The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Many Indian leaders seemed to support the schools; they had come to recognize that assimilation was the only hope for the survival of their children. And many Indian children educated there seemed to like the experience and to look back on it fondly. I say “seemed” because it is sometimes hard to look behind the rhetoric of “progress” to recognize the acute pain felt by those who had to say goodbye to their children—or parents—for years. Even as Carlisle was a stab at equality, it was also a knife in the heart of the Indian family. With the help of an interpreter, the daughter of American Horse wrote this letter home to her father shortly after her arrival at Carlisle:

  I want to tell you something, and it makes me feel very glad. You tell me that my brother is married and that makes me feel very glad. My cousins, and brothers, and I are all very well, at this Carlisle School. We would like to see you again. I am always happy here, but lately I sometimes feel bad, because you tell me that my grandfather is getting very old. Tell me how my brothers are. I would like to see my brother’s wife’s picture. Tell my brother Two-Dogs to write to me again. Miss Hyde’s father died two weeks ago, and I am very sorry. I remember all of my friends. If you don’t answer my letter soon, I’ll feel bad. I don’t always answer your letter soon, but it is because I can not write. As soon as I get so that I can write myself, I will write as often as I can. Tell Brave Bull that Dora (Her Pipe) has been a little sick, but is most well now. Tell if my grandfather is well. If he gets sick tell me. You wrote to my cousin Robert and told him that you had a house to live in, and lots of pigs and cows and such things, and I was very glad. You’ve got a white man’s house to live in now and I am anxious to learn all that I can, so that I can come home by and by and live with you. I hear that they have a big school out there and it makes me very glad. If you can, come again, and tell me if you can come again, when. I want to tell you that some more girls and boys came here. Twenty-five. Fifteen of them are girls. There are a great many of us here now, and Capt. Pratt is very kind to us. That is all I want to say now. Give my love to all of my friends.

  Your daughter,

  Maggie Stands-Looking

  Within a decade there were almost twenty boarding schools run by the Office of Indian Affairs, dozens of “agency schools” on or near Indian agencies around the country, and dozens more boarding schools run by religious orders (the majority by the Catholics), as empowered by Grant. The government had been running “Indian schools” since the first decade of the nineteenth century but now they were plentiful, and attendance became coercive. Federal expenditures on Indian education rose from $75,000 to about $2 million by 1894.

  Many students later testified that they had good experiences at Carlisle. Perhaps that school—under Pratt’s supervision and congressional scrutiny, constantly held up as the model for Indian education—was better staffed and better run than others around the country, which seem hellish in comparison. At Haskell, in Kansas, many different tribes were grouped. It was natural for Indians from a given tribe to stick together, but the school superintendent found this counterproductive. “It was deemed necessary to establish during the year a stricter system of discipline than heretofore prevailed,” he testified. “A cadet battalion organization of five companies broke up the tribal associations.” Discipline was instilled by force. Students regularly complained of being beaten, cursed, and made to perform hard physical labor as punishment for speaking their tribal tongues, routine disobedience, or failure to comply with school rules.

  There wasn’t a hard set of rules about when and how often students were allowed to return home, but in many if not most cases, students had to have money deposited into their personal accounts at the school to pay for their transportation back to their families during the summer. Most tribal communities were so poor as to make this impossible. My grandmother was sent to Tomah Indian Industrial School in Tomah, Wisconsin, in 1930 at age four and did not return home until she was ten. One concerned school official at Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota wrote to the parents of a very young girl at the school in the 1920s: “[Grace] was at the office yesterday and complains that she is very homesick for her mother and father and asked me to write you if you could send her enough money so she can go home for the summer vacation. These children have not been home for two years and this is their second summer here, naturally they would get lonesome.” A concerned father wrote to Flandreau around the same time: “I understand you will let me know when Angeline is seriously sick but that might be a little too late then as she has been ailing for a long time. There must be something wrong with her as she spends most of her time in the hospital. . . . She should be examined by the doctor very good. I don’t want to take her out of school before the end of the year but if she’s ailing all the time she might just as well be home. As she wrote to me herself she wasn’t feeling any too good to go to school. We might wait a little too long and then it will be too late.”

  Conditions “back home” were often worse, and some parents begged the schools to take their children because they couldn’t afford to feed them. The majority of Indian parents, however, didn’t want to be separated from their children and resisted putting them in the system. The Office of Indian Affairs and its agents in the field did not hesitate to coerce them. One method employed by the government was to disempower Indians in their own communities by stripping them of privileges and position. John Ward, the Indian agent in Mission, California, complained that “the parents of these Indian children are ignorant, and know nothing of the value of education, and there are no elevating circumstances in the home circle to arouse the ambition of the children. Parental authority is hardly known or exercised among the Indians in this agency.” He suggested that he “should be endowed with some kind of authority to enforce attendance. The agent here has found that a threat to depose a captain if he does not make the children attend school has had a good effect.” In the Dakotas not all the Indians shared the Oglala leadership’s enthusiasm for boarding schools, and many kept their children back. John Williamson at the Dakota Agency mused, “Compulsion through the police is often necessary, and should this be required during the coming year, it will be heroically resorted to, regardless of results. The treaty with the Indians gives the children to the Government, for school purposes, nine months in the year, but the punishment therein provided in case they fail to comply is hardly humane or just. If taking ration tickets only meted out merited punishment to the heads of families, who are alone guilty, it would be a wise provision, but the children have to go hungry and suffer the disobedience of the parents. It is better, in my opinion, to compel attendance through the police than taking up ration tickets for non-attendance.”

