May is the month of Mother’s Day, an appropriate time to honor mothers everywhere. But I would like to pay special tribute to those Native American mothers whose children the federal government relocated for assimilation purposes.
To understand this travesty, one needs to begin back in 1830 when the Indian Removal Act forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi River so their homelands could be made available to white settlers. After the Civil War (1865), the government looked for a way to subdue Native American tribes in the west, while supposedly improving their chances of functioning within a white society. The officials of that time decided that if Indians could be re-educated, the ‘Indian problem’ would be eliminated.
How better to do that, than remove Indian children from their families, send them to government-established boarding schools, force them to renege their native language and dress and train them to become working members of society.
The experiment started with an Indian school built in the late 1860s on the Yakima Reservation in Washington state. Then, the first Indian boarding school was built in 1879 in converted military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Named the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, it became the model for all future government-run boarding schools. It was also the only boarding school east of the Mississippi River, but its students came from the native tribes that had been relocated out West.
Additional boarding schools were then built in rapid succession.
In 1891 federal officials were given the authority to forcibly seize Native American children until school quotas were filled. Native American parents were threatened with the withholding of food rations and subsidies on the reservation unless they relinquished at least one of their children.
How does a parent decide which child to give up?
In many cases, parents were led to believe that their children would have a better life if educated by the government. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs took children as young as five and the family often did not see that child again for many years. From the time of 1892 forward, thousands of native parents wept as their children were pulled away, loaded into wagons, and driven off the reservations—often to a destination hundreds of miles away.
The anguish of a native mother or father is disturbing to imagine. Some fought back against the government and were promptly arrested. Their children were taken anyway.
Immediately upon arrival at a school, the children received short hair cuts, their native clothing disappeared, and they were assigned Anglo names. By dinner on their first day, they were introduced to an institutionalized diet based largely on starchy foods. Many children became malnourished.
Packed into overcrowded dormitories with poor sanitation, scrutinized and punished for talking in their native tongue, children fell sick to the diseases of tuberculosis, dysentery, and influenza. Most schools contained a graveyard on the property. While exact numbers are not available, reports from 1926 show 350 Indian schools, with over 60,000 Native children.
In 1928 the Brookings Institute made formal visits to the Indian schools and issued the Meriam Report. Recommendations for badly needed changes were stipulated, including educating younger children at community schools near their reservation homes.
The government disregarded the report.
The boarding school programs lasted for 99 years; from 1879 to 1978. Yes, you read that correctly. It was not until 1978 that the Indian Child Welfare Act guaranteed Native American parents the right to deny their child’s placement in an off-reservation school.
For the children who survived the horrors and the abuse in Indian schools, they became children without an identity. No longer Indian, and never white, these children entered society with the invisible scars of what today would be called PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Now imagine for a moment that you are a Native American mother. The year is 1914, and President Woodrow Wilson has just signed a proclamation that the second Sunday in May will henceforth be set aside to honor and celebrate mothers.
What would you have to celebrate?
Strong women often grieve in silence.
~ Linda
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Oh my. Such a sad story. So ashamed of what this nation has done.
I know, Bobbie, it is so hard to believe this continued until 1978!
linda:)
I graduated from high school in 1948. The Indian tribe, the Nooksacks, I grew up with in western Washington state were mostly ignored by the government. I learned their history. They hadn’t sent a representative to wherever they were supposed to go to get reservations, so they later told them to move into the Lummi reservation. However, they were blood enemies and refused to do so. The government then gave them individual home plots in what became our school district, so they went to school with us and lived and worked exactly like we did. Except, they did keep some Indian traditional gatherings. I remember the boy in my grade had the blackest eyes you could ever see. A girl was among my sister’s friends. Another girl got a crush on my brother and frequently called him. The Nooksacks were almost Oriental in appearance, and rather stocky. However, when I was working in Seattle, I met an Indian girl who looked nothing like the Indians I had known. She was tall and slender. She had grown up on a reservation further to the east in Washington and came and went, but was then working in Seattle.
We had a family of friends with the wife being one fourth Indian. Growing up, her sister had not inherited the same complexion, was blonde, and quite upset because she didn’t look Indian enough to go fishing whenever she wanted to. I don’t know anything else about any of the Indians, other than that my grandfather could talk to them in their language (saw him do it once), and he taught us how to say “Hello Friend,” in the local language. (This was all in the 1930s and 1940s.)
I do know the story of a Pennsylvania couple who adopted several children nobody wanted for various reasons. (I wrote it up for a magazine, but it wasn’t accepted.) One was an Indian boy from Canada who had been taken away from his family in maybe 1960s-1980s. When the couple found out the circumstances after he became of age, they helped him find his relatives and return.
I know the Indian experience in many places was quite horrible, and in some places, still is, I believe.
Oh Norma, thank you for your comments. I was horrified after researching for this article and the photos broke my heart.
linda:)
I knew about the schools, and the attempts to eradicate the native languages and customs. The girls were “educated” for domestic service. What shocked me about this piece was that the laws were still there until 1978! Incredible.
Thanks again, Linda, for doing this.
I know, Dixie. It is shocking and disgusting.
linda:)
I cry every time I think about this. This was done in Canada too.
This post reminds me of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. What a shame, disgrace and tragic that something like this happened and continues to happen in a country that I immigrated for its justice, freedom and liberty!
Linda, Thank you for another informative post on a such a heart breaking and controversial topic! Such topics should be never forgotten and retold over and over again.
Thank you, Madhu:)
linda:)
I didn’t realize that this happened in Canada, too. How incredibly sad.
Powerful! And so sad.
I know, Barbara, it was a hard one to research.
linda:)