Special education teachers in the Salmon River School District concluded that they could no longer control students who, according to their parents, were angry or sad. So they constructed a “barrier” made from “PVC and vinyl” to cage those kids in a makeshift “timeout” room. Other children they locked in plywood boxes until they settled themselves down.
Two-thirds of the kids at Salmon River are Indigenous, from the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation that straddles the US-Canada border. Democratic State Assemblyman Michael Cashman, who represents the district where the school stands, pointed out that a recently completed New York State Department of Education Investigation tells “an absolutely abhorrent story of mistreatment of youth.” He’s right. “These harms,” he continued, “are amplified by the cultural context they unfolded within: many of the families in the school district are Indigenous, a group that has a long history with systemic abuse from schools.”
These kids have family members who attended the notorious Mohawk Institute, known as the “Mushhole,” across the border in Canada. They have ancestors who attended the Thomas Asylum in western New York and even Carlisle, in Pennsylvania. The pain parents felt when they learned of these illegal restraints—which school officials called “calming stations”– should be perfectly understandable. After all, if you did this to your own child, in your own house, those children would rightfully be taken from you. You would rightfully be considered a monster.
Mush Hole or Rape, part of a searing art exhibit I was able to visit on tour when it came to Rochester in 2013. By R. G. Miller
There are so many episodes in the Native American past where people who felt that they acted in the best interest of Indigenous peoples did them enormous damage. There are other cases of stupidity so great that it approached the level of malevolence. And of course there is plenty of pure evil as well.
A graveyard filled with the bodies of dead children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA.
I am not sure what happened at Salmon River, whether bumbling good will, stupidity, or evil, but I am glad NYSED has stepped in and demanded that the school district clean up its act, follow state laws, and put reforms in place to ensure that this never happens again. For a state as heavily bureaucratized as New York, the Education Department has acted with decision.
But it’s not enough.
Over the past several years, we have seen people of color locked in cages. We have seen extraordinary acts of violence committed by the forces of government against its most vulnerable citizens. Callousness and cruelty that lies heavy in the air we breathe. Has this utter lack of empathy shaped what happened in a couple of classrooms way up in northern New York? I don’t know, but it seems to me to be the latest manifestation of a very old disease. I hope that the teachers who used those crates are never permitted to work anywhere near children ever again. And I wish that the long history of abuse experienced by Indigenous children would come to an end.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer had called for an investigation in 2022, but the state’s Department of Civil Rights refused to release the resulting 283-page report. No representatives from the Department of Civil Rights or the State Attorney General’s office attended a hearing held recently by the state legislature to explain why this was the case. Some sources have suggested that the report was “shoddy.” Others have suggested that the report bore little resemblance to the original assignment. Others still have suggested that releasing the Report could retraumatize survivors.
In order to try to sort this out, I decided to read the report, which an independent and non-profit news outlet called Bridge Michigan made public. Produced by an Indigenous-owned firm from Washington State called Kauffman and Associates, the document it produced is titled Native American Boarding Schools in Michigan: Final Report.
It’s far from perfect. The research is admittedly preliminary, despite the report’s title. The primary sources necessary to tell the story of Michigan’s boarding schools are extremely difficult to access, owing to the resistance of Catholic authorities. Marquette University has recently digitized the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Correspondence Files, but this is only a very first step. Kauffman and Associates had to produce a detailed report in a limited amount of time. There is a lot of material they were not able to examine, and I cannot imagine a historian, who wanted to write a book on boarding schools in Michigan, finishing a thorough and satisfying work in so few years. There is so much material that the Report’s authors did not have time to assess. This is not the authors’ fault.
The bulk of the report relies on survey responses by thirty Michigan boarding school survivors, and 165 “Descendants, who shared what they knew, experienced, remembered or had heard about the state’s boarding schools. Identifying and interviewing the dwindling number of aged survivors must be a priority if the State is interested in bringing about healing, reconciliation and justice. There are more voices out there, and this report’s sample is small. It is unclear the relationship between “survivors” and “descendants.” Descendants tended to be much more harsh in their assessment of boarding schools than did survivors. For anyone who has read Brenda Child’s important essay, “The Boarding School as Metaphor,” this is not surprising at all.
Survivors and descendants both recognized the schools’ genocidal intention to erase Indigenous identity. Teachers routinely used derogatory language to describe their students. 78% of survivors and 90% of descendants said that children were not permitted to practice their culture. Many survivors said that they learned to feel shame about being Indigenous. Some former students adopted a range of “dysfunctional coping” methods, and some students committed suicide. Some of the students suffered from malnutrition. Survivors and descendants agreed about this. They also reported sadistic punishments, long hours of work in a system reliant on the exploitation of their labor, and separation from the many tender ties of family. Some survivors passed on the destructive tendencies they learned to their descendants, producing intergenerational trauma. They faced coercive attempts to persuade them to accept Christianity, seldom saw a doctor if they fell ill, and faced abuse and neglect.
There is nothing in the Michigan report that will surprise those who are familiar with the long history of Native American boarding schools in the United States. For that reason, the apparent decision to shelve the report is puzzling. There is not much that is new here. There was, however, in the report a list of recommendations that Kauffman and Associates felt the governor and state legislature should enact, and these may have raised the hackles of racists who objected to the breadth of the commitment they envisioned. Thinking in terms of the Four Directions, the Kauffman report said that the East is represented by “yellow, spring, childhood, and spirituality,” which corresponded to the early stage of reparations and the work towards healing. By following these “East Recommendations,” Michigan would “contribute to the spiritual healing within Native communities by recognizing harm, empowering families to reclaim their lost histories and identities, and be a step toward restoring balance.”
It is not hard to imagine that a state bureaucrat might conclude that these recommendations come at too high a price. For Michigan to “acknowledge that it has an inherent and ongoing obligation to provide for the educational interests of Indian nations” in the state, and that the state “has also knowingly neglected this obligation, contributing to the harm experienced under its oversight,” is a heavy lift in Trump’s America, where the white people of the past could do no wrong. To “acknowledge that its actions and inactions associated with Native American boarding schools, have caused significant damage to the education, health, and well-being of Tribes and their citizens,” might be seen as a heavy burden indeed.
Does Michigan want to make things better? Then the state “must embrace the broadest, most inclusive approach in its efforts to address” the problems boarding schools created, and the governor must issue “an executive order as an official apology that recognizes its deliberate participation in the national policy if Native American boarding schools.” Find the evidence. Force the Catholic Church, using the subpoena power of the state legislature, to turn over its documents, and fully fund the mammoth task of documenting the causes and consequences of Michigan’s boarding school era.
Words and apologies are not enough. And it cannot be a top-down solution. Within six months to a year of the report’s publication, as the first of its “south recommendations” that “can contribute to the emotional healing within Native communities by fostering justice and accountability, honoring lived experiences, respecting Tribal knowledge, restoring familial bonds, and creating spaces for cultivating genuine healing,” the report recommended that the state “consult with the Tribes on all state activities surrounding Native American boarding schools. Michigan should, as well, “provide financial support for ongoing research regarding its role in the development and perpetuation of Native American boarding schools as well as the aftermath.” In addition to providing financial support for research and to remedy the damage done, Michigan would as well “support individual and community tribal healing by providing resources, programs, and funding committed to addressing the trauma caused by Native American boarding schools.” The state must fix what it broke, repair what it damaged, and provide a full record of its actions to be taught to children in all of Michigan’s schools, and “eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual and physical abuse charges involving minors in Michigan.”
