If you are familiar with the Longmire Netflix series titled “Longmire”, you may also be aware that the series is based on 17 novels that author Craig Johnson has released based on the adventures of sheriff Langmire.
I picked up his more recent book (“Hell and Back”) at the library recently. The tale is set in the town of Fort Pratt, Montana, which was the site of an Indian boarding school fire in 1896.
If you Google the town name, you’ll also pull up an article about the history of Indian boarding schools in America. Although you can read the entire July 2021 article in the link below, here’s a summary of a few key points:
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The Native American children travelled on trains, thousands of miles from their homes, to Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many had been forcibly taken from their parents and communities.
Once there, they had to hand over their belongings, put on uniforms, cut off their braids, adopt new names and abandon their languages and cultural practices.
Under teachers in charge of assimilation, the children studied English and memorized the U.S. presidents, reports the Daily Montanan. The rest of the time, they worked on the school grounds or on assignments in neighboring towns.
Some tried to run away. Some married. A few, like Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe, had renowned sports careers.
And some never came home, the victims of disease and poor health care, lost to their families. Last month, the Army began disinterring from a military cemetery the remains of 10 children who died between 1880 and 1910 while attending the Pennsylvania school, returning them to their relatives for burial.
The federal government conducted a large-scale drive during nearly a century to assimilate hundreds of thousands of Native American children by removing them from their families and sending them to faraway boarding schools—a painful chapter of U.S. history that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has directed her agency to investigate.
Haaland, a former member of Congress from New Mexico, is the nation’s first Native American Cabinet secretary and an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna.
Last month, Haaland ordered a federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to recover the histories of the institutions, where she says children endured routine injury and abuse. Native American leaders say the investigation represents a huge step toward acknowledging a devastating loss that has been overlooked by those outside their communities.
In her memo, Haaland said she wants the U.S. investigation to identify the children who attended and their tribal affiliations, along with a particular emphasis on finding records of cemeteries or burial sites connected with the schools that may contain unidentified human remains. Federally run off-reservation schools dotted the West and Midwest, from Arizona to Montana to Michigan to Wisconsin, according to a map created by Dickinson University for a digital resource center for the Carlisle school.
‘Kill the Indian, save the man’
Thousands of students from more than 140 Native American tribes attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in its 39 years in operation in southern Pennsylvania. Opened in 1879, it was the first government-run, off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans.
Its founder, Civil War veteran Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, brought a militaristic approach to assimilating Native American children. Pratt said in a speech in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” His model was to take children at a young age, far from their family, and eradicate their culture.
“One of the main goals was to disrupt the family bonds, the cultural bonds, the language bonds, that’s why you have so many of these schools in so many different places,” said Katrina Phillips, an assistant professor of American and Native American history at Macalester College and a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.
Pratt also saw the schools as a way to assert control over adults in tribes. In a letter he wrote in 1879 to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Pratt said he took the children of tribal leaders to the school because their parents “will be restrained by that fact and invited to seek for themselves a better state of civilization.”
Many more schools would follow the Carlisle model.
The federal government opened 25 federal off-reservation boarding schools. There were more than 300 other schools run by religious groups with support from the government. The schools operated from the late 1800s to the 1960s. The federal government still oversees four off-reservation boarding schools, but families now send their children by choice. The current schools include Native American language and cultural education.
By 1926, nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children were in the system, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
Mass graves in Canada
Halaand’s announcement came amidst two discoveries of mass graves near defunct boarding schools in Canada. She said she was “sick to my stomach” reading news reports about the newly found graves.
The Canadian schools were modeled on those in the United States, but the U.S. government is trailing behind Canada in its investigation. The Canadian government started a truth and reconciliation commission in 2008 to address the legacy of the boarding schools.
Haaland’s memorandum directs the Interior Department to collect historical records, consult with tribes, and deliver a report by next spring.
“Survivors of the traumas of boarding school policies carried their memories into adulthood as they became the aunts and uncles, parents, and grandparents to subsequent generations,” Haaland wrote in her memo. “The loss of those who did not return left an enduring need in their families for answers that, in many cases, were never provided.”
Arizona had 47 Indian boarding schools, more than any other state. One of them was less than a mile from what is now Pueblo High school in Tucson, and it was torn down in the early 1960’s to re-emerge as a small shopping center.
America has a long history of not being kind to the people who were the first inhabitants of the land now know as the United States.
From 1776 until 1871, the United States signed nearly 400 treaties with Native American tribes, but many of them were violated. The most famous example is the treaty that protected the area surrounding Six Grandfathers Mountain in South Dakota. When gold was discovered in the Black Hills, the treaty was forgotten, and Six Grandfathers Mountain turned into Mount Rushmore.
During the 1950’s, the most popular shows on television were westerns, and many of them were fights between cowboys and Indians.
During the 1973 Academy Awards Sacheen Littlefeather (who died earlier this year) represented Marlon Brando, who was declining the award to protest the depiction of Native Americans on television and in movies.
Native Americans did not get the right to vote in federal elections until 1924, but the right was not allowed in a handful states. In Arizona, that year was 1948, which means that when Ira Hayes climbed Mount Suribachi in 1945 with his fellow Marines, he was not allowed to vote in his home state of Arizona. Natives in New Mexico got the right to vote in the same year.
Now that a Native American is head of the Interior Department, it’s likely that some progress will be made to correct the sins of the past, and “Kemosabe” will take on a new meaning.
https://owd.tcnj.edu/~hofmann/kemosabe.htm
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