CSPAN SERINDIPITY

I was clicking the channels last night after Room Raiders was over on MTV. It was 11PM and I was about to go over to the fitness center to work out. But I accidentally clicked up (to CSPAN) instead of down (to check if CMT was doing videos on New Years Day). I did not get out of the house until midnight.

Why? Ward Churchill was giving a talk to a small group in San Francisco about his new book. The book is entitled "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" and was about the evils done through the residential boarding school programs that many Indians were sent to from around the country. I was transfixed, because he was utterly brilliant.

From the late 1800s to around 1980, many Native American children in Canada and the US were forcibly removed from their families and taken to residential boarding schools all around the country. These schools were ended in Canada when a boy was found frozen to death trying to walk a 1000 miles home to Manitoba in frigid temperatures with just a windbreaker.

Step by step Churchill laid out his case. Although I think I knew more about this phenomenon than 99 percent of America before the show, I was blown away by some of the truths that he systematically shared about how the Indian school program was used in an attempt to destroy Native culture.


Think on these things:

Students were rarely allowed to be somewhere close to home. In fact, they were shipped far away from home and family to places like Carslile Indian School (NJ) and Haskell Indian School (KS).

Carslile indian schools principal had no educational experience. He was infact, a prison warden before he was commissioned to begin the Indian school program. And this is the way he ran the Indian schools.

Boys were forced to have crew cuts the minute they entered the school. (Supposedly because they were lice riden, but this was really an attempt to strip away Native Culture) After that they were stripped naked, herded into showers, hosed down with insecticides, and forced to scrub with wire brushes and lye soap.

After a short amount of time, Indians were not allowed to speak their native tongue. If they did so, they were punished, sometimes beaten, and in some schools their tongues had a pin forced through them to remind them to speak the proper language.

Students were forced into bunkhouses to live in. This created numerous health problems. These health problems were then blamed on their cultural background.

Half of all children who entered Indian schools, especially before 1960, when they were in 3rd grade, died before they were allowed to go home. Churchill compares the death rates at concentration (not extermination, but concentration) camps in Germany in WW2. Survival rates are comparable in America at about the same time in history with Indian boarding schools.

Students only went to school 4-5 hours in the morning. The afternoon was left for vocational education (i.e. domestic work or factory work) for about 6 hours. The Indian schools sold the labor to fund the schools. And they spent half of what was spent to care for children in orphanages that were similar at the same time.

Students were not allowed to go home in the summer. Instead they were sent as cheap labor (children in 3rd grade mind you--and up to around 15 or 16 yrs)on farms in places like Southern Colorado (from Haskell in Lawrence KS). They were paid very little, and most of their pay went to the schools again.

At least half, and in some schools up to 100 percent of students were abused, often sexually, while in these schools that were not of their own choosing.

Well....that is a start. He talked rapid-fire for around an hour.

Today I am grieved about this. I want to talk to the people I knew, from both sides of this equation. Unfortunately, they have all passed away.