The West recommendations would “contribute to physical healing with Native communities by restoring resources necessary for healing and well-being and fostering reconnections to traditional knowledge and cultural practices that promote wellness.” When a state tries to eradicate a culture, there are going to be costly consequences, so the state must investigate the misuse of federal trust funds by state authorities and support financially language revitalization programs. When much is broken, much must be repaired.
EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, “transitional justice should be used as the frameworks for all recommendations.” In a world where Donald Trump’s executive orders banish discussions of the Nation’s past that focus on enslavement and dispossession, and in which DOGE cutsmic funds from proposals with worlds like “tribal” contained therein, I find it easy to imagine how concepts like transitional justice would alienate racist Republicans and timorous Democrats. It is an approach, after all, “designed to transform societies into rights-respecting democracies while addressing past human rights violations.” It embraces things the Trump administration has rejected explicitly, and that Democrats approach with extreme caution and a noticeable lack of enthusiasm: “criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reforms, memorials, apologies and art.”
There is much more to learn about boarding schools in Michigan, the report’s authors suggest. This work must be undertaken carefully and critically. But even with the evidence collected thus far and included in the report, the remaining questions are simple. How serious is Michigan about setting things right? Was this undertaking more than a performative gesture? Are the recommendations the report made too big a request for a settler state to address honestly and seriously? Now that we know what we know about Michigan’s boarding schools, what is the state government willing to do about it? I hope I am wrong, but the apparent decision to shelve the report suggests to me that the answer will be, distressingly, “not very much at all.”
Susie Porter and Annie Dibo stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ place from April 30 until August 27, 1909. The stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ “delightful home” in Oak Lane until June, and then they made her way to the cottage in Ocean City, near the beach where Nora Printup died.
Both students’ files are pretty thin. Annie arrived at Carlisle from the Mohawk Akwesasne reservation in September of 1906 and stayed until June of 1911 when she graduated. She seems to have returned for one more year of training in nursing later that year, as a twenty-year old. We know little about her home life, though her file does contain her Mohawk name, rendered phonetically by one of the school’s clerks as “ha-nau-ka-rou-to-ra-ta.” Likewise, we know little of her life after she left Carlisle. She may have been the same “Annie Diabo” who, in 1947, received word that her son, a World War II veteran and a high steel worker in California’s Bay Area, was struck by a car while he crossed Highway 1 after a night of drinking. Diabo is a common Mohawk name, and Mohawks are known for their work in high steel.
A photo of Annie Dibo, 1911, in her Student File
Susie Porter came to Carlisle from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She was 17 years old when she arrived in 1907. She married shortly after her return home in 1912. She was described during her stay at Mrs. Jacobs’ place as “a good trust-worthy girl, neat about her work, a good waitress, very satisfactory.”
One way to get at the experiences of these young women while they were at Carlisle is to search for their names in the school newspaper, The Arrow. Both girls were active in the Mercers and both were members of the YWCA. Annie gave a number of “Recitations,” on various subjects, while Susie seems to have loved to debate. She took the affirmative position in a debate on the proposition “that iron is more beneficial to man than gold” and the negative position on the proposition “that foreign immigration to the United States should be restricted.” Susie was a far more visible student than Annie. In the art room, Susie made “the most handsome blanket,” following a Pueblo design. “The soft colors, so carefully blended, for a color plan that is both pleasant and restful to the eye.” I wish I could see what it looked like.
There is a story in The Arrow that gives us our only glimpse into the life of the girls who stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ place in Ocean City. It is easy to imagine that Nora Printup loved it there. Her life could not have been that different from Susie and Annie, who arrived four years after her death. Katherine Wolf, a Cherokee, was placed for her outing at a home in Ocean City not far from Mrs. Jacobs. Katherine found Susie and Annie, and the girls became friends. Susie, Annie and Katherine “went bathing almost every afternoon” and, “in the evening,” Katherine wrote, “we generally took a walk along the beach.”
Annie kept in touch with Carlisle after she left, but it is impossible to tell how much and to what extent. Susie left Carlisle, first for Wisconsin to keep house for her father, and then to Minnesota. She married, and continued to write to the school. She returned for graduation in 1912, and she sent letters asking for sheet music from the Carlisle song book that she wished to play at church. She was a devoted Christian, and a devoted Carlisle alum.
Julia Peña was part of the ensemble cast of The Captain of Plymouth. Like Ethel Daniels, she played one of the “squaws” in the 1909 Carlisle Graduation pageant.
The “Squaws” in The Captain of Plymouth. One of these women is Esther Daniels, and another is Julia Peña. I do not know which ones.
Julia, a “Mission Indian” from Southern California, had a lot of experience with boarding schools. At the age of 8, she began attending the St. Boniface Indian School in Banning. She was there from 1900 until 1907. She spent one year at the day school in Pala, California, before traveling across North America to begin attending Carlisle in 1909. It was a family affair. Julia’s older brother Nicholas had attended Carlisle from 1895 until 1905. Years later, in 1913, he was known as the “best Indian farmer in Pala.”
Julia’s story is similar to that of the other young women who attended Carlisle, and who passed through Mrs. Jacobs’ house. She was active in student organization at Carlisle, playing a leading role in the Girls Holy Names Society. She performed in school plays, and attended sporting events from her outing placements when she had the time. The year before she arrived at Mrs. Jacobs’ house, Julia wrote to one of her teachers, Miss Georgenson, to announce “that she has a very pleasant home near the Susquehanna,” and that “everything is so pleasant that a person just can’t help enjoying life.”
Some of her patrons were satisfied with Julia, and others were disappointed. She stayed with the Engles family in Moorestown, New Jersey, from September 1909 until the end of August in 1910. To Mrs. Engles, Julia was “not satisfactory.” At times she did good work, but “at other times, careless, rude and impertinent, not honest.” Julia had apparently stolen some things from the Engles. Because she apologized, the patron would keep her through August but no longer. Another patron, one year later, though that Julia “is willing and tries.” She was a good worker, but her vision was so poor that she needed glasses badly. Once fitted, she wore her glasses all the time and performed much better work. We don’t know what Mrs. Jacobs thought of her.
Julia, like most of Mrs. Jacobs’ girls, missed Carlisle once she left. On her way home she sent postcards from the places she passed through to her former classmates and teachers. When she moved from Pala to San Diego, she continued to send postcards to her friends in Pennsylvania. She sent to Carlisle a dollar so that she could join the Carlisle Alumni Association. In April of 1915, now married and back in Pala, she wrote that “I am getting along very well at my new home. I used to live in San Diego, but I like it better here, as I am living on a farm. I am always glad to hear about the progress Carlisle is making, and I hope it will continue. I will close with best wishes for success to the Alumni Association, not forgetting all my classmates.”
Another student who left Carlisle, stayed in touch, and continued to support the school’s programs. Carlisle, as it did for Ethel Daniels and Esther Reed, made a huge difference in Julia Peña’s life.
Ethel Daniels was Esther Reed‘s roommate at Mrs. Jacobs’ house between April and August of 1908. Ethel, a Ute from White Rock, had arrived at Carlisle in 1904 when she was twelve years old. She graduated in 1909 and immediately returned home. Mrs. Jacobs’ house was her last outing placement.
