Note from Professor Dozier: This article outlines very well the legitimate complaints that Native American children and their families have struggled with for generations. It is also fair to say that in later years, particularly after the 1930s many Native Americans remember their time at Government boarding schools with some fondness, for it was the place where they met their future spouses [Esther (Navajo) and Robert Levi (Cahuilla) are one such couple] and many made life-long friends they otherwise would never have made.
November/December 2008 issue of
Poverty & Race
The following is a Feb. 2008 Shadow Report (lightly
edited) submitted as a Response to the Periodic Report of the United States to
the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. The
full Report can be found
here. See also
the 2-part NPR series, May 12, 2008 (American Indian School a Far Cry from the
Past) & May 13, 2008 (American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many). See also On
the Reservation and Off, Schools See a Changing Tide,
New York Times, May
25, 2008.
Brief History
During the 19th century and into the 20th century,
American Indian children were forcibly abducted from their homes to attend
Christian and U.S. government-run boarding schools as a matter of state policy.
This system had its beginnings in the 1600s when John Eliot erected praying
towns for American Indians, where he separated them out from their communities
to receive Christian civilizing instruction.
However, colonists soon concluded that such practices
should be targeted towards children, because they believed adults were too set
in their ways to become Christianized. Jesuit priests began developing schools
for Indian children along the St. Lawrence River in the 1600s.
However, the boarding school system became more
formalized under the Grants Peace Policy of 1869/1870. The goal of this policy
was to turn over the administration of Indian reservations to Christian
denominations. As part of this policy, Congress set aside funds to erect school
facilities to be run by churches and missionary societies. These facilities were
a combination of day and boarding schools erected on Indian reservations.
Then, in 1879, the first off-reservation boarding
school, Carlisle, was founded by Richard Pratt.
He argued that as long as
boarding schools were primarily situated on reservations: 1) It was too easy for
children to run away from school; and 2) The efforts to assimilate Indian
children into boarding schools would be reversed when children went back home to
their families during the summer. He proposed a policy where children would be
taken far from their homes at an early age and not returned to their homes until
they were young adults. By 1909, there were 25 off-reservation boarding schools,
157 on-reservation boarding schools, and 307 day schools in operation. The
stated rationale of the policy was to "Kill the Indian and Save the Man."
Children in these schools were not allowed to speak Native languages or practice
Native traditions.
Native Children in front
of Pratt Boarding School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Are these the faces of happy children?Sioux Children Arrive At
Pratt Boarding School, 1879.
[The goal of the program was to] [s]eparate children
from their parents, inculcate Christianity and white cultural values into them,
and encourage/force them to assimilate into the dominant society. Of course,
because of the racism in the U.S., Native peoples could never really assimilate
into the dominant society. Hence, the consequence of this policy was to
assimilate them into the bottom of the socio-economic ladder of the larger
society. For the most part, schools primarily prepared Native boys for manual
labor or farming and Native girls for domestic work.
The rationale for choosing cultural rather than
physical genocide was often economic. Carl Schurz [a former Commissioner of
Indian Affairs] concluded that it would cost a million dollars to kill an Indian
in warfare, whereas it cost only $1,200 to school an Indian child for eight
years. Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller argued that it would cost $22
million to wage war against Indians over a ten-year period, but would cost less
than a quarter of that amount to educate 30,000 children for a year.
Consequently, administrators of these schools ran them as inexpensively as
possible. Children were given inadequate food and medical care, and were
overcrowded in these schools. As a result, children routinely died in mass
numbers of starvation and disease. In addition, children were often forced to do
grueling work in order to raise monies for the schools and salaries for the
teachers and administrators. Overcrowding within schools contributed to
widespread disease and death.
Attendance at these boarding schools was mandatory,
and children were forcibly taken from their homes for the majority of the year.
They were forced to worship as Christians and speak English (native traditions
and languages were prohibited). Sexual/physical/emotional violence was rampant.
While not all Native peoples see their boarding school experiences as negative,
it is generally the case that much if not most of the current dysfunctionality
in Native communities can be traced to the boarding school era.
Today, most of the schools have closed down.
