Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life (31 page)

The goal of these activists seems odd to many: in communities rife with drugs, violence, gangs, domestic abuse, suicide, and high dropout rates, Ojibwe-language immersion seems like a perverse luxury.

Odd or not, what these fighters are after is something very different from what AIM was after in the 1960s and 1970s. AIM wanted the world to stand up and take notice of the injustices we suffered and continue to suffer. By taking notice public opinion might actually sway policy. Language activists look in the other direction—instead of looking out at the government and the mainstream and trying to convince them of something, they are looking in and are trying to convince their fellow Indians of something else. As my brother has put it on a number of occasions, “The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars trying to take our language away from us. Why would we expect the government to give it back? It’s up to us to give it back to ourselves.”

The U.S. government did indeed spend millions of dollars and many years trying to stamp out indigenous languages, mostly through subtle discriminatory practices (such as hiring and education) but the government also used unsubtle means, the most destructive of which was the institution of Indian boarding schools. As Native American languages endured a sustained assault, Indian identity—those elusive bonds that wed self and society and that make a people—took the greatest number of hits. Many Indians see this as proof of the spiteful, harmful attitude the feds have always had toward Indians. But governments really aren’t spiteful just to be spiteful. They are like animals—they do what they do out of self-interest. And for many years, Indians were a threat—a constant, powerful, very real, very physical threat—to American imperial expansion. We were, quite simply, either in the way or powerful enough to pose a threat if provoked. The process by which Indians were dealt with only sometimes took the form of war. In many other instances Indians were subjected to a process of “Americanization.” In place from colonial days, Americanization was aimed at creating a uniform public body, one that shared the same values and lifestyles and put the same premium on work, saving, expansion, and accumulation of capital. However, for Indians, the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was a dark time, in many ways because of the boarding schools.

In 1878–1879, the U.S. government built and funded the first of twenty-six federally controlled Indian boarding schools. Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, came to epitomize the boarding school era, which for many Indians was one of the darkest times in our history. The idea of the boarding schools was to forcibly break the family bonds that, in the opinion of many, kept Indians from becoming civilized and part of the American public. Carlisle drew students from more than 140 different tribes. The students had their hair cut short. Their names were changed. They were forbidden to speak their Native languages. No Indian religions were allowed at the school—attendance at Christian services was compulsory. Students were beaten for speaking their languages. Many were abused. By 1902, with twenty-six schools in operation, more than 6,000 Indian children had been removed from their homes and sent hundreds of miles away from their communities. When boarding schools and the policies that supported them were finally abolished in the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of Indians had been sent there. Carlisle alone admitted more than 12,000 students by the time of its closing in 1918.

Attendance at boarding schools was not compulsory. Parents had to agree to let their children go. But their permission was often effected through coercion. Indian agents, who got bonuses for collecting children for school, threatened to withhold annuities or supplies. They blacklisted Indian families who refused to send their children along. Some parents, like my great-grandmother, could not afford to feed their children, and while their Indianness was under assault at these boarding schools at least their children would have something to eat. After the schools had been in existence for a few decades the pressure to send children away became a norm. If you wanted your children to have a chance at a job or an education you sent them away. It simply was what was done. Agents from the BIA were extremely effective at coercing families into letting their children go. But it didn’t always work.