Ethel started sending postcards to friends at Carlisle on her way home. She missed the school as soon as she left it. As soon as she got home she reported that she “is enjoying western life” and that her brother Albert “is now a proud father of a cute little boy.”
Why share these details of her personal life? Ethel wrote to the school’s superintendent, Moses Friedman, and he would place excerpts of her letters in the Carlisle Arrow, the school’s weekly student newspaper. The Arrow was filled with small pieces of news like this from her and from many other students. At one level these updates served as propaganda–Carlisle graduates were succeeding when they returned home–but it seems to me that this is an explanation that is incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying. Students who returned home wrote back to Carlisle in numbers that at first surprised me, letting people back in Pennsylvania know what they had been up to. Ethel quite clearly loved her time at Carlisle. She said it time and again. So did so many other former students. She was proud, she wrote Friedman, to think that she had been the first president at Carlisle of the “Mercers Literary Society.” In that capacity she practiced her oratory. She was a student in the school’s art department, and was skilled enough as an artist that an Albany businessman purchased a rug that she made. She participated in a musical pageant, “The Captain of Plymouth,” in which she played one of a number of unnamed “Squaws.” Carlisle was an important part of her life.
By August of 1910, Ethel was engaged, living on a ranch with her mother, with “forty acres of land, one team, two riding ponies,” and “eleven head of cattle.” She asked that the staff at Carlisle continue to send her copies of The Arrow. She updated students at Carlisle on her family life. She married Donald Cobbs, and soon gave birth to sons named Loyde and Manferd. In 1914, she was living at Fort Duschesne in Utah, and let Superintendent Friedman know that she and the family were well, and that she was “always anxious for the dear Arrow to read the news of dear Old Carlisle.”
A photograph from Fort Duschesne late in the 19th century.
She reported in a letter to Friedman that she, Daniel, and the boys were preparing to move to a new allotment. “We have taken another allotment up away from the River bottom,” she wrote. They had bought a new team, after the old team died. “We felt lost with out a team but we just kept courage up, and now we have another team I am glad to say.” Her kids were cute, and she lived near her brother and his family, too. Ranching was hard work but she seemed happy. She reminded Friedman once again to send the Arrow. “It has so many news of how dear old Carlisle is improving.”
Files like Ethel Daniels’ are not uncommon. They do not square easily with the horror stories unearthed at Canadian residential schools, and they do not square easily with the accounts given today of American boarding schools. There is ample evidence of cruelty, neglect, illness and sadness at Carlisle, and we shall get to those stories in the coming segments. But there were also many Indigenous peoples for whom Carlisle provided exciting opportunities, a community of friends, a chance to learn a trade, to perform, to play sports, to make art. Carlisle changed lives, to be sure. Sometimes it devastated, and sometimes it transformed, but it always left a powerful impression on the lives of those who attended.
THEY WERE JUST KIDS. That is something that leaps off the page when you look at their student files. Delia and Florence Edwards, two Onondaga sisters, arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in December of 1909 and May of 1910, respectively. Delia was fourteen years old, Florence 13.
They were not dragged to Carlisle. State officials did not forcefully remove them from their homes. Like many of the young people who came to Carlisle, a parent signed them up. The girls attended the Onondaga Nation School for a couple of years, and then the Mindenville School District in the Mohawk Valley before they came to Carlisle. By the time the girls arrived, Carlisle required all students to have had several years of prior schooling and fluency in English. David Russel Hill, an Onondaga chief, the leader of the Onondaga Indian Band, and an advocate for Indian education, wrote on both of the girls’ applications that they had “advanced beyond the required studies.” If they wished to continue their schooling, he suggested, Carlisle may have been the best and the only opportunity open to them.
RECENT MONTHS have witnessed the discovery of more than 1300 unmarked graves at the site of a number of Canadian residential schools. The discoveries, according to a story that ran in the Ottawa Citizen, are proof of what First Nations people have been saying for a long time: “That Canada’s Indian Residential Schools spent nearly a century overseeing shockingly high rates of death among their students, with the bodies of the dead routinely withheld from their families and home communities.” In part because of the outcry these discoveries sparked, the American Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced an initiative to “address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be.” Haaland cautioned that the work would be difficult and time-consuming. Nothing, she said, will “undo the heartbreak and loss we feel.” Nonetheless, she said, “only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud of.”
The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative will investigate “the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools.” These schools, said Bryan Newland, the Principal Deputy Assistant for Indian Affairs, were intended to “culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed.” “Hundreds of thousands” of Indian children, Newland said, were taken from their communities. The Interior Department will work to collect the relevant documents, locate possible burial sites, and try to set the record straight.”
This is a worthwhile project, one of the only times in American history where an agency of the federal government has pledged to take an honest look at its history, collect the evidence, and allow for a true accounting of this part of the nation’s past. It is stunning, really. Having spent much of my work time the last year or so reading through Carlisle student files, this will be complicated and in many ways difficult work. And it may force many people to reconsider what they know to be true about Indian boarding schools.
CARLISLE WAS ABOUT 250 MILES south of the Onondaga Nation Territory, so Delia and Florence traveled less far than most of the 10,000 students who attended the school between 1879, when it opened, and 1918, when it closed.
It is difficult to discern much about the girls’ lives before Carlisle. Their Onondaga mother had died from heart disease, and they were being raised by their Mohawk father on the Nation Territory. We know which schools they attended, and that they were Protestants, though the denomination is not clear.
A military officer named Richard Henry Pratt founded the school to “kill the Indians and save the man.” Speaking to a gathering of Baptist ministers in 1883, Pratt said that “in Indian Civilization, I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under holding them until they are thoroughly soaked.” The best that Pratt could see in the thousands of young Native Americans who attended Carlisle was that with proper training they might be formed into something else, and he boasted of his ability to do just that.
Carlisle’s Founder, Richard Henry Pratt
Pratt was an energetic and effective promoter of the school. He produced before and after photographs of Carlisle students, the first depicting the child in their traditional dress, the second with their hair cut, their faces cleaned, and dressed in Carlisle’s school uniform. Pratt claimed that Carlisle took “savage” and “wild” Indians and transformed them into civilized individuals, ready for citizenship and productive employment in the American republic. His school, according to a newspaper article announcing its opening, “will endeavor to save the Indians from extermination by educating young Indians, who can grow up to be leaders of their people and direct them to civilization.” In reality, the largest numbers of students came from Iroquois communities, eastern Cherokees, and the Oneidas in Wisconsin. These young people spoke and wrote in English when they arrived, were members of Christian denominations, and familiar with farming.
Pratt needed to promote his efforts. Contrary to popular belief, policy-makers began to criticize off-reservation boarding schools as educational institutions. Early twentieth century commissioners of Indian Affairs and secretaries of the interior, for instance, much preferred reservation day schools, which were less expensive because they allowed children to return home at the end of the day, and because they better prepared the students for life in American society. Francis Leupp, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, wrote in 1905 that “it is a great mistake to try, as many good persons of bad judgment have tried, to start the little ones in the path of civilization by snapping all the ties of affection between them and their parents, and teaching them to despise the aged and nonprogressive members of their families.” Pratt retired five years before the Edwards sisters arrived, at a time when boarding schools faced a steady drumbeat of criticism from reformers, political leaders, and of course Native peoples themselves, who viewed them as retrograde institutions, dated and of questionable value compared to the benefits of schools closer to home.
