Civilizing Influence
Industrial School by his English name. He would be played, in a
movie about his life, by an Irish-American guy named Burt.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I don’t remember when I first heard the expression, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. I know I was very young. It’s a rotten thing to utter into a young ear — a national shame among a multitude of national shames committed against the original caretakers of the land we call home.
The extent of another of those shames was revealed today as a direct result of Joe Biden’s appointment of the first Native American to be Secretary of the Interior, the first Native American to be appointed to any cabinet post. Barely three months after her Senate confirmation, Deb Haaland ordered an investigation into what essentially were decades of government kidnappings of hundreds of thousands of Native American children into federal boarding schools whose aim was figuratively and ofttimes literally to beat the Indian out of them. Haaland’s own grandparents were among them.
The forced removals came after the United States Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 to instruct Indian children about the “habits and arts of civilization.” We wanted to civilize the savages. Make them more like white men and women.
Many of them were civilized into their graves.
This first Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report reveals that the schools accounted for more than five hundred American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian child deaths. Beyond the deaths, children were flogged, whipped, slapped, and cuffed; starved; used as forced labor; punished for “Indian behavior.” Their Indian names were changed, their Indian hair cut.
The Department of the Interior “expects the number of recorded deaths to increase.” And why might they expect that? Their initial analysis was of nineteen federal Indian boarding schools.
There were four hundred eight schools.
Their final analysis, the department predicts, will show tens of thousands died in the federal Indian boarding schools.
Tens of thousands of good little Indians.