Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863 - W. Dirk Raat - Страница 26

The purpose now is never to relax the application of force with a people that can no more be trusted that you can trust the wolves that run through the mountains. To gather them together little by little onto a Reservation away from the haunts and hills and hiding places of their country and … teach their children how to read and write: teach them the art of peace: teach them the truth of christianity … the old Indians will die off and carry with them all latent longings for murdering and robbing: the young ones will take their places without these longings: and thus, little by little, they will become a happy and a contented people.

General James Carleton to General Lorenzo Thomas, Sept. 6, 1863¹

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt (speech in 1892 at Carlisle)²

When one Indian boy or girl leaves this school with an education, the ‘Indian Problem’ will forever be solved for him and his children.

Chancellor Lipincott of University of Kansas at Haskell Dedication (September 17, 1884)³

The next day the torture began. The first thing they did was cut our hair … .While we were bathing our breechclouts were taken, and we were ordered to put on trousers. We’d lost our hair and we’d lost our clothes; with the two we’d lost our identity as Indians.

Asa Daklugie, Chiricahua Apache, 1886⁴

Your son died quietly, without suffering, like a man. We have dressed him in his good clothes and tomorrow we will bury him the way the white people do.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt, Carlisle, 1880⁵

Boarding schools for Indians have a lengthy history in the United States, dating back to colonial times when seventeenth century Jesuits established missions so as to “civilize an ignorant people and lead them to heaven.” In the mid-1600s Harvard College had an Indian school on its campus as did Hanover (later known as Dartmouth College) in the eighteenth century. Prior to the founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879, missionaries of various faiths had established religious schools near Indian settlements and on reservations in the Greater Southwest. Most of these were known as day schools.⁶

Carlisle, established by a stern Christian, an ex-army officer and former Indian fighter named Richard Henry Pratt, was the first off-reservation boarding school. It was located in what was previously a military installation—the Carlisle Barracks that had once been a training center for the US cavalry. Carlisle became the prototype for other off-reservation schools. By 1902 the government had established 25 off-reservation boarding schools, including a dozen institutions in sites in Oregon, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, California, and Montana. The Santa Fe Indian School, established in 1890, served mostly students from Southwestern tribes, as did the Phoenix, Arizona, and Riverside, California schools. By the beginning of the twentieth century nearly 18,000 students out of 21,568 were enrolled in either reservation or off-reservation boarding schools.⁷

By the early 1870s the fighting that characterized Indian–white relations had subsided, and reformers began to argue that the cost in lives and property was not worth the military effort. Grant’s peace policy called for non-violent coercion by Protestant missionaries who would direct affairs on newly established reservations. These agents would both convert their charges to Christianity while teaching them the value of farming and other rural tasks. By accepting the reservation solution the federal government in effect recognized the Indians as wards of the state—the American form of colonialism.

Yet by the late 1870s the failures of reservation life, characterized by bribery and dishonesty by those who were charged with implementing the Indian policy, and by a ration system that was both inadequate and yet fostered dependency on hand-outs by an impoverished Indian people, led to new reform movement. It was in this context that the off-reservation solution was posed by Pratt and others. If overt military actions and segregation on reservations were not transforming the Indian to a civilized person, perhaps education should be tried. Education might finally detribalize Indian youths, convert them to Christianity, and provide them with the gift of the white man’s civilization.⁸

Education would not only include as it aims Christianization and citizenship training, but also would incorporate the rudiments of academics such as the ability to read, write, and speak English, as well as facilitate individualization by developing a work ethic that promoted the ideal of self-reliance as well as respect for private property.⁹ Education would produce assimilation, and this would result in a new American who no longer would speak his or her tribal language, avoid “pagan” thoughts and rituals, and would leave behind any notions of community and communal values. And it should be an educational process that would not be thwarted by angry parents and traditional forces on the reservation.

One solution was to distance the school children from their family and tribe. Not only did the federal officials believe that the children should be separated from their “tribal” and “savage” ways so as to become “civilized,” but by separating them from their families they could be used as hostages to insure proper behavior by their parents back at the reservation. This type of education would be a different kind of relocation policy, a sort of education that would assimilate and integrate the Indian into American society. It would be a form of cultural genocide, or as one writer called it, “education for extinction.”¹⁰ And the model for organizing an off-reservation school like Carlisle would be a military one, and Richard Henry Pratt would become its first officer and teacher.