Students at Carlisle spent only some of their time on school grounds. Much of their time was spent on their various “Outing” placements, where they were sent to live with white families to learn a craft or a trade or, in the case of women, basic housewifery. If they were old enough, they attended schools near their patrons’ home. Delia attended Moorestown High School in New Jersey, and Florence attended Haddonfield High.
Delia’s patrons found her “headstrong and self-willed,” but capable of doing well when she tried. Another thought she was “a great child and tries to please.” Florence spent time in Jenkinstown and Kennet Square, Pennsylvania, and at a couple of sites in New Jersey. One of her patrons, in 1910, told the Carlisle field agent, whose job it was to check in on students, that “Florence is not satisfactory, she is not very strong, is at a critical period in her life.” The thirteen year old was “willing,” but just not capable, in the eyes of her patron, to provide enough help. “She is very untidy about her person & work.” A year later, however, a new patron in Beverley, New Jersey, reported that she was very fond of Florence, and found her “a good obedient child, a little slow, but tries and is improving.”
One of Delia Edwards’ records cards, listing her outing assignments and patrons’ addresses.
Florence may have struggled at times during her placements, but she took advantage of the opportunities Carlisle presented. She wrote for the student newspaper. She received a prize for one of her essays from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. She was an active member of Carlisle’s YWCA chapter, and at one meeting led the students in a lecture on “the heroes of the Bible.” She was also a member of the Mercers, where she practiced “Declamation.” IN 1914, she gave a reading in the auditorium of her essay, “Is it Worth While?” (The paper gave no sense of what “it” was). In January of 1915 she led the Protestant service at the school “and also gave a fine little talk.” She must have been a magnetic figure, filled with charisma. People liked her.
Both of the girls went home for the summer of 1915. By September they were back at school and both had moved on to their next placements. In October of 1915, the Carlisle Arrow ran a report of students staying in the school’s hospital. Florence “who came in from the county,” was one of them. She was “now up,” and, according to Agnes Owl, “was only lonesome for Carlisle.”
Turned out it was much more serious. Florence had contracted tuberculosis, the dread disease that killed 194 out of every 100,000 Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lawrence Edwards, her father, began to hear that his daughter was ill. In November he wrote to the school’s superintendent, asking for information. He had heard nothing from Florence, but “others are telling me she is sick.” Two weeks later, on the sixth of December in 1915, the Superintendent wrote back. Florence was cured, but he told Mr. Edwards that he thought it advisable “to let your daughter…have a complete rest in order that she regain her physical strength.” He was sending her home to Onondaga.
Delia, it turned out, was sick as well. Mrs. Lippincott, one of her patrons, sent Delia to the hospital. She complained of abdominal pain. It was appendicitis, and she had surgery in November. She recovered well. While Florence journeyed home to rest, Delia returned to her patron. She wanted to go back to Carlisle. She wrote to her friend Lucy Lenoir, a Chippewa student. The letters are wonderful. Delia was a relentless kidder, always ready to affectionately tease her friend. And she was bored to tears at times doing housework for her patron. “I wish we could be there for the social which will be the last Saturday” of January. Earlier, she told Lucy, she had broken up with her boyfriend. “We certainly would make a hit on some swell guys,” she wrote. But getting back to Carlisle was more difficult than it should have been. The superintendent saw no reason for her to return to the school. Her patrons reported that her work was good, and that she was succeeding in her studies. Delia told Lucy that “I am so darn sick of country life I believe I’d die if I stay here much longer.” Maybe, she wrote, “I’ll play sick and see if I can’t go back to Carlisle.” She missed her friends. A short time later she wrote to Lucy again, saying “Dearie, I have no idea where I will be when you open this letter, but if I am not in my grave I will be at dear old Carlisle.”
Delia would not make it back to Carlisle until June. In May of 1916, Lawrence wrote to the superintendent. “My daughter Florence is very low now and I wish to have Delia come to her before anything happens.” Delia was summoned back to the school, where she arrived on the First of June. She returned home to the Nation Territory on June 6.
One month later, Florence died. “She had been ill for about ten months,” Delia wrote. “She certainly wanted to get well so she could return to Carlisle in the fall to graduate with her class next spring.” She told the superintendent that it was hard for her to lose a sister. “Father and I are trying our best to bear it,” she wrote, “but life is not ours so we will have to take things as they come.” Her sister had returned to Carlisle from her outing assignment with a fatal illness. The school’s records document the names of the children who died there. Still, Delia could not wait to return. Like many of the Onondagas who attended Carlisle, she missed the school when she was not there. She was nineteen years old. In the very same letter in which she expressed her grief at her sister’s death, she told the Superintendent that “I will try to return the latter part of September to Carlisle to continue my studies.” She wanted to “be placed with the graduating class as I certainly worked hard this winter with my studies at the Moorestown High School.” She wanted confirmation that she could return, so she asked the superintendent to “let me know if I can be entered in the ‘Fourth Year vocational’ class and I will return just as soon as I can before I get too far behind with my studies.” She hoped as well that the school would consider admitting her stepsister Elsie. Carlisle mattered to Delia.
The last letter in Delia’s Carlisle file, announcing Florence’s death, and how she wanted to recover well enough to return.
She never returned to “dear old Carlisle.” She was told that she did not have “sufficient credits to enter the class which is to complete the course in another year.” She should return to Moorestown High School and then, at “the opening of the year you will be given the opportunity to take whatever work for which you are prepared.” Her last date of attendance was listed as May 31, 1916. It is not hard to believe that when Carlisle closed a short time later, she may have seen this as a loss for her people. As Onondaga chief Jesse Lyon asked, “Why was Carlisle closed? Nobody know,” he said. “Too good for Indian, maybe, but that is what Indian needs.”
THE STORY OF CARLISLE is not a simple one. As historians we know to be attuned to ambiguity and ambivalence. It is proper to view boarding schools as American institutions directed toward cultural genocide—the erasure of Native American culture, values, and beliefs. It attempted to play that role. But it did not always succeed. Students were homesick, at times. Some ran away from the school, especially the boys. Some returned to their communities feeling as if they no longer belonged. Yet there were Onondagas who ran away from home to get to Carlisle. Some of those runaways were not heading home, but to visit girlfriends. It is proper then, to view Carlisle as well as a flawed institution which Native American students attended to receive an education and learn crafts and trades, or to play sports or to play music, opportunities that were often closed to them elsewhere. More than one thing can be true at a time. Carlisle took and it gave, but it neither destroyed nor erased, the Onondagas who attended it between 1879 and 1918. The Interior Department’s Boarding School Initiative will need to be attuned to the school’s ambivalent legacy.
Because
I teach a first year writing seminar at my college on the history of the
Carlisle Boarding School, I have spent a fair amount of time reckoning with the
words and deeds of Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the Indian’s school’s founder
and chief propagandist.
The
school’s history fascinates me. In my
own research on the history of the Onondaga Nation, I have followed those who
attended the school through its records and reconstructed their lives as much
as the evidence permits. Like my
students, I make use of the digitized school records available at the Carlisle
Indian School Digital Resource Center.
