The New Trail of Tears

by Naomi Schaefer Riley

  Some of the kids I interview at Saint Labre tell me they have friends who have dropped out and gone back to public school. “This place is hard, and they make you wear uniforms,” says one middle-school girl. By which she means khakis and a polo shirt. Yet the school’s paternalistic policies – a dress code, after-school hours set aside for homework, living in dormitories, and teachers who demand parental involvement – are in part responsible for its success. At other schools, kids are simply allowed to make their own choices.

  Winfield Russell, of the Northern Cheyenne tribal council, attended Saint Labre, but he told his kids they could decide where they wanted to go. He compares it to buying his son sneakers. “I used to buy his basketball shoes. I used to buy him what I wanted him to wear. And here I finally realized, you know, they went to school [at Lame Deer] because he liked it and they wanted him to go to school here.”

  Ivan Small, the director of the Saint Labre Catholic schools, has a hard time understanding why the parents he deals with let their kids – sometimes as young as eight – make decisions about their own education. But he has seen firsthand the complete disintegration of the Indian family. It’s not just “babies raising babies.” A number of his students are wards of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some are being raised by older siblings. Their home lives are chaotic – riddled with drugs and alcohol and abuse of all sorts.

  Their lives aren’t much different from the lives of kids in the South Bronx or Compton. The dysfunction, the culture of dependency – it’s all there. But there are differences between rural poverty and urban poverty. Right now in our worst inner cities there are parents begging for scholarships to Catholic schools, waiting for charter school lotteries, doing whatever they can to give their children a chance at a better life. Why aren’t the communities around Saint Labre doing the same? Saint Labre, like other Indian Catholic schools, is regularly dismissed in casual conversation by community leaders. Why are there empty seats in all of its classrooms? Why are there extra beds in its dormitories?

  For one thing, parents on the reservation don’t seem to be aware that things could be better for their children. Parents in the South Bronx – even if they just get on the subway occasionally – are aware of people dressed in suits going to middle-class jobs. When you’re 100 miles from Billings, Montana, there’s no such realization. When Small takes kids from his school on field trips – to math competitions or to visit colleges in Washington, D.C., the kids are stunned. They might as well have gone to another planet.

  But there’s also this: many of the parents don’t want their kids to leave. It’s almost the opposite of an immigrant mentality. If you spend enough time interviewing working-class parents who have recently come to America from the Dominican Republic or Mexico or Poland or Russia or Italy, you’ll understand that as much as they love their children, they aren’t hoping that as adults, their children won’t move to a nicer neighborhood. For them, the whole point of coming to this country was to move up socially and economically. Most Native American parents don’t share this attitude.

  It may seem surprising to outsiders that the kids who do go to college frequently return to the reservation after they graduate. These kids feel a sense of familial obligation – though many have trouble finding work. Karl Little Owl attended Mount Saint Mary’s after Saint Labre. When he returned to the reservation, the only jobs available were in tribal government. So now he spends his days applying for grants from the federal government. “My push is always looking for opportunities where there are not a lot of strings attached.”

  More commonly, I hear from a number of residents, students attempt college but quickly return. They get homesick or feel as though they don’t fit in at college. Saint Labre now has an administrator whose sole job is to keep up with these college kids and make sure they’re getting the support they need.

  It’s odd that Richard Littlebear, president of Chief Dull Knife College, is dismissive of the efforts of Small and the Saint Labre School. Littlebear worries that Saint Labre “can pick who they want.” It’s true that Saint Labre doesn’t accept kids with severe disabilities, but by offering free tuition and transportation and even boarding facilities to almost any student on the reservation, Saint Labre can’t be said to be creaming off the better students. Littlebear goes on to say, “One of the characteristics of all parochial schools was that they really promoted their own agendas, which were Christian agendas of a missionary type.” The public schools, on the other hand, were “parent-driven in educating Native American students.”

  Yet Saint Labre is run by a “full-blooded” Indian who makes a point of celebrating Indian customs and teaching Native languages, something fewer and fewer of the adults know anyway. And most Indians are Christians, as outsiders might be surprised to learn. Churches – from Pentecostal to Baptist to Catholic – dot the reservation landscape. The Crow legislature recently passed a “Resolution of the Crow Tribal Legislature to Honor God for His Great Blessings upon the Crow Tribe and to Proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord of the Crow Indian Reservation.”9 And a banner with similar language hangs in the legislative building.

  When I probed Littlebear further about Saint Labre in particular, he says, “This is what I’ve heard. I just don’t know that much.”

  And so it goes. Even the people on the reservation who should be most interested in the educational success of Cheyenne and Crow students – members of the tribal council, the president of the local college – have little interest in the one school that seems to be giving students the knowledge and preparation they need to lift up themselves and their families. It doesn’t seem to faze Small. But at this point, nothing does.

