POLITICS
COVER
Chief's
House Torched in Kanesatake
BIOGRAPHY
A
Christmas Story: Sharon Greyeyes' Original Bannock Shop
BOOKS
Carr's
Native Experience Reprinted
Telling
It Like It Is
BUSINESS
Diamond
Search Leads to Conflict-of-Interest Probe
ENVIRONMENT
Blueberry
River First Nations Launches $7.5 Million Lawsuit Against Gas Development
HUMOUR
Bee
in the Bonnet: Ten, Happy, New, Years
Bee
in the Bonnet: Point the Arrow
POLITICS
Wounded
Leaders, Wounded Nations
Ottawa
Announces New Fast Track for Residential School Survivors
The
2004 National Aboriginal Achievement Awards (NAAA)
Wounded
Leaders, Wounded Nations cont'd
Prisons provide concept
Captain Pratt developed the concept of the residential school while serving
as a prison warden of natives captured in the post-Civil War battles he
fought for control of the plains. In 1875, he became the jailer of a group
of Caddo, Southern Cheyenne, Comanche and Kiowa prisoners at Fort Marion
in St. Augustine, Florida. They were issued military uniforms, and given
instruction in drill. A handful who curried his favour became guards keeping
watch over their fellow native prisoners.
Conditions for such native prisoners of war, transported thousands of miles away from their ancestral homes on the plains, were quite traumatic. Food was scarce, disease rampant. There was terrible overcrowding. Prisoners could be jailed for 30 years in Florida cells thousands of miles from their homes. Many endured great suffering behind bars until a general amnesty in 1919, when natives in the United States were finally given voting rights.
Pratt offered his prisoners hope for early release if they agreed to abandon their native ways. In 1878 he had a select group of 17 prisoners released from the confines of Fort Marion. They were sent to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, then a boarding school for black children.
Seeing a way of escape, the former inmates conformed to Pratt's expectations and excelled in school. From this coercive experience of forced assimilation, Pratt developed his concept of what became known as the Industrial Indian Residential Boarding School. Here he believed that distinctive native cultural traits could be eradicated. Some of his former prisoners recruited natives to attend these schools.
While he was a prison warden in St. Augustine, Pratt met a number of wealthy vacationers who supported his plans for the residential school; where natives could be assimilated into American ways. Their lobbying persuaded the government to support his schemes for indoctrination, brainwashing and assimilation.
Before the 1870s, residential schools were located on or in close proximity to reservations, where parents could easily visit. They would now be deliberately located far away.
Schemes to break native ties
To obtain students for the Carlisle residential school, Pratt went to
the Lakota communities which had three years earlier defeated Custer's
calvary. He persuaded the chiefs to send the children to Carlisle on the
deceptive grounds that gaining education would help them defend their
reservation communities from white land speculators.
While Pratt spoke with the Lakota chiefs to get students for his school, one of his key supporters was Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes. He was the author of legislation called the Dawes Act.
The infamous Dawes Act would remove 40 percent of the remaining land held by Native Americans on reservations. Much of this former reservation land, guaranteed by sacred treaties, ended up in the hands of white speculators, logging and mining interests, and ranchers.
The Dawes Act required that reservations be divided up into individual lots to teach natives respect for American notions of private property.
Ecologists have pointed out the folly behind the Dawes scheme. Most of the land that was broken up by the Dawes Act was not suitable for intensive farming by natives on individual plots of land. It was better suited to communal grazing for animals (such as bison) than growing crops (such as wheat) on plots that would fail during common drought periods.
Both Dawes and Pratt sought to break up what they termed the "tribal mass," and turn Indians into assimilated Americans. They had no understanding of how these native nations had evolved over thousands of years, through cultures based on respect for the earth.
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