Nevertheless, some boarding schools still remain. While the same level of abuse
has not continued, there are still continuing charges of physical and sexual
abuses in currently operating schools. Because these schools target American
Indians specifically, they are in violation of CERD.
The Continuing Effects of Human Rights Violations
Human Rights Violations:
A number of human rights violations have occurred and continue to occur in these
schools. The U.S. has provided no recompense for victims of boarding schools,
nor have they attended to the continuing effects of human rights violations. The
Boarding School Healing Project (303/513-5922, 605/200-0164) has begun
documenting some of these abuses in South Dakota. Below are some of the
violations that have targeted American Indians, constituting racial
discrimination:
Religious/Cultural Suppression:
[Because] Native children were generally not allowed to speak their Native
languages or practice their spiritual traditions, many Native peoples can no
longer speak their Native languages. Survivors widely report being punished
severely if they spoke Native languages. However, the U.S. has grossly
underfunded language revitalization programs.
Because boarding schools were run cheaply, children
generally received inadequate food. Survivors testify that the best food was
saved for school administrators and teachers.
[And] according to one former BIA school administrator
in Arizona: "I will say this. . . [C]hild molestation at BIA schools is a dirty
little secret and has been for years. I can't speak for other reservations, but
I have talked to a lot of other BIA administrators who make the same kind of
charges. Despite the epidemic of sexual abuse in boarding schools, the Bureau of
Indian affairs did not issue a policy on reporting sexual abuse until 1987, and
did not issue a policy to strengthen the background checks of potential teachers
until 1989. The Indian Child Protection Act in 1990 was passed to provide a
registry for sexual offenders in Indian country, mandate a reporting system,
provide rigid guidelines for BIA and HIS [Indian Health Services] for doing
background checks on prospective employees, and provide education to parents,
school officials and law enforcement on how to recognize sexual abuse. However,
this law was never sufficiently funded or implemented, and child sexual abuse
rates are dramatically increasing in Indian country while they are remaining
stable for the general population. Sexual predators know they can abuse Indian
children with impunity.
As a result of all this abuse, Native communities now
are suffering the continuing effects through increased physical and sexual
violence that was largely absent prior to colonization. However, the U.S. fails
to redress these effects by not providing adequate healing services for boarding
school survivors.
Forced Labor:
Children were also involuntarily leased out to white homes as menial labor
during the summers rather than sent back to their homes. In addition, they had
to do hard labor for the schools, often forced to do very dangerous chores. Some
survivors report children being killed because they were forced to operate
dangerous machinery. Children were never compensated for their labor.
Deaths in Schools:
Thousands of children have died in these schools, through beatings, medical
neglect and malnutrition. The cemetery at Haskell Indian School alone has 102
student graves, and at least 500 students died and were buried elsewhere. These
deaths continue today. On December 6, 2004, Cindy Sohappy was found dead in a
holding cell in Chemawa Boarding School (Oregon), where she had been placed
after she became intoxicated. She was supposed to be checked every fifteen
minutes, but no one checked on her for over three hours. At the point, she was
found not breathing, and declared dead a few minutes later. The U.S. Attorney
declined to charge the staff with involuntary manslaughter. Sohappy's mother is
planning to sue the school. A videotape showed that no one checked on her when
she started convulsing or stopped moving. The school has been warned for past
fifteen years from federal health officials in Indian Health Services about the
dangers of holding cells, but these warnings were ignored. Particularly
troubling was that she and other young women who had histories of sexual
assault, abuse and suicide attempts were put in these cells of solitary
confinement.
Happy Students: Some students reported happy experiences while at boarding school. Some may have left a tumultuous homelife for a more stable situation. Other students were not abused. Still other students became life-long friends, some even married after attending school together, like Robert (Cahuilla) and Esther (Navajo) Levi, both now deceased. A more important and contemporary function of the boarding schools was to bring Indian people from far-flung tribes together. This bringing together has been the basis of several resistance movements like the Mission Indian Federation and the American Indian Movement. Children who would otherwise never have known each other were brought together and became friends. From these friendships, a larger sense of what it means to be Indian has developed that includes all Indian people in America in a pan-Native movement that has rekindled strength and pride in Indian identity.