In 1887 the U.S. government established a boarding school at Keams Canyon. It was a terrible place, so much so that the Indian agent at Fort Defiance wrote to the commissioner of Indian affairs to say: “If deaths occur a strong prejudice will be aroused against the school, to say nothing of the policy of conducting a boarding school for any human pupils with such conditions of accommodations.” Nonetheless, agents tried their best to get the children into school. Hopi parents promised to send them and then did nothing. Frustrated, the commissioner withheld annuities and halted the construction of all houses and buildings at Second Mesa. When that didn’t work he ordered that wells being dug for precious groundwater be left unfinished. This was a cruel act: there was two feet of snow on the ground and the temperature was minus seventeen degrees Fahrenheit. Nonetheless, the Hopi held on to their children. In 1890, with nothing to show for the commissioner’s efforts, the army marched onto Hopi land. In Orayvi it captured 104 children and sent them to Keams Canyon Boarding School. The Indian agent Plummer thought this wasn’t such a good idea—it would make people angry, and each and every action would necessitate the use of force. Instead, he suggested arresting the chiefs and headmen of the Hopi. If they were taken, that would send a strong message. Eventually, because of the school issue and for “hostile behavior” the U.S. Army captured nineteen Hopi leaders and sent them to Alcatraz
, where they served a year before they could return home. (This is the only instance I know of in which people who took back land that was stolen from them and planted with wheat could be considered “hostile.” In 1832, however, the starving Sac, led by Chief Black Hawk, sneaked across the Mississippi River to harvest their corn f
rom fields that had been fenced and trampled by settlers, and they were met by the Illinois militia, which considered this harvesting mission an act of war. The Sac were attacked by the Illinois militia, federal troops, and their Dakota allies and an army gunboat killed Sac women and children who were attempting to swim across the Bad Axe and Mississippi rivers. The seventy Sac warriors who made it across were butchered by their longtime Dakota enemies once they reached shore.)

As destructive as boarding schools might have been, many Indians actually enjoyed their time there and had no unpleasant experiences. The schools were the brainchild of a fairly well-meaning man. Known best for stating that his purpose at Carlisle was “to kill the Indian in him to save the man,” Captain Richard Henry Pratt was something of a do-gooder. He had served in the Civil War. After the war he was put in charge of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, famously known as “buffalo soldiers”—freed blacks who joined the Union army. After there were no more southerners to fight they were sent west to kill Indians. In the aftermath of the Red River War—between the United States and a coalition of Indian tribes made up of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho (which had to be one of the strangest and most ignored ironies of plains warfare, since the Indians were largely objecting to the extermination of buffalo herds by white buffalo hunters and then found themselves at war with black buffalo soldiers)—Captain Pratt and his buffalo soldiers were tasked with escorting seventy-eight Indians from the Southwest to prison in St. Augustine.

Pratt was very concerned with the welfare of these Indian prisoners. He improved living conditions and diet and eventually set up a kind of “self-guarding” system whereby the Indians policed themselves. He did this largely as a way to help the Indians preserve their own dignity in captivity. Eventually white vacationers, many with missionary backgrounds, became interested in Pratt and his endeavors at Fort Marion. They encouraged him to continue his efforts to “civilize” the Indians in captivity. They volunteered to teach the Indians English, how to read and write, basic math, and history. About twenty of the Indian captives went to college at Hampton after their release. Others settled in New York. Buoyed by this “success,” Pratt took his idea of “cultural immersion” to political friends of his and he secured funding for Carlisle. Basically Pratt saw the civilizing of Indians as being not dissimilar to his domestication of wild turkeys (he had stolen a nest of wild turkey eggs and hatched them, and they were raised by a barnyard hen). Comparing Indian students to his turkeys, he said that all the Indians needed was “the environment and kind treatment of domestic civilized life to become a very part of it.”

In order to effect the “kind treatment of domestic civilized life” Pratt and his fellow teachers at Carlisle tried to erase as much of the Indian from the Indian as they could. They succeeded in that aim, but they also turned generations of children and their parents against education. The boarding school system persisted in the United States only until the late 1930s and early 1940s, but by then the damage was done. In Canada, a similar system lasted much longer, well into the 1960s and 1970s.

Dan Jones was a child in the Canadian residential school system and endured some of the worst assaults on his sense of self, not to mention his body, that anyone should have to endure. “My earliest memory,” he says. “Trees. You know how, when the light is going, it’s almost night, and the sky is black but the trees are even blacker. The very first thing I can remember is that jagged line of the treetops, spruce trees. I was in the rabbit-fur sleeping bag my mom made for me and my brother Dennis, sleeping on the rocks next to the fire on a portage trail someplace. That’s the very first thing I remember.”

