Education-Boarding Schools

[Okwes]

Education-Boarding Schools
Posted by: "Alice" [e-mail] o7silverhawk
Thu Dec 7, 2006 8:59 pm (PST)
Boarding Schools were the ideal instrument for absorbing people and
ideologies that stood in the way of republican millennial destiny.
Schools would be able to quickly assimilate Indian youth. The first
priority of the boarding schools would be to provide the rudiments
of academic education: reading, writing and speaking of the English
language. Arithmetic, science, history and the arts would be added
to open the possibility of discovering the "self directing power of
thought." Indian youth would be individualized. Religious training
in Christianity would be taught. The principles of democratic
society, institutions and the political structure would give the
students citizenship training. The goal was to eradicate all
vestiges of Indian culture. By the 1880s there were 60 schools with
6,200 Indian students in the United States. There were two forms of
schools on the reservation: the reservation day school and the
reservation boarding school. The reservation day school had the
advantage of being relatively inexpensive and caused the least
opposition from parents. The reservation boarding school spent one-
half day teaching English and academics and a half-day was given
over to industrial training. However, it was felt that reservation
schools were not sufficiently removed from the influences of tribal
life. The non-reservation boarding school would be, in the eyes of
the assimilationists, the best school for changing Indian children
into members of the white society.

The most well known of all the non-reservation boarding schools was
the school established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania by Col. Richard
Henry Pratt in 1879. His goal was complete assimilation. Headmaster
of the Carlisle Indian School for twenty-five years, he was the
single most important figure in Indian education during his time.
His motto was, "Kill the Indian in him and save the man."

Pratt believed that off-reservation schools established in white
communities could accomplish this task. By immersing Indians into
the mainstream of American life, the "outing" system created by
Pratt, had students live among white families during the summer. He
hoped to have Indian youths not return to the reservations, but
become part of the white community. Carlisle was the only off-
reservation boarding school built in the East, all others were built
in the West.

Carlisle as well as other non-reservation boarding school instituted
their assault on the cultural identity by first doing away with all
outward signs of tribal life that the children brought with them.
Boys had their long hair cut. All children were given standard
uniforms to wear. They received new "white" names, including
surnames which it was felt would help when property was inherited.
Traditional Indian foods were abandoned and students had to acquire
the food rites of white society, including knives, forks, spoons,
napkins and tablecloths. Regimentation was the order of the day and
students spent endless hours marching to and from classes, meals and
dormitories. Order, discipline and self-restraint were all prized
values of white society.

Discipline, which varied at different schools, consisted of
confinement, deprivation of privileges, threat of corporal
punishment or restriction of diet. In addition to coping with the
severe discipline, Indian students were ravaged by disease at
boarding schools. Tuberculosis and trachoma, "sore eyes," were the
greatest threats. In December of 1899 measles broke out at the
Phoenix Indian School. By January it had reached epidemic
proportions. Before it ended 325 cases of measles, 60 cases of
pneumonia, and nine deaths had been recorded within a 10-day period.

Students were not allowed to speak their native languages, not even
to each other. The Carlisle school rewarded those who refrained from
speaking their own language, most other schools relied on
punishment. At the better non-reservation schools a reasonable
degree of literacy was attained in a relatively short period of
time, while at other schools the method of teaching English, showing
students an object card such as CAT, shown, written, pronounced and
traced did not produce the comprehension for those words which had
no equivalent in their native tongue.

The schools hoped to produce students who were economically self-
sufficient by teaching work skills and instill values and beliefs of
possessive individualism, meaning that you care about yourself and
what you as a person own. This opposed the basic Indian belief of
communal ownership, the land was for all people.

Half of each school day was given over to industrial training. Girls
learned to cook, clean, sew and care for poultry. Boys learned
industrial skills such as blacksmithing, shoemaking or performed
manual labor such as farming. Since the schools were required to be
as self-sufficient as possible, students did the majority of the
work. Boys farmed and raised food, girls made clothes, cooked,
served meals and did the laundry for the entire institution. By 1900
practicality became the goal and schools moved even further toward
industrial training while academics languished.

The "outing" program developed at Carlisle placed Indian students in
the community during the summer. The program took three forms:
summer months only, one year at a time, with children placed , in
urban and industrial settings, where they could learn skills other
than farming. While monitored carefully at Carlisle, other outing
programs were often exploitive. In Phoenix girls became the major
source of domestic labor for white families. Boys were usually only
able to obtain jobs as seasonal harvest workers or take jobs that
neither white or even immigrant labor wanted. In Phoenix the
children were not well supervised and learned very little from their
outing experience.

Conversion to Christianity was deemed essential. Schools were
expected to develop programs of religious instruction. Emphasis was
placed on the Ten Commandments, the beatitudes and psalms.
Implanting ideas of sin and a sense of guilt were part of Sunday
schools. Christianity governed gender relations at the schools and
most schools invested their energy in keeping the sexes apart, in
some cases endangering the lives of the students, by locking girls
in their dormitories at night, so that they might not get out, even
in the case of fire. There were, however, ritualized social
activities such as dances and promenades.

