INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS
While I was in Phoenix this week, I got a chance to go to the Heard Museum, which celebrates Native American history and culture. Coincidentally, it was the museum’s 75th anniversary so admission was free. Although if I ever return to Phoenix, I will gladly pay the $7 admission.
The most fascinating exhibit to me was the one on Indian boarding schools. Apparently, at the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s, there was a spirited group of American politicians who believed that what Native Americans needed was to modernize from their Indian ways and assimilate into American ways.
These “reformers,” in the name of “saving” the Indians, lobbied for the creation of Indian boarding schools. Having tried this approach unsuccessfully with young men, they turned their attention to small children. The students were taken from their families, sometimes forcibly, and transported hundreds of miles away, making family visits near impossible. Upon arrival, they got their long hair cut and were crammed into dormitories, where they began a military-like existence. They were punished for speaking their native languages, and made to believe that everything about their home culture was bad.
Hearing the accounts and seeing the pictures, I could not help but think of Japanese internment camps and Nazi concentration camps. And all of this was carried out by a group of leaders who considered themselves “enlightened”! Truly, our treatment of the Native American is shameful, and its consequences continue into the present day.
Ironically, the very thing these reformers sought to do – beat the Indianness out of these people – didn’t happen. In fact, bringing children of different tribes together and causing them to suffer through this ordeal together helped further forge a pan-Indian identity. These children, seeing how they were viewed by their “reformers,” began to identify themselves less by their home tribes and more by their shared Indian heritage.
All in all, the Heard Museum was a real eye-opener. I pray all Americans will keep their eyes and hearts open to the plight of the Native American, and that we will never sweep under the rug the terrible atrocities we inflicted upon them in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” “progress,” and racial and religious superiority.
While I was in Phoenix this week, I got a chance to go to the Heard Museum, which celebrates Native American history and culture. Coincidentally, it was the museum’s 75th anniversary so admission was free. Although if I ever return to Phoenix, I will gladly pay the $7 admission.
The most fascinating exhibit to me was the one on Indian boarding schools. Apparently, at the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of the 1900’s, there was a spirited group of American politicians who believed that what Native Americans needed was to modernize from their Indian ways and assimilate into American ways.
These “reformers,” in the name of “saving” the Indians, lobbied for the creation of Indian boarding schools. Having tried this approach unsuccessfully with young men, they turned their attention to small children. The students were taken from their families, sometimes forcibly, and transported hundreds of miles away, making family visits near impossible. Upon arrival, they got their long hair cut and were crammed into dormitories, where they began a military-like existence. They were punished for speaking their native languages, and made to believe that everything about their home culture was bad.
Hearing the accounts and seeing the pictures, I could not help but think of Japanese internment camps and Nazi concentration camps. And all of this was carried out by a group of leaders who considered themselves “enlightened”! Truly, our treatment of the Native American is shameful, and its consequences continue into the present day.
Ironically, the very thing these reformers sought to do – beat the Indianness out of these people – didn’t happen. In fact, bringing children of different tribes together and causing them to suffer through this ordeal together helped further forge a pan-Indian identity. These children, seeing how they were viewed by their “reformers,” began to identify themselves less by their home tribes and more by their shared Indian heritage.
All in all, the Heard Museum was a real eye-opener. I pray all Americans will keep their eyes and hearts open to the plight of the Native American, and that we will never sweep under the rug the terrible atrocities we inflicted upon them in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” “progress,” and racial and religious superiority.
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