  At Carlisle, the punishments of choice were having one’s mouth washed out with lye soap (for speaking their native languages), daily beatings, and being locked in an old guardhouse with only bread and water for rations. One former student testified to the intimidations: “We would cower from the abusive disciplinary practices of some superiors, such as the one who yanked my cousin’s ear hard enough to tear it. 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. The sustained terror in our hearts further tested our endurance, as it was better to suffer with a full bladder and be safe than to walk through the dark, seemingly endless hallway to the bathroom. When we were older, we girls anguished each time we entered the classroom of a certain male teacher who stalked and molested girls.”

  So much for personhood. Or rather, the institution of the boarding schools was evidence of what the government understood personhood to mean. To be culturally Indian and live in one’s Indian community was to be a savage. In Canada, where the boarding school system was in place until the 1970s (the last school didn’t close until 1996) and affected many more aboriginal children, Sir John Macdonald, the first Canadian prime minister, put it this way: “When the school is on the
reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages, he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as the head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.” To be a person was to be a certain kind of person: an American (or Canadian) who owned property and was culturally white. Indian kids went to school to be not-Indian.

  They also went there to die. Perhaps no other aspect of Indian education during the sixty years of the boarding school era is more tragic than the fact that the school grounds at Carlisle and Haskell and all the other schools included graveyards. At Haskell, a forlorn cemetery is tucked behind the power plant and marked by more than a hundred small white tombstones. Many of the children who died there didn’t even get a marker. At Carlisle, hundreds of students were buried. The names on the graves at Flandreau are a poignant roll call of a whole generation of Indians from across the country who never made it back to their tribal homes and never saw their parents again. Annie Dickson—Arapaho, age nineteen. Josephine Choate—Assiniboine, age twenty-one. Eugene Barber—Caddo, age eight. Harry White Wolf—Cheyenne, age six months. Joseph Rosseau—Chippewa, age sixteen. May Mohajah—Kaw, age seven. Nelson Swamp—Oneida, age three. Andrew Big Snake—Ponca, age sixteen. The list of the fallen children who died far from the arms of their parents and grandparents, far from the laughter of their siblings and cousins, far from the homelands their ancestors had fought so hard to protect and had hoped would always protect them, goes on and on. According to the Meriam Report, Indian children were six times as likely to die in childhood while at boarding schools than the rest of the children in America. Despite the good intentions of progressives (and because of those intentions) significant portions of three entire generations of Indians died in the boarding schools, and countless more were damaged by them.

  The full effect of the boarding school system wouldn’t be understood until decades after the agenda of “civilizing the savage” ground down. Even during the years the schools were in full swing it was hard for Indian families back in their homelands to know exactly how bad they were. Many couldn’t read or write English and so couldn’t communicate at all with school officials and teachers. Often children began to forget their own languages, or lost the habit of speaking in them, and so could not speak easily of what had happened to them. And shame played a role, as did a kind of grim realism. It was what it was, and for most it was the only option, so it didn’t bear talking about.

  In 1928 the government decided to conduct its own investigation of Indian administration, health, and education. The Meriam Report was nothing if not thorough. It ran to more than eight hundred pages and included detailed statistical analysis. The section on Indian education was particularly alarming. It noted that the boarding schools hired unqualified and underqualified staff and paid them poorly. Turnover was high. In one classroom ten teachers had passed through in the course of a single semester. Most schools ran largely on Indian child labor. Students milked the cows and killed the chickens and split the wood and mowed the fields and whitewashed the walls and cooked the food in the kitchens. The report cautioned that “if the labor of the boarding school is to be done by the pupils, it is essential that the pupils be old enough and strong enough to do institutional work.” It also noted that while official policy was to discourage the enrollment of young children, “there are numbers of young children, and in the reservation boarding schools the children are conspicuously small. At Leupp, for instance, one hundred of the 191 girls are 11 years of age or under. The result is that the institutional work, instead of being done wholly by able-bodied youths of 15 to 20 nominally enrolled in the early grades, has to be done, in part at least, by very small children—children, moreover, who, according to competent medical opinion, are malnourished.” It went on. The time that children spent on such tasks “is in no sense educational, since the operations are large-scale and bear little relation to either home or industrial life outside; and it is admittedly unsatisfactory even from the point of view of getting the work done.”