  Tribal leaders and parents are often suspicious of non-Indians and of what might happen to their children if they leave the reservation. They’re even suspicious of Saint Labre because of the terrible history in the United States (and even more so in Canada) of removing Indian children from their homes and re-educating them at private and parochial boarding schools.

  These residential schools were symbols of everything that was wrong with Indian policy in the United States and Canada for much of the past 200 years. The mere mention of these now-closed schools still makes many Native people shiver. The schools were paternalistic, abusive, and unrelenting in their goal to erase tribal culture. Under threat of physical abuse, the schools forced children to forgo their native languages and customs, cut their hair, and effectively separate from their families and their own history.

  Launched in the late 19th century, some of these schools were run by religious groups. But the Bureau of Indian Affairs also started some of its own, modeled on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, Carlisle was supposed to “Americanize” Indians.

  In his address to the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction in 1892, Pratt set out his plan for “civilizing” the tribes to the west. He argued that efforts to educate Indians – carried out mostly to that point by missionaries – had been largely fruitless because the missionaries had let Indians largely keep their own ways and stay separate from white people. The Carlisle School, and the 150 or so boarding schools that followed it, had a different model. Pratt explained:

  It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, [and] he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth,
and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.10

  When I interviewed people at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it became increasingly apparent that the former Holy Rosary Mission school left scars on many of its residents. Founded 125 years ago as the Holy Rosary Mission by the Jesuit order and the Sisters of Saint Francis of Penance and Christian Charity, Holy Rosary – like many Catholic schools on reservations – saw its task as to bring the Catholic faith, and some might say the dominant white culture, to residents of the reservation. Even after it changed its name to Red Cloud in the 1960s to honor the great Lakota chief and the school’s Indian heritage, many continued to see it as a vehicle for the subjugation of Indian culture.

  Cecilia Fire Thunder of the Lakota tribe, who attended Red Cloud through 10th grade, tells me, “They were colonizing us and trying to make us more like them.” People, she says, “tell me I speak such great English and they ask me where I went to school. I refuse to answer questions about Red Cloud. I am learning to let go of the pain and damage they inflicted on me.”

  And it’s not just her. As the superintendent of the school, Ted Hamilton, tells me, Red Cloud “has a kind of Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde thing” going on. “Red Cloud has done really great things, particularly in the last 30 years.” But “it’s got [a century] years of doing really bad things to Indian people – horrible things to Indian people.” Hamilton is white and grew up in Illinois. After earning his master’s degree in library science, he found that library jobs were scarce, so he applied to be the archivist at Oglala Lakota College. “They didn’t have archives,” he clarifies. “They had boxes of stuff.” So Hamilton moved to Pine Ridge to help them create an archive and train people on the reservation to keep it themselves. He eventually received a grant from the Ford Foundation to do this work for other tribal colleges as well.

  Hamilton married a Lakota woman who already had six children. He then went on to work in different areas of education – he helped with technology and libraries and worked at various local schools. He has been at Red Cloud for 29 years now, and “I’ll be here until they bury me,” he tells me, laughing.

  A year after he was married, his oldest son was going to be a freshman, and Hamilton suggested that they send him to Red Cloud. His wife, who had attended Red Cloud, wasn’t excited but agreed. Hamilton recalls the first time he really understood the issue:

  I remember the first parent-teacher conference. We got up to that entryway over there and she said, “Stop the car.” I stopped the car. She burst into tears. And so, here I am with my relatively young wife, new wife, and she’s crying like crazy. I’m like, “What is going on?” She says, “I swore I would never set foot on this campus again. I had to board here. My parents left me here.”

  She said, “They wouldn’t let us speak Lakota.” She’s a full-blood, and Lakota was her first language. She said, “They wouldn’t let us speak our language. This is an oppressive place, and yet somehow I let you talk me into letting my son go to school here.” I had to do the parent-teacher conference alone. She never left the car.

  By the time a year went by, she had gotten used to it and managed it. The other three boys that we had, who are our youngest three, went to school here; she was much more comfortable. But there is that history here, and there are people who still remember the boarding schools as being both positive and negative. I’ve known many Native people [who] say, “The boarding schools were a great experience for me,” and others who will say it was horrendous. It kind of depends on who you talk to and what their experience was.

  In Canada, the residential schools were funded by the federal government, but in most cases they were administered by religious organizations. According to an account by CBC News, a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Company: “Initially, about 1,100 students attended 69 schools across the country. In 1931, at the peak of the residential school system, there were about 80 schools operating in Canada. There were a total of about 130 schools in every territory and province except Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick from the earliest in the 19th century to the last, which closed in 1996. In all, about 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Métis children were removed from their communities and forced to attend the schools.”11 (Métis are people of mixed European and First Nation ancestry.)