One
thing I have not done is visit Yale’s Beinecke Library, where Pratt’s personal papers are housed. I have read his published writings, and in
them I find it difficult to detect any self-doubt, any questioning, of the
school’s fundamental premise: to best prepare Native American men and women for
citizenship and participation in the American body politic and economic system,
they must be removed from their homes and educated away from the
reservation.
Pratt was quite explicit about
this. The attachments of home generated
a powerful pull. Even boarding schools located on reservations could not work,
Pratt believed, because the sights, sounds, and scents of home provided a
powerful distraction. Best to remove the
students entirely. Speaking to a gathering
of Baptist ministers, Pratt said that “In Indian Civilization, I am a Baptist,
because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get
them under holding them until they are thoroughly soaked.” Because of his tendency to make statements
like these, scholars and the interested public describe the boarding schools as
brutal institutions. Pratt, they say,
acted with genocidal intent. He said,
indeed, that he hoped to “kill the Indian,” and save the man.
There is no doubt that there was
cruelty, brutality and short-sightedness.
There was coldness and callousness and inattention. Some students resisted. One of my students is working on a paper I
very much look forward to reading on firestarters, girls who set fires at
Carlisle and were expelled. Yet the
graveyard at the school contains the bodies of students who died far from home,
the victims, in Calvin Luther Martin’s phrase, of “blundering goodwill.” Efforts are underway to repatriate some of
these children, to return their bodies to their homelands. There are stories at
Carlisle to melt a historian’s heart.
At the same time, we historians
generally find simple morality tales uninteresting, because the past is always
more complicated. For example, I
recently reviewed a book by a historian named Keith Burich about the Thomas Indian School in New York, located on the Seneca Nation’s
Cattaraugus Reservation. Thomas was open for a century, from the 1850s to the
1950s. There are people alive today who
attended Thomas. The consequences of the
school’s treatment of Iroquois children, Burich writes, were horrific. The school’s policies and its approach
created in the students “a state of dependency and perpetual childhood that
guaranteed the students’ inability to adjust to life outside the institution.” Arriving at Thomas from families broken by
the forces of colonialism, “the same ‘pathologies’ that landed them at
Thomas—poverty, divorce, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence—followed them
when they left, ensuring that there would be future generations of Thomas students.”
Yet the evidence that Burich provides
suggests that he may not be attuned enough to the school’s ambivalent legacy.
The Mohawk Andrew Herne, disappointed by the public school opportunities at
home, hitchhiked to Thomas to enroll.
Burich points out that for many of the children, “Thomas provided a far
better educational opportunity than the public schools on or near their
respective reservations.” The Seneca
Arthur Nephew remembered the school as the best part of his life. “We were taken care of, we had shelter, we
had food, we had medical care, we had all kinds of recreation, and all kind of
trades we could learn,” he wrote. Thus it appears that Burich’s claim that the
school left children “unable to survive outside an institutional setting where every
aspect of their lives was dictated and controlled by the institution” is an
oversimplification at best, that underestimates the resilience and toughness of
Iroquois families and children. His claim that the school left its students
shattered in self-esteem and “unable to adjust to life after Thomas” seems
inadequately supported and, indeed, contradicted by some of the evidence he
presents. There was suffering to be sure, as Iroquois people have pointed
out. But there was more to Thomas than
that.
And Carlisle, too.
Pratt left Carlisle in 1904. Robert
Utley, who wrote the introduction to the University of Oklahoma Press edition
of Pratt’s From
Battlefield to Classroom
said that the school’s founder “retired.”
Technically that is correct. But Pratt left under duress, and a number
of powerful critics of the entire off-reservation boarding school enterprise
had emerged in the early twentieth century, most notably Francis Leupp, who served
as Teddy Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs.
Utley said that Pratt retired to
Rochester, New York, where I live. Other sources say the same thing. The
Rochester Public Library has done an incredible job of digitizing its local
history resources, so I set off in search of the retired Colonel Pratt. His name does not appear in any of the
published city directories, nor does that of his wife or any
of his children. I asked friends for
help, and I followed some other leads, but still no luck. Where was Colonel
Pratt? I did not know, and I worried that Utley might have been wrong.
I am fairly certain that if I had
limitless time and limitless resources, and no family and no need to do things
other than history, I could have made the trip over to New Haven. I bet there are answers there about Pratt’s
time in Rochester. But I don’t, and I
couldn’t, so I didn’t, and the staff at Yale did not answer my email queries.
I poked around a bit more and I
found what I was looking for in the newspapers.
Pratt had daughters, and they married. It did not take long to figure
out that his son-in-law Edward M. Hawkins lived in Rochester, on Highland
Avenue, a five-minute bicycle ride from where I live (I know. I tried it).
I am not sure how much time Pratt
spent in town, but he was in Rochester often. In retirement he spoke out
against the Indian Bureau, and the “ethnologists” whose work informed the
critiques of Pratt’s program for Carlisle.
Long after off-reservation boarding schools had fallen out of favor, he
continued to champion the entire effort as worthwhile and significant. He was
proud of Carlisle, and he seems to have kept in touch with former students and
even attended a reunion of former Carlisle students in 1913 in Akron, New York,
near the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
Just a couple of dozen Tonawandas attended Carlisle. More than three hundred went to Thomas. Of those who went to Carlisle their experiences seem to have mirrored those of other Haudenosaunee people who attended the boarding school. Some appreciated their time at the school and expressed their gratitude to Pratt and to his successors as superintendent. Daisie Doctor Snyder, for instance, in 1907 expressed her regret that she would not be able to return to Carlisle for that year’s commencement ceremony. She missed “Dear Old Carlisle,” and wrote that “I only hope this Commencement will surpass all others, and that the out going class are prepared to stand the hard knocks of the cold world and to fight a hard battle for the right and also to still uplift our race. Rosalie Doctor Poodry invited the administrators at Carlisle to visit her at her handsome, two-story frame house in Basom, New York, and said that she would love to send her children to Carlisle someday. She sent the superintendent a postcard,
with a photograph of the house. The baby, a little girl named Marion, had
died a few weeks before she mailed the card, and Rosalie understandably still
was broken up. As much as she looked
forward to reading the school newspapers that she received in the mail, she
asked that they not say anything about her dead child.
Rosalie
Doctor Poodry’s letter was intimate and revealing. Other Tonawandas told the
school what they were up to, but did not share too much more than that. Hiram Moses was farming forty-five acres of
reservation land, and working when needed on the state highway. He attended the Presbyterian church on the
reservation. Joseph Poodry lived in Buffalo. He worked at the Pierce Arrow plant there,
and managed the Seneca Indian baseball team.
Others
said little about their time at the school, chose not to keep in touch, and did
not reply to the school’s questionnaires.
Many of them returned to the reservation and lived lives that would have
differed little from what they might have experienced had they never gone away
to school Some succeeded, and attributed
their successes to what they learned at Carlisle. Others did not do so well. Perhaps their hardships stemmed from the
dislocation caused by the years they spent away, or the difficulties they faced
in reintegrating themselves into the community after they returned.
Yet
despite the boarding school experience, the criticism of their culture they
routinely listened to there, and their years away from home, Tonawanda remained
an indigenous homeland. Despite the
efforts of the state to break up their lands and dispossess them, a story the
Tonawandas knew all too well, they remained native peoples. And they asserted this, publicly and
frequently, in ways that Pratt could not have missed.
