The Inconvenient Indian (14 page)

The idea of educating Native children hadn’t begun with Richard Pratt. Both the Catholic and Protestant churches had been conducting their own private wars for missions long before Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened its doors. In 1885, J.A. Stephan, the Director of the Catholic Bureau, urged the immediate building of more Catholic schools on reservations: “If we do this, we do an immense deal of good, get the Indians into our hands and thus make them Catholics; if we neglect it any longer, the Government and the Protestants will build ahead of us schools in all the agencies and crowd us completely out and the Indians are lost.”

Francis Paul Prucha, the Jesuit scholar and historian, talks about the conflict between Catholics and Protestants as they battled each other for schools on reserves and reservations in his book
The Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888–1912
. Reading Prucha’s book, which is rich in its referencing of primary sources, leaves one with the distinct impression that the main concern of the Catholic and Protestant missions was not so much Native education as it was outdoing each other in the race for Native converts.

Schools came in a variety of configurations. The early schools were mostly day schools located on reserves and reservations where Indian children remained in contact with their family and culture. However, almost immediately, these proved to be ineffective. So long as the children could stay in their communities, any progress with assimilation was blunted by the strength of Native culture.

The second group of schools was day and residential schools located near reservations and reserves, and developed, in part,
to limit the access of Native children to their families and communities. Francis Xavier, the co-founder of the Jesuit Order, is supposed to have said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” but, frankly, any fool could have figured that one out. It’s what advertising is about, the training of generations of consumers who will remain loyal to particular products. And whether you like the idea or not, religion and culture are products. Just like hot dogs and frosted cereals.

From the standpoint of the churches, limiting a child’s access to his or her culture, limiting the influence of the “old, unimproved people,” made a great deal of sense. Why give children choices when it would only confuse them? Why have them exposed to traditional beliefs when the goal of the schools was the Christianizing and civilizing of Native youth? The off-reserve day and residential schools were more effective in controlling access to family and community than the schools on the reserves, but only by degrees.

And then, in 1879, along came Richard Pratt and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Carlisle was the first truly off-reservation, residential school. As an officer in the U.S. Army, Pratt had a long history with Native people. He had fought against the tribes of the southwestern plains. He had been in charge of the Fort Marion prison in St. Augustine, Florida, where seventy-one Indian prisoners were sent in 1875. It was at this prison that Pratt began considering how Native people might be assimilated, and it was this history and his experience as a soldier and a warden that he brought with him to Carlisle.

The Carlisle model called for schools to be situated as far away from Native communities as possible. The model insisted that
personal contact between parents and students be greatly reduced or eliminated altogether. It prohibited the practice of Native traditions and the speaking of Native languages. The children were taught to read and write English, encouraged to join a Protestant Christian denomination, and given vocational training in such matters as farming, baking, printing, housekeeping, cooking, and shoemaking. Licence plates.

I’m kidding about the licence plates, but depending on your sensibility, the Carlisle model resembled either a military camp or a prison. Or both. And by 1909, there were some 25 schools based on the Carlisle model in operation in the United States, along with 157 on-reservation boarding schools and 307 day schools.

When I was fifteen, I wound up at a Catholic boarding school in Sacramento, California, run by the Christian Brothers. As a teenager, I can remember being something of a problem. I didn’t have a father, and I think my mother worried that my delinquencies resulted, in part, from a lack of male models and mentors. Looking at me through my mother’s eyes, I can see how Christian Brothers would have seemed a good place for a boy such as me.

The school was a long list of regulations, which were enthusiastically and martially enforced, and it contained an assortment of miseries and indignities passed out like treats at a party. I had never been hit at home, but, at Christian Brothers, I got my knuckles cracked with a ruler for talking in class and swatted across the shoulders with a wooden pointer for having a smart mouth. I was whacked across the backs of my thighs for a variety of offences and kicked once for not leaving the recreation room fast enough. But, all in all, it was minor stuff. Not much worse than you’d expect from a fraternity hazing. Or a mugging.

Then there was the food. Breakfast was, most often, a kind of grey, tasteless porridge, what Basil Johnston, in his residential school memoir
Indian School Days
, calls “sad ol’ mush.” Fred Lazenby, one of the guys at the school who seemed to enjoy getting into trouble most of the time, called our cuisine “shit on a shingle.” Years later I would learn that “shit on a shingle” was a colourful metaphor for chipped beef on toast, but at the time, everyone thought that Fred was clever as hell. Except the Brothers. Nothing much amused them. Not the food. Certainly not us.

There was a great deal that I disliked about the school and not much that I remember with any fondness. But the one thing I do remember clearly from the two years I spent at Christian Brothers was the feeling of isolation and the sense of loss and abandonment. I knew my mother believed that I would get a good education, and I knew she wanted the best for me, and all I wanted to do was come home. The school was, at its best, a cold, dead place. I’ve tried to forget about the experience, but researching Native residential schools for this book has caused those memories to seep to the surface once again, and they taste just as bitter now as they did then. My mother was at home. My brother was at home. My grandmother was there, and so were my cousins and aunts and uncles. For the two years I was at the school, I couldn’t help but think that I had done something wrong, something so very wrong that the only solution had been exile.

The truth is that my experiences have little in common with the experiences of the children who were dragged out of their homes across North America and incarcerated at residential schools. I hadn’t been raised on a reserve. I spoke English. I wasn’t seven or eight or nine. I wasn’t beaten, though there were
those “boxing matches” with Brother Arnold. I wasn’t sexually abused. I wasn’t one of the four boys who, in 1937, fled the Lejac residential school in British Columbia and froze to death within sight of their home community. On those occasions when I ran away from Christian Brothers, I simply snuck out of the dormitory, walked to the freeway, and hitchhiked the twenty miles home. I could have walked it. In California in 1957, the only perils I faced on my periodic escapes were too much sun and the concerns of a mother who loved me.

