Many, many children have hated this, and many parents have hated seeing their children trained in a different way of speaking, acting and thinking than their own. That way, the Tao of the modern west, is the path of middle class discipline we have discussed here many times before: regulate your days by the clock, do your assigned tasks in a timely fasion, keep yourself and your home neat, brush your teeth, never act crazy in public. The central purpose of schooling, beyond reading and writing, is to shape children into this mold.
There is a vague notion on the left that we could have education that is not coercive in this way, that would somehow empower children and give them agency within our world without forcing them into a particular model of being and acting. I don't believe it. I think learning this way of life as self-discipline and self-esteem is the only way most people will ever thrive in our age.
Which brings me to Indian boarding schools. The first of these schools was opened in 1801, and some still exist, although most are now under the control of Indian nations. They have always been controversial, attacked as abusive and coercive from at least the 1840s, well before the great wave of schools opened after 1880. They always saw their goal as "civilizing" Indians, that is, inculcating the habits of middle class western life. These schools loved before and after pictures like the ones included in the poster at the top, and they don't show their students learning to read; they show them changed from wild Indian children into properly behaved scions of the middle class. There is of course a racial angle to this; most of the Indians sent to these schools saw these as White ways, and some of their teachers seem to have hated Indians. But the people who ran these schools would have been just as happy to print photographs showing the transformation of poor white kids from Appalachia or formerly enslaved blacks into well-dressed young gentlemen and ladies. They were aiming at a certain sort of person, of whatever race.
How were children treated in these schools? I'm sure it varied enormously. A small, isolated boarding school seems like a good way to empower sadists to work their way on vulnerable victims. But then education was abusive and regimented for everybody in those days; it was a rare student who got a high school degree without a litany of beatings and other punishments. Right now there is a lot of attention focused on the graveyards of those schools, but they weren't killing students on purpose; students died because lots of children died everywhere in those days, and because children who grew up in low-density rural environments still had a lot of infectious diseases to be exposed to. Quite likely the problem was made worse at some schools by poor diets, frequent beatings or other harsh punishments, etc. But the cause of death was almost always disease.
Some Indians who were sent to these schools complained about the hard work, that is, raising their own food, sewing their own clothes, cleaning the buildings, and so on. But the "industrial school" model was common all over the world back then, and millions of students of every ethnicity found themselves learning new skills by having to make their own clothes, raise and cook their own food, and so on. Again, I am sure that at some schools sadistic schoolmasters made this a lot worse than it had to be, but there was nothing racist about the model.
There is also a lot of complaint about the ways children were forced into these schools; in a few cases parents were jailed until they signed papers handing over all parental responsibility to the schools. It is easy to forget, though, that education is mandatory for every American child; this is a massive coercion of ourselves, not something we just do to Indians. Plus, not all Indians opposed it; as I mentioned a while back, when some of the Osage got rich off oil money they sent their kids to expensive boarding schools in the East. It seemed to many Indians at the time that however much their children hated these schools they were the only way forward for their people.
The more serious charge against the schools, to my mind, is cultural genocide. Because this was, quite explicitly, their mission: "kill the Indian and free the man," as one advocate put it. Most of the schools insisted that their students speak English all the time, and some of them beat anyone who lapsed into Lakota. They forced all the students to practice Christianity and forbade native rites as "devil worship." Their goal, quite explicitly, was to replace Native culture with the culture of middle class Christian Americans.
How should we feel about that?
Consider, for a moment, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a full member of the Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to hold her job. She has made it part of her mission to focus attention on the Indian boarding schools. NY Times:
In an effort to lift the veil on abuses within the system, Secretary Haaland has been traveling around the country for more than a year, conducting listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the boarding school system. In the Senate, a bill has been introduced to establish a truth and healing commission to address the legacy of Native boarding schools, similar to one undertaken by the Canadian government in 2007.
“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Ms. Haaland said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”
But I have a feeling that all those Methodist and Catholic school teachers who went out to Indian Country would be very proud of Deb Haaland. This was exactly their goal: to raise Indians who would thrive so well within American society that they would one day be cabinet secretaries. And Senators, generals, Congressmen, CEOs, engineers, tenured professors, and all the other nice job slots nobody can get without a full commitment to the middle class Tao.
The Indian boarding school system did what it was intended to do: radically accelerate the assimilation of Native Americans into the Amercan mainstream, so that they could compete and succeed within this system.