Dan and his twin brother, Dennis, were born on their family’s trapline just north of the Minnesota border, in northwest Ontario. His father’s Ojibwe name was Pawanjigwaneyaash (“He is Soaring Up”), but the Indian agent couldn’t say it, so he substituted the English name Johnny Jones. The children were raised in the traditional Ojibwe manner, and although the family was only a few miles from the American border as the crow flies, it might as well have been living in a different century altogether. At the time, the 1950s, this region of boreal forest and lakes was accessible only by canoe or floatplane. There were no roads, no stores, no cars or TVs. There was not much of anything except water and trees. Their village, situated at the mouth of the Otter Tail River on Redgut Bay of Rainy Lake, is a beautiful place, with pines, poplars, lowlands, rocky shores, and cliffs. Work was seasonal. In the summer the men guided tourists who wanted to fish in Rainy Lake. In the fall the Indians harvested wild rice. In the winter they trapped furs, in the spring they netted fish. Nancy Jones and her husband Johnny raised eight children in “the bush.”

During one long winter Nancy went into labor while on the family’s trapline. Johnny was two days away by snowshoe. She delivered her baby herself, cut the umbilical cord with her skinning knife, strapped the baby to her back, and walked out of the bush back to the village. Johnny helped with the delivery of Dennis and Dan. Nancy gave birth to Dennis and neither she nor Johnny could figure out why she was still in labor. After another forty-five minutes she gave birth to Dan. When they traveled Nancy would change diapers (packed with moss) on portages while Johnny carried the canoe and gear around. It is a different way to be connected to a place. Once, while I was trapping with Dan, he pointed to a flat rock on the portage trail: “My mom used to change our diapers there.” It was hard to believe. But then, I know Nancy and she is so knowledgeable, so impressive, that you have no choice but to believe. She once shot and killed a moose, and since she had forgotten her knife, she skinned the animal using the lid of a snuff can.

In recent testimony before a Canadian commission convened to assess damages caused by residential schools in Canada, Dan Jones said, “We lived off the land. The Anishinaabemowin [Ojibwe] language was the only one spoken. We put tobacco out as an offering for our first kill ceremonies, ceremonies for wild rice, and blueberries. My father was always strong in that way. It was all done in the language, being thankful and giving thanks for everything that was given to us. The only thing I thought was traumatic before boarding school, was once I thought I was left on a portage. My father went ahead to start the motor and I thought we were being left behind and I started crying. He came back and comforted me. They were nurturing and gentle. Firm when they had to be.”

The Joneses slept outside when they were traveling on their trapline or moving between camps. “My parents would make a little lean-to, and my mother had made a rabbit-skin blanket which was the warmest thing I ever had. When we were sleeping outside we’d tease her. I’d say, ‘Look at me, look at me, I got a rabbit-skin blanket and you don’t have anything. I’m a lot warmer than you are.’ So a lot of those memories are fond memories.”

Dan was four years old when he saw a white man for the first time. “We were swimming off the dock in front of the village and a floatplane landed in the bay and came over to the dock. I was scared. I’d seen planes in the sky, but never up close. It was so loud. A man got out and he looked strange to me. I told my mom that something was wrong with his skin. That a man was here and he must be sick. She told me he was fine. He was white. He just wasn’t like us.” The plane was there to pick up winter furs.

Within a year Dan was taken from this idyllic childhood and sent to boarding school in Kenora, two and a half hours by car from Dan’s community. His mother was told that if she didn’t send him voluntarily the kids would be taken anyway, and instead of seeing them on holidays and over the summer, she wouldn’t see them at all for years. So she let them go. The school wasn’t all that far from Redgut Bay. The boarding school Dennis and Dan Jones attended was a unique model—they were housed in dorms as part of the residential school system but bused to a public school they attended along with white children. It was supposed to be a good place for Indian kids; a lot of the staff and teachers were Indian, too. But this only made it worse. The betrayals more severe. “I remember watching the white kids get off the bus (we rode the same bus) and their parents were standing there and watching and waving. I looked at that just forlornly. Later my kindergarten teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everybody said fireman, lawyer, stuff like that. I said I wanted to be white when I grew up, because, to me, being white meant you had privilege, you got to go home to your parents, you had all these things.”