Having served in the military for the Union cause during the Civil War, Pratt, when the war was over, retired from the army to manage a hardware store in Logansport, Indiana. Pratt, finding himself temperamentally ill-suited for the hardware business, joined the regular army in 1867 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Tenth Cavalry, an all-“Negro” unit that had Cherokee scouts attached to it.¹¹ For eight years, from 1867 to 1875, Pratt spent much of his time in what would become Fort Sill in the heart of Comanche and Kiowa country fighting plains Indians. When the Red River War of 1874 was concluded, he was ordered to escort 73 prisoners of war—Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapahoe—to Fort Leavenworth. On May 11, 1875 he was further ordered to transport the prisoners to the old Spanish fortress of Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida.¹²

It was at Fort Marion that Pratt became more of a teacher than a jailer. He decided that he would rehabilitate his prisoners and received permission to teach his captives vocational skills that would hopefully lead them to become useful citizens. He cleaned them up and gave them military uniforms to wear. The Indians were instructed on pressing their trousers and shining their boots. He instituted daily inspections in which every Indian would stand at attention at their freshly made beds. They received haircuts. For exercise they would drill in army maneuvers and participate in parade marches.¹³

They would also learn to work like white men, especially doing hard labor like stacking lumber or packing crates. Do-gooder matrons from St. Augustine served as volunteer schoolteachers, teaching English and Christian doctrine at the same time. All in all, Fort Marion was turned into a basic training camp that was part school and vocational center, with a catechism curriculum thrown in. The Fort Marion experience was later transferred to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where 22 prisoners were sent for more schooling.¹⁴ The Fort Marion and Hampton Institute experiences convinced Pratt that he had finally found a solution to the “Indian problem,” and his program of eradicating “Indianness” could be permanently installed at Carlisle. In 1879 the secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz, gave Pratt his school. And from Carlisle Pratt’s martial philosophy would diffuse outward to other reservation and off-reservation schools.

The first concern was one of physical appearance. Holding true to the gender stereotypes of the age, girls were dressed in heavy Victorian-style dresses, while the boys were issued wool military uniforms. Haircuts for the boys would follow; an activity that was especially traumatic for Apache groups.The federal government produced images of the “before and after” of the children to convince the general public of the good work being done to transform the Indian from a savage to a civilized person (see Figure 2.6). Physical bearing, a new haircut, western clothing—all meant a transformation from the brutal state of a savage to that of a civilized, American Christian. The forces of social evolution would be realized by an educational system that would produce proper-looking students who were a boon to local communities (as well as a source of cheap labor). The photo collections were not only a public relations campaign, but a successful marketing device. In selling the “before and after” images to outsiders, the school was selling itself as well.¹⁵

Figure 2.6 Before and After. Tom Torlino (Navajo) arrived at Carlisle Indian School October 21, 1882, at the age of 22 years. After his term was disrupted in 1884, he returned to Carlisle in 1885.

Credit: Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA.

Part of the transformation included segregating the children by age and gender into companies for marching in close-order drill every morning. Music programs took the form of marching bands that accompanied the students as they drilled and marched in parades. School plays dramatized stories of the saga of Hiawatha or George Washington and the cherry tree in order to instill within them the new American mythology. Native dances were allowed, as long as they were performed on patriotic holidays or celebratory occasions—such as the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.¹⁶

One poster at Carlisle encouraged male students to participate in sports, seemingly for purposes of exercise but more likely to instill military discipline. The sign urged them to “become a football player or boxer,” and “learn to play a sport and become controlled and civilized.” Appealing to the machismo of teen-agers, the poster instructed them to “develop manly aggressiveness so that you can win a trophy.” Being macho meant that you can “learn to be strong and not to cry or show emotion.” Finally, and this was the clincher, “learn to obey a stern fatherly authority—your coach!”¹⁷

All of these teaching techniques were codified in 1901 with the publication by the superintendent of Indian schools the Uniform Course of Study for the Indian Schools of the United States, a treatise that assumed Indian children were “too dull” to excel intellectually and could only be trained to be shoemakers or sewers of domestic clothing. The goal of the federal government was to create a docile, regimented group of Indians who would follow orders.¹⁸

Repression came in a variety of ways. If a student spoke his native tongue, or refused to adopt “civilized” English names, he or she would have their mouth washed out with “a bar of yellow soap” or get a “kerosene shampoo” and receive corporal punishment.¹⁹ Homesick children would often become “runaways,” either attempting to go home, or more often, finding solitude in the empty spaces that could be found within the educational compound. Some girls even held peyote meetings in their dorm rooms. Again, if discovered these students would be hand delivered to the Guardhouse for punishment, or if a boy, would have to run the “belt line.” Sadistic dorm advisers would misuse their authority and inflict cruel punishment on their charges.²⁰

As in many other darker phases of life in the American West, rape and sexual abuse at the off-reservation boarding school was a common event. Students were intimidated by sexual predators. One student said that “After a nine-year-old girl was raped in her dormitory bed during the night, we girls would be so scared that we would jump into each other’s bed as soon as the lights went out.” She continued to note that “When we were older, we girls anguished each time we entered the classroom of a certain male teacher who stalked and molested girls.”²¹

When the youngsters were given work assignments outside of the campus it was very likely that they would often have to confront unwanted sexual advances and molestation.²² While they might learn a useful vocational trade, they would also be a form of cheap labor and sexual and non-sexual entertainment for outsiders.