Carlisle had a football team, coached by "Pop" Warner, Phoenix also
had football that played against other local white schools. Phoenix
also had a band that performed all during the summer at various
festivals and parades. Both activities were meant to support the
idea that Indian people were capable of competing with whites.

The schools taught history with a definite white bias. Indian
students were taught that Columbus Day was not only a banner day in
history but also a beneficent development in their own race's
fortune. Only after discovery did Indians enter the stream of
history. Thanksgiving was a holiday to celebrate "good" Indians
having aided the brave pilgrim fathers. New Year's was a reminder of
how white people kept track of time and Washington's birthday served
as a reminder of the "great white father." On Memorial Day some
students at off-reservation schools were made to decorate the graves
of soldiers sent to kill their fathers.

Indian people resisted these schools in various ways. Sometimes
entire villages refused schooling. When they refused to enroll their
children in white men's schools, Indian agents on the reservations
normally resorted to withholding rations or sending in agency
police. In some cases police were sent onto reservations to seize
children, whether they were willing or not. The police continued to
take children until the school was filled, so sometimes orphans were
offered and in other cases families would bargain, negotiating a
family quota. Navajo policemen avoided taking "prime" children and
would take less intelligent or physically impaired children or those
not well cared for.

Parents would band together to withdraw the students en masse,
encourage runaways and undermine the schools influence during
vacations. In 1893 the U.S. courts said that parents had a legal
right to deny their children's transfer to off-reservation schools.
Once the courts ruled in the parents favor, some families used this
right keep their children on the reservation. Some parents saw white
education for what it was the total destruction of Indian culture.
Others objected to specific aspects of the education system, the
manner of discipline, the drilling. Still others were concerned for
their children's health. They associated the schools with death.
Resentment of the boarding schools was most severe because the
schools broke the most fundamental of human ties, the parent child
bond.

[blackcrowheart]

Bitter Legacy of American Indian Boarding Schools

www.usariseup.com/article.cfm?articleId=146
<http://www.usariseup.com/article.cfm?articleId=146>

My mother said that the nuns used to take the Indian kids to town to beg
for money to support the mission school. They would point to the kids
and say to passers-by, "Help these poor dirty Indians." My
mother and her brother Donald are shown here on the shores of Lake
Superior during the 1980s.

Thoughts of my mother are always bittersweet. In recent years, however,
the bitterness has grown into hope. It's not an easy hope, covered
in thorns as it is, but hope nonetheless. In my younger days, I was
derailed by a deep sense of personal injustice. She was not the loving
mother I felt I deserved. She was often cold, harsh, self absorbed and
quick-tempered; never like the doting mothers of my white classmates.
For many years, I felt terribly deprived and justifiably resentful.

In recent years, however, I've begun to realize that my fire of
resentment scorched only my own heart, which I've let it burn down
to a tolerable ember. I am beginning to see this tiny, irascible woman
for who she truly is – a survivor. A woman whose dynamic force of
will has stopped at nothing to hold onto life. We often joke that she
will bury us all; she turned 83 this year. As I learn more about her
personal history, I am humbled and grateful for her strength. In meeting
the relentless daily demands of my own children, I now see that my
mother gave me a great gift, a gift she never dared hope to receive as a
child. She stayed.

Like too many Indian people from her generation, she and her siblings
were forcibly taken from their family by non-Indian reservation
authorities. They were then turned over to the church and the Catholic
nuns who ran a boarding schools that existed for the purpose of
stripping away Indian culture and identity from Indian children.

Now that her guard is down, robbed from her by growing dementia, the
painful memories seem to rule her life. Each time we speak with her, she
brings up the abuse she suffered at the sister school. She always begins
her recollections in the same way, leaning in close, "I probably
shouldn't tell you this, but… ."

Her most frequently recurring memory is the sexual abuse she suffered at
the hands of an older boy and how she "screamed and screamed."
She also tells us how the nuns nailed her younger brother to the wooden
plank dining table overnight when he wouldn't eat a dinner of stewed
onions. And about the beatings for speaking the Ojibwe language, for
stealing food, for crying for one's parents, for disobeying, for not
working hard enough. The list goes on and on.

Life at the "sister school" robbed the experience of family or
knowledge of parenting skills from my mother. Visits with family were
kept to a minimum while the nuns over looked the event to ensure nothing
"Indian" was passed along to the children. She recalls the only
visit from her mother, who gave her a five-pound box of chocolates. Back
in the dormitory, she quickly devoured the candy until she vomited. She
has often told us she never liked chocolates after that and that she
never got along with her mother. It was as though a mother's love
was a sweetness she could never taste. She remained estranged from her
mother her entire life, never forgiving her for not resisting the nuns.
She never gained the luxury of objectivity about her life. Her only ally
was the chip placed firmly on her shoulder, a fierce insistence that she
wasn't a "dirty Indian" but always harboring under the
surface a lingering fear that she was.