  Manny Jules attended the residential school In Kamloops, British Columbia, but didn’t have to live there – which, he acknowledges, means that he had a different experience from many of his peers. “I was never sexually abused or physically abused. I never got the strap or got beat up.” Perhaps it was because he came from a family of tribal leaders: his great-grandfather was a chief, and his father was on the tribal council.

  Jules attended residential schools until seventh grade and then went to the local “white” school in Kamloops. In some ways, he recalls, that was harder for him. “When I got to that school, there were still some places in town Indians couldn’t go.” He was mocked for being Indian and mocked for being poor. But his parents wouldn’t let him drop out, emphasizing the importance of education. It’s the same message he gives his own daughter: “You have to be able to look after yourself and not depend on anyone.”

  The office where Jules works isn’t far from the house where he grew up, which is about the size of this workspace. The office is a study in contradictions. The large hardwood-framed windows, the oak conference table, and the imposing desk in the corner all date to the late 19th century, when this building was part of a residential school for Indians that Jules attended.

  But Jules’s office is also decorated with important pieces of tribal history. Otter pelts and buckskin clothing adorn a proud-looking mannequin. The otter is decorated with red ochre, Jules tells me, which was used before the advent of beading. Photos and proclamations line the walls, a combined accounting of Jules’s own history, including his time as chief of the Kamloops band, and the history of the Aboriginal Peoples of British Columbia. When the residential school closed, many wanted to destroy this building – even burn it to the ground – but Jules wanted to make it the headquarters for the Kamloops band leadership.

  Whether or not it affected Jules personally, the abuse and its effects on the community as a whole are hard to escape. “The majority of the kids I went to school with are dead,” he says, “because of the experience they had, the abuse, the separation [from their families and communities].”

  It was only a few years ago that, working with leaders of Anglican, Catholic, and other churches, the Canadian government developed a plan to compensate members of the affected communities for this sad chapter in the country’s history. A fund of $1.9 billion (Canadian) was set aside for payment to anyone who had attended these schools, of which $1.6 billion has been paid out. Those who had suffered sexual abuse or serious physical abuse could press their claims separately.12

  In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology on behalf of the Canadian government for the residential school system, and leaders of all the churches involved have done something similar. The Catholic Church, which was responsible for educating three-quarters of the students in the system, was the last to do so. In 2009, Pope Benedict expressed his “sorrow” to a delegation from Canada’s Assembly of First Nations for the abuse and “deplorable” treatment that First Nation students suffered at Catholic residential schools.13

  Still, for most members of First Nations who are Jules’s age or older, the residential schooling system was the defining experience of their lives. As a result, they’re wary of any change in federal policy, particularly anything that seems as if it might be another attempt at assimilation. They’re not happy with the status quo – members of First Nations are doing abysmally by every economic and social indicator – but potential solutions are met with great skepticism.

  So it’s not surprising that, even today, when outsiders come to teach at traditional public schools on reservations, community members are suspicious. The presence of Teach for America fellows is
one of the biggest sources of conflict in reservation schools. At Wounded Knee, the federally funded turnaround team fired all 10 of its teachers and told them to reapply for their jobs. Only two made the cut. The other eight were from Teach for America. And this isn’t a coincidence. Alice Phelps, the newly installed principal, explained why the TFA corps members didn’t belong at Pine Ridge. “None of them were asked back,” she tells me, “because they’d have to be highly qualified. We wanted highly qualified teachers who had experience and could manage our students and also work on strategies to bring them up.”

  The battle over Teach for America has intensified across the United States in the past couple of years, with union-backed protest movements taking hold at universities and with members of the teaching establishment criticizing the group in op-ed pieces and on cable news. But nowhere is TFA facing more opposition than in Indian communities.

  On the surface, welcoming Teach for America should be a no-brainer. TFA is obviously selective: for the 2014–15 school year, it had 50,000 applicants and accepted about 5,300 of them. Over 10,000 corps members now work in 50 urban and rural districts, and they come from the best schools in the nation. One in five has a degree in science, math, technology, or engineering14 – the areas our public schools are most deficient in. Corps members typically commit to a two-year stint at an underserved school, attending a training camp over the summer to learn classroom management and continuing their professional development while in the classroom.

  So why the objection to TFA’s presence? Or more to the point: if you’re a principal who doesn’t seem to have a grasp of first-grade math, how can you fire young men and women with Ivy League degrees who want to spend at least two years of their lives working for next to nothing to help your kids succeed?