Colonel
Pratt is one of the villains in Native American history. He spoke of eliminating Native American
cultures, and carried out his policies, for a time, with the enthusiastic
support of American officials. But if he really believed the erasure of Indian
identity was an attainable goal, he could not have missed the reality that he
failed spectacularly. His legacy is
ambiguous, and defies easy categorization.
Every year, Tonawanda Senecas came into Rochester. I am pretty certain they were in town when Pratt was there, too. The Tonawandas went to Maplewood Park, one of the city’s popular gathering places. They set up a stage. They advertised their gathering in the papers, and the press attended and described what they saw. The Tonawandas routinely adopted and granted names to powerful white men, like Mayor Hiram Edgerton, in this photo housed in the collections of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. And as white Rochesterians gathered, and watched Indian
teams play baseball and demonstrate their lacrosse skills, and as they purchased the baskets and other items of craft produced by Tonawanda Seneca women, the Tonawandas danced.
The men wore ribbon shirts and their gustoweh. Women wore their calico dresses, their moccasins. They dressed in the traditional attire of Haudenosaunee people, with a few Plains-style feather headdresses thrown in for good measure. I like to think that Pratt, if he was in town, would have attended. He liked native peoples, after all, and liked to meet with former students. And in front of him, and white audiences who easily imagined that native peoples were part of the past, and who supported the allotment of their lands, the dissolution of aboriginal culture, and the erasure of their language, they gathered in the center of Rochester. They danced, and they proceeded to proclaim that they were still here, and that here they would remain. They were supposed to have been gone long before. If warfare or the dispossession of the nineteenth century didn’t get them, assuredly they would disappear as the century progressed. But here they were, in the middle of an important industrial city, announcing to all who cared to watch that anything the forces of colonialism might throw at them, they would survive as native peoples.
I recently finished reading Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives. It’s a beautiful little book, written originally in French, translated into English by Thomas Scott-Railton.
Farge’s journey into the archives brought her into contact with the denizens of 18th century Paris, ordinary men and women who entered the historical record only because they found themselves dragged before authorities as accusers and victims, witnesses or perpetrators. They came to advocate for their cause, to protect or recover their property, to seek redress, or vengeance, or, at times, to save their lives. Farge describes the people of Paris, but her experiences in the archives and the lessons she drew from the people she encountered there—men and women who appear fleetingly and incompletely in the judicial records–are wise and wonderful enough to be useful to all students of the past, whatever field they study. I can imagine using Farge’s book the next time I teach the freshman writing seminar.
The allure of the archives, Farge writes, “is rooted in these encounters with the silhouettes of the past, be they faltering or sublime. There is an obscure beauty in so many existences, barely illuminated by words, in confrontations with each other, imprisoned by their own devices as much as they were undone by their era.”
Farge describes the rituals and mechanics of archival work, and she describes archival etiquette, at least for an era before digital cameras became commonplace. But the book’s beauty lies in its account of Farge’s interactions with the archives’ inhabitants, the ordinary French men and women who show up in bits and pieces in the surviving records. “The incompleteness of the archive,” she writes, paradoxically “coexists right alongside the abundance of documents.” Tell me about it. Historians write down quotations from these documents, and “the proper usage of documents is similar to the inlaying of precious stones: a quotations only truly takes on meaning and significance if it fills a role that nothing else could.” Historical scholarship is a discipline and a craft and, for Farge, it is a reflective process. Those working in the archives must remain conscious of what they are doing, and the consequences that may result from their carelessness. We hold these forgotten lives in our hands. That is a privilege that comes with great responsibility.
History is never the simple repetition of archival content, but a pulling away from it, in which we never stop asking how and why these words came to wash ashore on the manuscript page. One must put the archive aside for a while, in order to better think on one’s own terms, and later draw everything together. If you have a taste for the archives, you feel a need for these alternating tasks of exclusion and reintegration of documents and writing, as you add your own style to the thoughts that emerge.
Still, so many people you meet in the archives, so many stories. “What can be done with these countless individuals, their tenuous plans, their many disjointed movements?” She likens these images to silhouettes on a wall or the shifting images one sees when gazing into a kaleidoscope, dynamic always, appearing and then disappearing, passing quickly out of your field of view before you get a clear sense of what you are looking at.
I get it. My colleagues who write about Native American history will sympathize. In so many archives, in so many collections of documents, in parish registers, burial records, transcripts of diplomatic encounters, bits of correspondence scattered here and there, receipts, school records, and even newspapers, thousands of lives, thousands of individuals, will appear fleetingly, saying little or nothing at all, words recorded by people with limited understanding of the peoples whose stories they tell.
These lives are difficult to reconstruct, I know, as I work through the many thousands of pages of documents I have collected to write my Onondaga book. It is difficult and demanding work. We work to recover larger pictures from scattered or broken fragments. But as I look small, I look large, too. We wrestle with the challenge of understanding the relationship between these individuals and the larger societal forms to which they belonged as native peoples.
It is easy to write the history of native peoples as objects acted upon by non-native actors. Writing that sort of history, however, privileges the forces of colonialism and the voices speaking in behalf of that process.
Farge has given me a lot to think about as I continue to read my sources and work on my history of the Onondaga Nation.
The Onondagas, as a community, experienced warfare, disease, and dispossession. They endured efforts to break up their reservation, to individualize them and destroy their national identity, and to transform them into something else. They confronted the State of New York’s efforts to extend its laws over their lands and the decisions of nearby business interests that destroyed Onondaga Creek. Telling these stories requires detailed examination of the many thousands of pages of documents and an enormous amount of reading, but the work itself is not particularly difficult. The views of white policy makers and power brokers are uncovered with relative ease. The challenging part is reconstructing the lives of the thousands of individuals who cross the pages in the sources I read, and who interacted with these larger forces.
History: It’s the study of continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions and cultures. To tell these stories of continuity and change, to give them real meaning, requires a close examination of the small pieces, the individual pebbles on the beach. Boarding schools were terrible, we are told, instruments of cultural-genocide marching under the guise of benevolence. Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle School, and I read his propaganda and his reports, all the paper detritus of his campaign to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The best he could see in the thousands of young Native Americans who came to Carlisle was that they might be formed into something else. Pratt’s words are difficult to read, knowing that his blundering arrogance shattered so many lives and caused so much grief.
But I also need to look at the young men and women who clearly wanted to go to Carlisle because it offered them an opportunity to acquire a trade, to improve themselves. The records exist. We can see the Carlisle students who ran away from their “outing system” placements because they were homesick or were needed at home or because they hated their overseers, or fell in love with a fellow student working at a place not far away. It requires telling the stories of those Onondagas who missed the school once they left, who pestered the school’s administrators to send them copies of the student newspaper, and who attended Carlisle games when the team was close enough for them to make the trip. We must consider of the stories of those who were sent home because they were sick or rebellious or because they drank too much. It requires placing one set of difficult readings against another and against yet another still, cobbling the pieces together into some sort of sensible whole.