  The report was equally scathing about the schools’ teaching and teacher training methods, curriculum, and sensitivity to the individual academic, practical, and emotional needs of Indian children. This disregard for the children as individuals extended even to the uniforms they were forced to wear. In one sad footnote the writers observed that “there is no individuality in clothes in most schools, and suits are apparently passed on interminably, necessitating repeated repair.” A single pair of trousers had been worn, for example, by twelve boys successively.

  But the report saved most of its indignation for the health conditions at the schools. In a survey of more than seventy schools, the authors noted insufficient ventilation, rampant overcrowding, frequently nonoperational toilets and sinks, and an almost complete absence of “modern” laundry facilities. In one school very small children were discovered working behind piles of laundry that dwarfed them because the superintendent found they folded more when confronted by big piles. At another, the children were too malnourished to play. Even where they had the energy, they were often required to “maintain a pathetic degree of quietness.” Some authorities did not allow them to speak at all. Most schools at the time of the survey included a sort of jail used to discipline children. School buildings in general were decrepit, often to the point of being fire risks, dorms were crowded, sanitation was substandard, and boilers and machinery were out-of-date and sometimes unsafe. Medical personnel were insufficiently trained, and the children themselves were offered nothing in the way of health education. Nor were they given sufficient milk, and almost nothing in the way of fresh fruits and vegetables (hence the malnutrition). The school day was unusually long, cutting into sleep, and a lack of recreational opportunities provided children with little exercise. The report concluded, “The generally routinized nature of the institutional life with its formalism in classrooms, its marching and dress parades, its annihilation of initiative, its lack of beauty, its almost complete negation of normal family life, all of which have disastrous effects upon mental health and the development of wholesome personality: These are some of the conditions that make even the best classroom teaching of health ineffective.”

  Such were the ways in which the U.S. government tried to “kill the Indian” to “save the man.” From 1879 to the late 1930s, when the last compulsory boarding school programs were suspended (though some schools continue to this day), tens of thousands of Indian children were torn away from their families, forced to abandon their cultures and religions, and indoctrinated in federally funded religious schools. The effects of this attempt to break a people—and the aim of the boarding schools, albeit guided by “progressive” ideology, was unquestionably that—are still being felt today.

  Meanwhile, back in Indian homelands, even worse conditions prevailed as the most crushing form of oppression in America was instituted and expanded across Indian country.

  Allotment

  According to the passionate progressives in the Indian Rights Association and the Friends of the Indian, education was only one part of the Indian problem. The other issue was the reservation system, which they saw as holding “the Indian” back.

  Herbert Welsh, one of the founding members of the Indian Rights Association, had traveled extensively in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and the Southwest in the early 1880s and expressed his dismay at the squalid conditions, poverty, and lack of industry that he felt the reservation system encouraged. He was equally dismayed by the greed and mismanagement rampant among agents in the Indian service. The only solution, he felt, was doing away with the need for an Indian service by doing away with reservations themselves. His gro
up had the ear of the government, which was similarly inclined. The commissioner of Indian affairs, in his annual report of 1886, complained:

  At present the rich Indians who cultivate tribal lands pay no rent to the poorer and more unfortunate of their race, although they are equal owners of the soil. . . . The proprietor grows annually richer, while the laborers, his own race, joint owners of the soil, even of the lands that he claims and individually appropriates, grow annually and daily poorer and less able to assert their equal ownership and tribal claim and, shall I say, constitutional privilege and treaty rights.

  Power is power, and like their more “civilized” white counterparts Indians could and often tried to consolidate as much of it as possible for themselves.

  Congress and the Executive of the United States are the supreme guardians of these mere wards, and can administer their affairs as any other guardian can. Of course it must be done in a just and enlightened way. It must be done in a spirit of protection and not of oppression and robbery. Congress can sell their surplus lands and distribute the proceeds equally among the owners for the purposes of civilization and the education of their children, and the protection of the infirm, and the establishment of the poor upon homesteads with stock and implements of husbandry. Congress cannot consistently or justly or honestly take their lands from them and give or sell them to others except as above referred to, and for those objects alone. The sentiment is rapidly growing among these five nations that all existing forms of Indian government which have produced an unsatisfactory and dangerous condition of things, menacing the peace of the Indians and irritating their white neighbors, should be replaced by a regularly organized Territorial form of government, the territory thus constituted to be admitted at some future time as a State into the Union on an equal footing with other States, thereby securing all the protection, sympathy, and guarantees of this great and beneficent nation. The sooner this sentiment becomes universal the better for all concerned. . . . The vast surplusage of land in the Indian Territory, much of it, too, not surpassed anywhere for fertility and versatility of production, which can never be utilized by the Indians now within its borders nor by their descendants (for it is not probable that there will be any material increase in numbers of Indian population), must sooner or later be disposed of by Congress some way or other.