Of course, this was a horrific blow to Native cultures. Many were destroyed, and those that survived were weakened. Much has been lost: languages, faiths, stories, ways of standing and walking and feeling.
Even more important, to my mind, is the psychological harm this did to generations of Native children, who ended up feeling neither one thing nor the other, no longer fully Indian but also never feeling really at home in the broader American world. I follow several Indian writers, and this is a huge point of emphasis for all of them. Paul Chaat Smith:
I felt persecuted by history, tortured by fate. I wanted it all to be one thing or the other. I hated being half-white and half-Indian. . . . The truth is that I longed to be a stereotype. Mainly I wanted to be the full-blooded Comanche, secure in his own Comancheness, raised on the stories of his people. (Somehow the full-blooded Comanches whom I had known my whole life, who had never moved away from southwest Oklahoma, who almost always married other Comanches, would not suffice. They were Christians and not traditional enough. I think over the next rise I imagined more suitable Comanches.)
But, confused as he is, Paul Chaat Smith has a nice job as a curator of Native art at the Museum of the American Indian. Would it really have better for him to have been born fully Comanche and raised on the plains? Who knows?
The Indian boarding schools certainly represent a tragedy. They represent the tragedy that unfolded when Native American cultures encountered the vastly richer and more powerful cultures of Europe and experienced a massive die-off, ten or fifteen Holocausts, from diseases to which they had no resistance. Once that encounter had taken place, I do not think there was a good path into modernity for Indians. They could either have remained outside western civilization, living in a violent, Neolithic world, or they could join and endure double consciousness and outsider, minority status. Taking on this transformation voluntarily did not necessarily make it easy; consider what happened to Japan.
I see modernity as a gigantic machine that has ground up the whole world and spit it out in a different form, like one of those road-building machines that chews up the old, bumpy road surface and simultaneously lays down new, smooth blacktop behind. There is a sense in which the new road is better: smoother, safer, faster. And there are powerful ways in which modernity has made our lives better: we live longer, healthier lives, have greater material comfort, have great freedom to choose where we work and live and whom to have as our friends. We can learn far more about the world than anyone ever could before. We can watch spaceships and astronauts soar into the heavens and imagine living on other worlds. But there are also great costs. The symbols of those costs are all the traditional cultures that have been ground up and spit out by the modern machine, from Scottish Highlanders to Korean rice farmers, Norwegian fisherman to Kazakh herders, Algonquin farmers to Comanche buffalo hunters. Many people raised entirely within this world feel great anguish about the losses: of community, continuity, certainty, religious faith. Many born outside it, or with one foot in this culture and one in another, are bewildered and torn, wanting some kind of truth and healing commission to find out what happened to them and their world.
What happened to them is what has not happened to almost everyone in the world. We have all been caught up in the machine of modernity and ground into nicely rounded pieces that fit smoothly into the racing engine of an ever-accelerating history. School is at the heart of how this happens, for everyone. Whether the process is worth it is a very deep and hard question.
1 comment:
Right now there is a lot of attention focused on the graveyards of those schools, but they weren't killing students on purpose; students died because lots of children died everywhere in those days, and because children who grew up in low-density rural environments still had a lot of infectious diseases to be exposed to. Quite likely the problem was made worse at some schools by poor diets, frequent beatings or other harsh punishments, etc. But the cause of death was almost always disease.
You're splitting hairs. The cause of most deaths on the battlefield was also technically disease - diseases which were directly caused by the brutality of war.
You simultaneously admit that starving and beating children caused more of them to die, and also try to discount those extra deaths entirely by noting "lots of children died everywhere in those days".
At BEST, your apparent argument is that killing children is fine, so long as it's done indirectly, and so long as other children are also dying of other causes. If that's not the argument you meant to make, then you did a very poor job communicating what you actually meant, and deeply reconsider your words.
I'm going to have to come back and read the rest of your post later, because you've gotten me a tad incensed, and I'd rather respond calmly and rationally where possible. I'd like to extend the benefit of the doubt here, but the way you are coming off is extremely ugly, and hard to excuse.
In the meantime, I ask you to reflect on how you might feel if some of your own children were forcibly abducted from you by the government, sent to re-education camps, and starved and beaten until they succumbed to disease. I doubt you'd be so calmly rationalizing of their deaths, as some sort of necessary evil.
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