), Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors, Pratt’s theory of “civilizing the savage” began as an experiment with Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida. Convinced that assimilation was the path forward, he revised the slogan popular in the west–one repeated by Laura Ingalls in her third novel, Little House on the Prairie–“the only good Indian was a dead Indian” (p. 211)
Pratt’s boarding school model was founded on this revision of the slogan: “all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” On-reservation schools that allowed students to return to their families were a failure, in his eyes. The solution was to remove Indian children to off-reservation boarding schools ensuring they would be “thoroughly Christianized, individualized, and republicanized.” His school in Pennsylvania became a model for over 350 similar schools, many run by Catholic and Protestant churches who were paid by the government for this task. Jeffery Hamley, in Cultural Genocide in the Classroom, summarizes the goal differently: “a large-scale and complex system of schooling unrivaled in American education for what it attempted to accomplish: the destruction of tribal cultures as a means to assimilate Indians into the lower levels of American society.” The schools, patterned on harsh military discipline, involved classwork in the morning and manual labor in the afternoon–farming for boys, and domestic work for girls.
In Kent Nerburn’s follow-up to his moving Minnesota-based book encountering a Lakota elder named Dan in Neither Wolf nor Dog, he reconnects with Dan at the end of his life and helps him in his quest to find the final resting place of his sister, Yellow Bird. Early in the book, Dan recounts the day when white men pulled up in a car, and his father tried to hid the children. His sister, fearing for her doll, ran towards the house and was taken by the men there to remove the children and place them at a boarding school. Dan recalls begging his father to let him go, to try and protect his sister. His father said, “The white man’s world is very strong, but it has no heart. You are my son. i don’t want to lose you to that world. I don’t want you to be like one of those boys who goes to the white man’s school and comes back calling elders “savages” (34). Yet Dan made his case, and earned his father’s blessing to go, seeking to find and protect his sister.
Later in the book, Nerburn narrates the scene when Dan finds an abandoned railway station where all those years ago, Dan and his parents were to have met Yellow Bird after being sent on the “Outing program” pioneered by Pratt at Carlisle, in which boarding schools kept students for the summer and “leased” them out to white families as menial labor. She did not get off the train at the station, and they never saw her again. Leaning against the broken down station, Dan recalled:
“When I got to that boarding school, I was really scared. I had this eagle feather. An old man from our village had given it to me so I’d remain strong. He’d earned it when he was young. He said he’d been saving it his whole life to give to someone, and that I was the person the creator had wanted him to give it to.”
“When I got to that school, the first thing the priests did was take that eagle feather and break it up. They just tore it up right in front of me. They broke it up and threw it on the ground. From that moment, I hated that school . I knew it was bad for my spirit. But I was there for Yellow Bird.”
” I fought everything they did…but when none of that stopped me, they stared punishing Yellow Bird…I hardly ever got to see her. They kept the boys and girls separated. Sometimes I’d see her outside on the playground, and she’d try to run to me. She’d be crying, and they’d grab her and hit her” (p. 137).
This is the horror of my Christian legacy and the US Government policy. Tomorrow, a story about how this legacy is playing out with a Yerington Paiute youth fighting against the boarding school legacy with every step he takes. And Thursday, the National Day of Mourning, a reflection on what white people might do in rethinking this history of state-sponsored forgetting of the horrors upon which this nation and its mythic “Thanksgiving” is based.