Sometimes, the people who appear in these records have children and grandchildren still living. As historians, drawn in by the allure of the archives, we are voyeurs and witnesses, and we will uncover stories that if shared carelessly can produce grief and pain and sadness. If we view our trips into the archive like a raid or a treasure hunt–and I will admit to feeling this way during my 5:00am drives down the Thruway from Rochester to Albany–we risk becoming exploitative, engaging in a sort of colonial enterprise. These documents are not ours, and the stories we fashion from the lives we see in bits and pieces do not belong to us alone. As we share these stories, and shape our careers as historians on the backs of the people about whom we write, we must remember our obligations, and the seriousness of our enterprise.
Many of my friends are historians, and many of us, I believe, identify closely with the work that we do and the subjects that we teach. It is part of what makes us what and who we are. We think about our work a lot, maybe too much for those with whom we share our lives. We can obsess and lose sleep as we think about the questions that can only be answered by a sojourn in the archives. We must be honest: as historians, we are nothing without these stories. Arlette Farge’s book reminded me of these obligations, and the deep and alluring connections that exist between the people we write about and the stories we tell, what we do and how we see ourselves.
This Friday is Sorry Day in Australia. Though it has antecedents in aboriginal protest and commemoration, Sorry Day has taken place every May 26 since 1998. It followed in its current form from a May 1997 report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission called Bringing them Home, which acknowledged that “Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the European occupation of Australia.” That report was tabled twenty years ago this year. Children in Australia’s boarding schools experienced physical and sexual abuse. They received little education of value. The Australian government admits that now.
In February of 2008, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a formal apology. You can watch his powerful statement here. He spoke of the brutality of Australia’s historic treatment of its indigenous neighbors.
Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people.
It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.
To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.
On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.
On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry.
I offer you this apology without qualification.
We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.
We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied.
We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.
In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation – from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.
I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally.
Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that.
Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.
I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.
I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.
My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia.
And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.
Australians are a passionate lot. We are also a very practical lot.
For us, symbolism is important but, unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance, it is little more than a clanging gong.
It is not sentiment that makes history; it is our actions that make history.
Rudd’s statement, which is worth reading in its entirety, goes far beyond anything the United States has considered. There is in this country a substantial number of people who do not like to hear about the negative parts of US history. I have heard this sentiment a lot over the years, and it takes different forms: discussion of the negative parts of American history is unpatriotic, or demoralizing, or depressing; telling these stories might come at the expense of telling more positive and uplifting stories that could bring young people to respect and revere American institutions; or, occasionally, telling the stories of those individuals and groups who have fallen by the wayside or who suffered as a result of American progress somehow diminishes the dominant narrative and those white people who populate and benefit from it. These reactionary forces are powerful. Those who bring these stories up can expect to be criticized severely, to have their integrity and their objectivity as scholars questioned, or to be dismissed with that empty-headed epithet that their work is “politically correct.” I saw this first hand when I taught in Montana at the beginning of my career in the 1990s. Speaking out on these issues, it turned out, nearly cost me my job.
Sorry Day in Australia is a limited response. It does not go as far as the guys in the Australian rock band Midnight Oil wanted to go when they called upon their fans, in “Beds are Burning,” to return the land to its original owners.
Sorry Day does not pretend to fix every problem. But it does open up a discussion, a day when the government of Australia encourages its citizens to reflect upon what it has done, even in the relatively recent past, to Aboriginal Australians. That is more than the United States has done.
Canada, too, despite continuing problems with First Nations youth in provincial institutions, despite the large numbers of missing indigenous women, and the deep structural problems that gave rise to the Idle No More movement, has undertaken efforts to talk about its painful past. I have mentioned on this blog the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation housed in Manitoba: it is a marvelous project that might equip Canadians to tell the story of Canada’s residential schools, the young people taken by law and by the authorities from their families to be educated, and the consequences and legacies of these wrong-headed and evil policies.
In the United States, in places, there are efforts to begin an accounting for the nation’s past misdeeds. Confederate memorials are coming down, a long-over due policy beautifully defended by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu. Some buildings, on some college campuses, named after racist and cruel figures from the American past, are being renamed, though not without controversy. Some universities with ties to the slave trade, like Brown and Georgetown, have undertaken programs to atone for their sins.
But when it comes to native peoples, we are way behind Canada and Australia. Small gestures, no doubt, are taking place: some members of some religious congregations have pushed their churches to renounce the so-called “doctrine of discovery,” a symbolic gesture that in the end would cost these churches little. More real, perhaps, was the recent decision by the Society of Jesus to return land given to it by the United States on the Rosebud Reservation to the community. But a larger accounting has not occurred.
And without such an accounting, young people can only with great difficulty arrive at an understanding of the moral complexities of their nation’s past. We need more than an apology, couched in legalese, that nobody knows about. I have mentioned the congressional apology on this blog. You can read it here, and see how truly deficient a document it is. It is as if a Senate staffer went through an American history textbook, found the points where bad things happened to native peoples, and cobbled them together into a tepid and half-baked statement of regret. We are sorry, but want it understood that nothing in this apology opens us up to suit.
The resources to write and teach this history are out there, and contrary to what you might have been taught, native voices are not hard to find in the historical record. In the Agency records housed at the National Archives, for instance, hundreds and hundreds of reels of microfilm, each containing hundreds of pages of documents, allow committed researchers to reconstruct the government’s systematic programs to incarcerate native peoples on reservations, Christianize and civilize them, and take their land, all in the name of “Progress.” Scattered around the country in state, local, and organizational archives are the historical documents that reveal the herculean efforts of native peoples to survive these policies. In these records are the stories of native peoples who lived their lives under this oppressive regime. Their stories are worth talking about. Obviously if I did not believe this very strongly I never would have written Native America. We need to know these stories, for without comprehending the damage done we can hardly understand that for which we apologize.
On the last day of class in my Native American survey course, I talk about apologizing for the past. I mention the periodic calls for an apology for slavery, or the efforts of the Reagan administration to accept responsibility on behalf of the American people for the policy of “internment” during the Second World War. I ask, “What about native peoples?” Does the United States owe native peoples an apology? I play them a video of Rudd’s apology and I might have them look at the American apology resolution. Are these actions adequate? If not, what more might be done? Has so much historical damage been done that nothing can set things right?
You can imagine the student responses. We (they readily identify themselves with the government still) will get sued, or when will it end, they ask. They worry of an ill-defined slippery slope. I had nothing to do with it, some might say, for my family came to the United States long after all of this history had occurred.
I try not to say too much. I try to let the conversation evolve. If there is a lag, I mention some of the stories I have told them over the course of the semester. I do not talk about the larger processes of dispossession or colonialism, but smaller stories, about individuals and local groups. Don’t these stories cause you to feel sorrow? Regret?
We do not apologize well, I tell them. I will mention whatever celebrity is in the news who said something that he or she regretted, followed by a “I’m sorry if anyone was offended.” No, I will point out. It would have been better for this person to have said, “I’m sorry that my words hurt you.” And if the government does not owe native peoples an apology, I ask the students, “Do you?”
It is time for us to pull these records together. The National Archives does a lot. Archivists across the country do great work, and digitization projects are underway all over the place. But these institutions need resources (Yes, I know about the Trump administration’s draconian budget proposal). Let’s start compiling the material to tell this story comprehensively. It is time for an accounting. Look, as I mentioned in an earlier post, at the ground beneath your feet. It does not diminish us in any way to admit that non-Indian citizens of the United States have prospered because their ancestors made native peoples suffer. It is the truth. We need to confront it.