Another type of repression came from the missionaries and the Indian agents, as well as the teachers at the schools. This was the suppression of native religion and its replacement with Protestant, and sometimes Catholic, creeds. The reservations and schools were aided in this by the Indian Offenses Act of 1883. This bill forbade the practice of traditional rites such as praying with the pipe, as well as ceremonies such as vision quests, sweat lodge rituals, and the sun dance. Intended to civilize the Indians, the act compelled the Indians “to desist from the savage and barbarous practices that are calculated to bring them in savagery.”²³ In other words, the assimilation policy of the United States as practiced in the boarding schools was to replace “paganism” with Christian civilization—the solution to the Indian problem.

But the ultimate form of repression was contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis, trachoma, measles, and influenza. The crowded conditions at the boarding schools without disinfectants and where hand towels, drinking cups, schoolbooks, and musical instrument mouthpieces passed freely among school children presented particular problems. As the Commissioner of Indian Affairs noted in 1916, after observing the brutal fact that Indian children in the boarding schools were being ravaged by disease, “We can not solve the Indian problem without Indians.”²⁴ Cemeteries at Carlisle and elsewhere testified to the sorrowful outcomes for many at the boarding schools. As Lawrence Webster, a Suquamish student at Tulalip Indian School in Puget Sound said in 1908, “Death was the only way you could get home … . It had to be a sickness or death before they’d let you out of there very long.”²⁵

In the final analysis assimilation at best was incomplete. Some scholars would prefer the word “integration” to “assimilation” in that, certain cultural traits of the majority culture, e.g., English language or the sport of football, were added to the traditional characteristics of the minority or Indian culture.²⁶ In seeking out their “private” spaces, many students spoke their native language and participated in tribal rituals, dances, and ceremonies. Sometimes these activities were disguised from the authorities by being performed at times that were American holidays or memorial occasions. If a student were thinking of his or her family or a traditional tribal event his or her thoughts would be formed in the native languages. Likewise, if the idea was part and parcel of the majority culture the speech would be in English.

Recent studies of the boarding school experience have demonstrated that in the early twentieth century Hopi students at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California “turned the power” so as to create vocational and cultural opportunities for themselves from programs originally designed to destroy their identity. Through these ways the vanishing Indian refused to vanish, and by 1928 the Boarding School philosophy had changed to face the new realities of a people with a culture that would not die. Teachers such as Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School began to promote indigenous art, and the off-reservation Indian boarding school system eventually witnessed their students “turn the power” to make the schools work for themselves and their communities.²⁷

By way of conclusion a final case study should be examined. This is the example of Sarah Winnemucca (Thocmetony) and her attempts at Indian education. After having served as a teacher at the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation outsides of Reno, Nevada, Sarah in the spring of 1885 began to think about establishing her own Indian school. Her “model school” was initially supported with finances from Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the Boston philanthropist who was a pioneer in the kindergarten movement. With financial help from Peabody and land available on her brother Natches’s ranch in Lovelock, east of Pyramid Lake and southwest of the current city of Winnemucca, Sarah established her school for “all the Paiute children in the neighborhood.” By the summer of 1886 her school, called the “Peabody Institute,” was flourishing.²⁸

The major difference between Sarah’s school and the reservation and off-reservation schools at the time was that it was an institution established by Paiutes for Paiutes. It was not simply a passive receptor of white values and prejudices. For example, the native language was used to learn to speak English, and then the Numic speech aided in learning how to read and write English. Unlike the government schools, students were not whipped for speaking their native tongue. No effort was made to separate the children from their parents. In fact, students were urged to use their language skills, arithmetic, and industrial training to educate their parents. By 1887 over 400 children had applied to Sarah’s boarding school. The school appeared to be thriving.²⁹

However, by late summer 1886 the “model school” was beginning to encounter financial problems. The charitable contributions from Boston benefactors started to dry up. Then Natches faced several monetary crises from mortgage costs to dishonest ranch hands.³⁰

Before closing her door for the last time in the summer of 1889, Sarah made appeals for financial support from both her Boston friends and the US government. Although the government had created “contract” schools with missionaries on and off the reservation, it was unwilling to fund any school “for Indians run by Indians.” The “model school” idea died, and Paiute children would have to wait another 38 years before they could enter the public schools.³¹

After her school closed Sarah eventually went to Henry’s Lake in Idaho to live with her younger sister Elma, or as the locals called her, “Pokey.” Elma was nicknamed “Pokey” because she was married to John Smith, the name of the white man who befriended Pocahontas during the founding of Virginia. The nickname was for some a term of endearment, but for most Idaho whites it was a reminder for Elma of her “Indianness,” that is her inferiority. In any case, Sarah, who appeared in good health, suddenly died on October 16, 1891, at the approximate age of 47. Although a common understanding is that she died of tuberculosis, it is more likely she died from stomach poisoning, either accidental or as a result of homicide. If not accidental the likely perpetrator was her sister Elma who apparently was jealous of her older sister. Elma died in 1922. The two were buried in unmarked graves; after all they were only “housekeeper” squaws unworthy of Christian burials (see Figure 2.7). ³²

Figure 2.7 Unmarked graves of Winnemucca sisters? No headstones; simply rocks in a circular pattern in foreground.

Photo by W. Dirk Raat, Henry’s Lake gravesite, Island Park, Idaho (2019).