In the "sister school," my mom and her siblings learned the
domestic arts, with a special emphasis on cleanliness. The latter
remains a lasting lesson for my mother and many Indian women of her
generation, as they repeatedly try to wash away the terrible shame of
being a "dirty Indian". Even today, I feel a tiny degree of
guilt if I stand and use a mop to wash the kitchen floor rather than
using a rag while "on my prayer bones," as my mother harshly
instructed.

I hear her words, "We may be Indian, but by God, we ain't
dirty!"

Like most Ojibwe women, my mother is a great storyteller. I recall
summer afternoons lying on her bed in the dark, cool bedroom where she
would recreate scenes from her childhood. My mother told of cruel Sister
Catherine's death. Sister Catherine fell down the steps to the root
cellar where the food was stored and hit her head. "Oh, how us kids
did a silent cheer!" she recalled, still giggling at the memory of
Sister getting her "comeuppance."

I know now, however, most of the stories were sanitized and wishful
memories. It was her attempt not to focus on her violent alcoholic
father, who beat his young bride and repeatedly left them after vain
attempts to provide for his family. Her mother was not a desperate young
woman who simply gave up on her children. In her stories, her father was
a hero who never stopped trying to win back his children. My mother left
out the real barbed wire pain of abandonment, worthlessness and
undiagnosed mental illness. I learned these things on my own when I was
strong enough to hear them.

The memories from Indian boarding schools are still handed down one
generation to the next where they lodge in our hearts like tiny jagged
pieces of steel, robbing us of our pride if we let them. Those
"sister school" stories became part of my psyche even before I
could speak. Like a big ugly suitcase, they were passed along to me to
carry if I would; I think it is much the same for other native people.

Although feeble, the recent U. S. apology for its "ill-conceived
policies" adds to efforts to break this cycle. It may help us move
toward some sort of healing. Certainly no amount of reparations could
make my mother un-see or un-feel the happenings at the "sister
school". At the very suggestion, I imagine her spitting out the
following, "I don't want any danged ol' rotten white
man's money!"

My great hope, however, is that the apology and actions like it will set
the stage for validation that the Indian boarding school era really
happened that the hurt my mother suffers wasn't her fault. Even
greater, my hope is that maybe we won't have to keep passing down
the hurt; that with understanding maybe we can take away some of its
power.

For now, in my family, we are serving as my mother's Truth and
Reconciliation Commission. We listen attentively to her stories, told
over and over again. Gratefully, we are now able to pray she may at last
find peace.

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The American Indian boarding school era began in the late 19th century
during the administration of President Ulysses S.

Grant. Boarding schools, where Indian children underwent acculturation
into white society, were touted as an economical alternative solution to
the nation's "Indian problem" (as opposed to outright war).

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Navajo Tom Torlino, photographed in1887 and again 1890 after completing
a three-year course at the Carlisle Indian School, in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania.
Under Grant's Peace Policy of 1869, thousands of American Indian
children as young as 5 years old were taken from their families and
subjected to a life of harsh discipline and cultural cleansing.

The schools were modeled after a prison school created by Captain
Richard H. Pratt for Indian prisoners of war in Florida and were usually
operated with military precision. Pratt's philosophy of rigid order
became the desired model. Punishment was swiftly meted out for offenses
such as displaying any Indian tendencies. Students' mouths were
scrubbed out with lye soap for uttering any words in their native
language. Children were virtual prisoners at the schools, forbidden to
visit their parents, forced into hard labor, and subjected to a host of
abuses including physical and sexual abuse by school officials and other
students.

Since the schools usually functioned with limited funds, children
frequently died from starvation or preventable diseases. Pratt's
philosophy to "kill the Indian to save the man" was widely
embraced as a more humane, Christian solution for controlling the Indian
population. Native children were trained to become "useful,
contributing" members of the new America as domestic servants –
the only role for which they were deemed fit. This policy of forced
acculturation was supported by the U.S. government, which appropriated
funds for more than 400 such schools.

The system continued well into the 20th century. By the mid-1930s,
schools began to slowly improve. By the 1970s the schools began to
recognize the merits of including native culture in curriculum, and
gradually became less coercive. Although most of today's Indian
boarding schools are located on reservations and operated by tribes, the
schools are plagued with a lack of funding, alcohol and substance abuse,
and high suicide rates among students according to the National Center
for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research. A recent
report by the Government Accountability Office found that at least 60
percent of Bureau of Indian Affairs schools have inadequate funding.

Physicians, educators and leaders in Indian country have recently begun
to publically discuss the connection between the legacy of hurt and
abuse suffered at boarding schools and serious social problems within
the native community. According to a 2007 U.S. Justice Department study,
native women are 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually abused
than other women in the U.S. Native people struggle with unprecedented
levels of alcohol and substance abuse and have a high incidence of abuse
and violence toward children as well as high rates of suicide,
especially among young people. Grass roots native organizations such as
the Boarding School Project are making the case that the
intergenerational trauma experienced at boarding schools has created
post-traumatic stress disorder that has been passed down through
generations. The organization is working to document boarding school
abuses so that native communities can begin healing and demand justice.

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