One of my very good former students told me about “The Secret Path,” a multimedia project produced by Gord Downie, the lead singer of the Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip in the fall of 2016. An animated film, a musical album, a graphic novel, The Secret Path tells the story of Chanie Wenjack. Twelve years old when he fled from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School, Chanie wanted to return to his family at Ogoki Post, four hundred miles away. He did not know how long a journey he had, and he never made it home. He died from exposure, exhaustion, and hunger along the tracks that he thought would lead him to his family in October of 1966. Just a kid.
The Secret Path is a simple but searing portrait of the experience of children in Canada’s residential schools. From the late nineteenth century into the 1980s (Cecilia Jeffrey closed in 1974), Downie wrote,
“All of those Governments, and all of those Churches, for all of those years, misused themselves. They hurt many children. They broke up many families. They erased entire communities. It will take seven generations to fix this. Seven. Seven is not arbitrary. This is far from over. Things up north have never been harder. Canada is not Canada. We are not the country we think we are. “
Children at Cecilia Jeffrey were subjected to medical “experimentation and treatment of ear disease” in the 1950s, government documents later revealed. Children suffered, emotionally and physically. Their families did, too, and a lot of people knew about it. If you are interested in this history, or the parallel history of boarding schools in the United States, you should watch the film, listen to Downie’s music, and learn from the panel discussion treating the painful legacy of these institutions, filled with children taken by law from their parents aboard “Trains of Tears” which transported them hundreds of miles from their homes. Between 20,000 and 50,000 children were sent to residential schools in Canada. As in other parts of the history of native peoples, the numbers can stagger, become too abstract. What Downie does so well is force us to look at the entire broken and horrible process from the perspective of one child.
There is a large literature on the history of American Indian boarding schools. The bibliography will guide you to some of the books I like. The best treatment of the famous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania remains the unpublished dissertation written by Genevieve Bell, “Telling Stories out of School: Remembering the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918,” (Ph.D diss., Stanford University, 1998). You will likely have to get it through your college library’s interlibrary loan.
Bell showed that we have not told the story of the American boarding schools as effectively as we might, that the important insights from this vast scholarship have not trickled down to high school and college American history textbooks. For one thing, we have allowed Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of Carlisle, to shape too much of the narrative. Pratt liked to boast that he would “kill the Indian and save the man.” He liked to produce before-and-after pictures, showing “savage” children from the western wilds and the same children, cleaned up and with their hair cut, in the military uniforms worn by Carlisle students. Pratt wanted his supporters to believe that he was “civilizing”
Sylvester Long’s Report Card, before he became Buffalo Child Long Lance
wild Indians.
The reality was more complex, a point Bell makes convincingly. The most numerous children at Carlisle came from native communities in the east–Oneidas, for instance, or eastern Cherokee. These children spoke English and already were familiar with agricultural work on a white American model. Many of them already were Christian. They studied Latin and Trigonometry. Many of them wrote English beautifully.
But the institutions still were cruel. Institutions in general where “the other” was corrected, improved, educated, reformed, rehabilitated, or detained, were routinely brutal. Children died at these schools, far from home, some without knowing how much their parents and siblings missed them, without knowing how much they were loved.
I took this picture on a very rainy day nearly a decade ago in the graveyard that still stands on the site of the former Carlisle Indian School. I was inspired to visit the site one day while I was in the area after reading Calvin Luther Martin’s The Way of the Human Being, which I mentioned in my previous post. In that book’s closing pages, Martin and his wife visited the graveyard at Carlisle. Having left his teaching job at Rutgers, and having spent some time teaching the real people in Alaska, Martin looked at the columns and rows of tombstones as if they were the seats in a classroom. He presented to them, in a sense, his last lecture.
“I took my position at the front of the class and looked around, professor for the last time. Before me, attentive students in silent formation. The last class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. They died before becoming blacksmiths and carpenters, shoemakers and tinsmiths, tailors, printers, harnessmakers, plumbers, bricklayers, or laundresses, cooks, and seamstresses. But they were already real people, I thought, as I fought back my anger–people who understood the way of the human being in this place. I was a man, a historian, standing before a cemetery created by blundering good will.
I paused and reconsidered. I had to leave them with something more satisfying than my bitterness. . . I apologized to these kids. I apologized not as an angry historian but simply as a sorrowful human being. What else can one possibly be, standing in a graveyard? I called some by name as I did so. I told them we were traveling west, and I invited any lingering spirits to come along. All I heard were the cars, though sometimes, more powerfully, the wind.”
The United States, several years ago, apologized for its historic treatment of native peoples. You probably missed it. The apology received little attention. Largely the work of then-Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, the resolution included the formal “Whereas” statements that appear so often in Senate documents: Indians had been treated badly, they had been dispossessed, and, “Whereas the United States government condemned the traditions, beliefs, and customs of Native Peoples, and endeavored to assimilate them by such policies as the redistribution of land under the General Allotment Act of 1887, and the forcible removal of Native children from their families to faraway boarding schools where their Native practices and languages were degraded and forbidden,” the United States apologized “to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States.” Nonetheless, “nothing in this joint resolution,” the Senators agreed, “authorizes or supports any claim against the United States.”
It was an empty, cynical, and shallow gesture. We do not talk about the boarding schools, and other painful parts of our history, frankly enough. We do not learn from this history. The government boarding schools are gone, but there are still a few run by church and other organizations, like St. Labre in Montana. Their approach is different than those used in an earlier period but, still, it is important to remember how recent this history is. The Thomas Indian School on the Cattaraugus reservation in western New York remained open into the 1950s. It is not unusual to speak of and, in New York State, to meet boarding school “survivors.”
Canada is doing more than the United States to talk about its troubled past. Still, problems remain. Just a couple of days ago, APTN ran a story with the headline “Ontario Government Has No Idea How Many First Nations Kids it Puts in Group Homes.” Three teenage girls had died in these schools in less than six months, one in a fire, two by suicide. If American officials and Canadian officials would have had their way in the not-so-distant past, nobody would be discussing the fate of Indian children, for the schools would have succeeded in assimilating native children into the Canadian or American mainstream. According to Ry Moran, the director of the Canadian National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, these schools “tried to end indigenous peoples. They tried to end cultures.” Speaking at a panel discussion available on The Secret Path website, Moran noted that “the railways were used in this country to establish Canada, but they also were used to transport kids,” many thousands of them, who were forcibly taken from their families. It’s a story, Moran argues, that still too few Canadians know. (The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is creating an archive, an amazing but troubling archive of arrogance, cultural imperialism, and ethnocentrism: You can check it out right here).
Americans, too, do not know these stories well enough. Colonialism. It is a force. It produces comforting myths that blind Americans to the truth. “It could not have been as bad as we might have heard.” I have heard that from audiences where I have spoken. We do not like to confront the legacy of our past cruelties. More powerful work like that produced by Downie may force more of us to do so.
![Female students as "Indian Squaws" in "The Captain of Plymouth" [pose 3], 1909](https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/styles/display_images/public/image-photo/CCHS_PA-CH3_114.jpg?itok=drzE8DzH "Female students as \"Indian Squaws\" in \"The Captain of Plymouth\" [pose 3], 1909")