In my junior year, I returned to Roseville and public high school, and simply shoved Christian Brothers into the back of my mind where I couldn’t see it. I know it’s lurking in the shadows somewhere, but it no longer distresses me the way it did. One thing, though, is clear. Given my obvious lack of emotional fibre, I would never have survived Carlisle. Had I gone to that institution with Ernest White Thunder, Fanny Charging Shield, Susia Nach Kea, Nannie Little Robe, or Albert Henderson, I would have been buried with them in the school graveyard.

In Canada, residential schools began popping up in the 1840s, and by 1932, there were more than eighty schools in operation. Sixty percent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church, with another 30 percent run by the Anglican Church. The rest were run by other Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterians and the Methodists. In 1850, attendance at residential schools became compulsory for all children from the ages of six to fifteen. There was no opting out. Non-compliance by parents was punishable by prison terms. Children were forcibly removed from their homes and kept at the schools. As with their U.S. counterparts, schools insisted that the children not have
any extensive contact with their families or home communities. Students were forbidden to speak their languages or practise any part of their culture.

The schools in both countries were, for the most part, overcrowded. Diseases flourished. Sexual and physical abuse was common. The children received neither proper nutrition nor proper clothing. In 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce submitted a report to Duncan Campbell Scott, the Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, which set the mortality rate for Native students at residential schools in British Columbia at around 30 percent. The rate for Alberta was 50 percent. I’m not sure exactly how Scott reacted to the report, but, in 1910, he dismissed the high death rate at the schools, insisting that “this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.”

Final solution. An unfortunate choice of words. Of course, no one is suggesting that Adolf Hitler was quoting Scott when Hitler talked about the final solution of the “Jewish problem” in 1942. That would be tactless and unseemly. And just so we’re perfectly clear, Scott was advocating assimilation, not extermination. Sometimes people get the two mixed up.

In 1919, Scott abolished the post of Medical Inspector for Indian Agencies. Perhaps the position fell to budget cuts. Perhaps Scott and his department were still stinging from Bryce’s report and decided that the best way to deal with mortality figures was not to keep them.

In 1926, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work, commissioned a survey that looked at the general condition of Indians in the United States. Lewis Meriam, a Harvard graduate with a
law degree from George Washington University and a doctorate from the Brookings Institution, led the investigation. Meriam and his team spent some twenty months travelling to reservations, talking with people in the field, examining the whole of Indian Affairs, and writing a comprehensive report on the subject.

The Problem of Indian Administration
.

In the 847-page report, which was co-written by Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago) and released in 1928, Meriam says candidly, “The survey staff finds itself obliged to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of Indian children in boarding school are grossly inadequate.” The report goes on to describe the diet at the schools as “deficient in quantity, quality, and variety,” and insists that the “per capita of eleven cents a day” per student is insufficient.

Diseases such as tuberculosis and trachoma were rampant. Dormitories were overcrowded “beyond their capacities.” Medical services were not up to a “reasonable standard.” Nor were the children getting much of an education. “The boarding schools are frankly supported in part by the labor of the students,” noted the report. “Those above the fourth grade ordinarily work for half a day and go to school for half a day. A distinction in theory is drawn between industrial work undertaken primarily for the education of the child and production work done primarily for the support of the institution.” The question, says the report, “may very properly be raised as to whether much of the work of Indian children in boarding school would not be prohibited in many states by the child labor laws …”

As for the “industrial” training that the children received, which was supposed to allow them to move effortlessly into
White society and find work, the Meriam Report cautions that “Several of the industries taught may be called vanishing trades and others are taught in such a way that the Indian students cannot apply what they have learned in their own home and they are not far enough advanced to follow their trade in a white community in competition with white workers.”

Of the residential school system in general, the report was succinct and to the point: “The first and foremost need in Indian education is a change in point of view. Whatever may have been the official governmental attitude, education for the Indian in the past has proceeded largely on the theory that it is necessary to remove the Indian child as far as possible from his home environment, whereas the modern point of view in education and social work lays stress on upbringing in the natural setting of home and family life. The Indian educational enterprise is peculiarly in need of the kind of approach that recognizes this principle, that is less concerned with a conventional school system and more with the understanding of human beings.”

Overall, the Meriam Report was extremely critical of the federal government and its failure to protect the rights of Natives as well as tribal land and tribal resources. Perhaps that is why, in the eighty-three years since the report was filed, the United States has never commissioned another study of its kind. Why would the government spend money, one could argue, to ask questions to which it already knows the answers?

Canada waited until the 1960s to ask the same question of Indian policy that their American cousins had asked thirty-eight years earlier. The Hawthorn Report, which was published in 1966 and 1967, looked at “the contemporary situation of the Indians of Canada with
a view to understanding the difficulties they faced in overcoming some pressing problems and their many ramifications.” The “problems,” according to the report, were the “inadequate fulfillment of the proper and just aspirations of the Indians of Canada to material well being, to health, and to the knowledge that they live in equality and in dignity with the greater Canadian society.”

The report was a well-researched, conscientiously written document, whose preamble was careful to stress that the researchers did not believe that “the Indian should be required to assimilate, neither in order to receive what he now needs nor at any future time.” Indeed, the framers of the report were explicit in pointing out that “it is our opinion that the retention of these identities is up to the Indians. No official and perhaps no outside agency at all can do that task for them. Whether or not, and to what extent, Indians remain culturally separate depends on what it is worth to them.”