Soul Wound
The Legacy of Native American Schools
U.S. and Canadian authorities took Native children from their
homes and tried to school, and sometimes beat, the Indian out them. Now
Native Americans are fighting the theft of language, of culture, and of
childhood itself.
By Andrea Smith (2015 reblog)
A little while ago, I was supposed to attend a
Halloween party. I decided to dress as a nun because nuns were the
scariest things I ever saw,” says Willetta Dolphus, 54, a Cheyenne River
Lakota. The source of her fear, still vivid decades later, was her
childhood experience at American Indian boarding schools in South
Dakota.
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Boys pray before bedtime with Father Keyes, St.
Mary’s Mission School, Omak. © Northwest Museum of Arts &
Culture/Eastern Washington State Historical Society, Spokane, WA
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Dolphus is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the
U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began
with President Ulysses Grant’s 1869 “Peace Policy,” continued well into
the 20th century. Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities
took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off
to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian
day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were
separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a
single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their children lost
food rations.
Virtually imprisoned in the schools, children experienced a
devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling
labor to widespread sexual and physical abuse. Scholars and activists
have only begun to analyze what Joseph Gone (Gros Ventre), a psychology
professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, calls “the
cumulative effects of these historical experiences across gender and
generation upon tribal communities today.”
“Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding
schools,” writes Native American Bar Association President Richard
Monette, who attended a North Dakota boarding school, “where recent
generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for
hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best
and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry;
where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through
blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where
mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering
Native words.”
Sammy Toineeta (Lakota) helped found the national Boarding School
Healing Project to document such abuses. “Human rights activists must
talk about the issue of boarding schools,” says Toineeta. “It is one of
the grossest human rights violations because it targeted children and
was the tool for perpetrating cultural genocide. To ignore this issue
would be to ignore the human rights of indigenous peoples, not only in
the U.S., but around the world.”
The schools were part of Euro-America’s drive to solve the “Indian
problem” and end Native control of their lands. While some colonizers
advocated outright physical extermination, Captain Richard H. Pratt
thought it wiser to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” In 1879 Pratt,
an army veteran of the Indian wars, opened the first federally
sanctioned boarding school: the Carlisle Industrial Training School, in
Carlisle, Penn.
“Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization,
and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit,” said
Pratt. He modeled Carlisle on a prison school he had developed for a
group of 72 Indian prisoners of war at Florida’s Fort Marion prison. His
philosophy was to “elevate” American Indians to white standards through
a process of forced acculturation that stripped them of their language,
culture, and customs.
Government officials found the Carlisle model an appealing
alternative to the costly military campaigns against Indians in the
West. Within three decades of Carlisle’s opening, nearly 500 schools
extended all the way to California. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
controlled 25 off-reservation boarding schools while churches ran 460
boarding and day schools on reservations with government funds.
Both BIA and church schools ran on bare-bones budgets, and large
numbers of students died from starvation and disease because of
inadequate food and medical care. School officials routinely forced
children to do arduous work to raise money for staff salaries and
“leased out” students during the summers to farm or work as domestics
for white families. In addition to bringing in income, the hard labor
prepared children to take their place in white society — the only one
open to them — on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder.
Physical hardship, however, was merely the backdrop to a systematic
assault on Native culture. School staff sheared children’s hair, banned
traditional clothing and customs, and forced children to worship as
Christians. Eliminating Native languages — considered an obstacle to the
“acculturation” process — was a top priority, and teachers devised an
extensive repertoire of punishments for uncooperative children. “I was
forced to eat an entire bar of soap for speaking my language,” says
AIUSA activist Byron Wesley (Navajo).
The loss of language cut deep into the heart of the Native community.
Recent efforts to restore Native languages hint at what was lost. Mona
Recountre, of the South Dakota Crow Creek reservation, says that when
her reservation began a Native language immersion program at its
elementary school, social relationships within the school changed
radically and teachers saw a decline in disciplinary problems.
Recountre’s explanation is that the Dakota language creates community
and respect by emphasizing kinship and relationships. The children now
call their teachers “uncle” or “auntie” and “don’t think of them as
authority figures,” says Recountre. “It’s a form of respect, and it’s a
form of acknowledgment.”
Native scholars describe the destruction of their
culture as a “soul wound,” from which Native Americans have not healed.
Embedded deep within that wound is a pattern of sexual and physical
abuse that began in the early years of the boarding school system.
Joseph Gone describes a history of “unmonitored and unchecked physical
and sexual aggression perpetrated by school officials against a
vulnerable and institutionalized population.” Gone is one of many
scholars contributing research to the Boarding School Healing Project.
Rampant sexual abuse at reservation schools continued until the end
of the 1980s, in part because of pre-1990 loopholes in state and federal
law mandating the reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse. In
1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run
Hopi day school in Arizona, had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from
1979 until his arrest in 1987. The principal failed to investigate a
single abuse allegation. Boone, one of several BIA schoolteachers caught
molesting children on reservations in the late 1980s, was convicted of
child abuse, and he received a life sentence. Acting BIA chief William
Ragsdale admitted that the agency had not been sufficiently responsive
to allegations of sexual abuse, and he apologized to the Hopi tribe and
others whose children BIA employees had abused.
The effects of the widespread sexual abuse in the schools continue to
ricochet through Native communities today. “We know that experiences of
such violence are clearly correlated with posttraumatic reactions
including social and psychological disruptions and breakdowns,” says
Gone.
Dolphus, now director of the South Dakota Coalition Against Sexual
and Domestic Violence, sees boarding school policies as the central
route through which sexual abuse became entrenched in Native
communities, as many victims became molesters themselves. Hopi tribe
members testified at a 1989 Senate hearing that some of Boone’s victims
had become sex abusers; others had become suicidal or alcoholic.
The abuse has dealt repeated blows to the traditional social
structure of Indian communities. Before colonization, Native women
generally enjoyed high status, according to scholars, and violence
against women, children, and elders was virtually non-existent. Today,
sexual abuse and violence have reached epidemic proportions in Native
communities, along with alcoholism and suicide. By the end of the 1990s,
the sexual assault rate among Native Americans was three-and-a-half
times higher than for any other ethnic group in the U.S., according to
the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Alcoholism in
Native communities is currently six times higher than the national
average. Researchers are just beginning to establish quantitative links
between these epidemic rates and the legacy of boarding schools.
A more complete history of the abuses endured by
Native American children exists in the accounts of survivors of Canadian
“residential schools.” Canada imported the U.S. boarding school model
in the 1880s and maintained it well into the 1970s — four decades after
the United States ended its stated policy of forced enrollment. Abuses
in Canadian schools are much better documented because survivors of
Canadian schools are more numerous, younger, and generally more willing
to talk about their experiences.
A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada
documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United
Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal
government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the
Canadian residential school system. (SERIAL KILLERS? I think these
church officials were and should have been indicted… Trace)
The report says church officials killed children by beating,
poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero
cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of
organs and radiation exposure. In 1928 Alberta passed legislation
allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British
Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced
sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after
police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a
nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children
when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy,
police, and business and government officials “rented out” children from
residential schools to pedophile rings.
The consequences of sexual abuse can be devastating. “Of the first 29
men who publicly disclosed sexual abuse in Canadian residential
schools, 22 committed suicide,” says Gerry Oleman, a counselor to
residential school survivors in British Columbia.
Randy Fred (Tsehaht First Nation), a 47-year-old survivor, told the
British Columbia Aboriginal Network on Disability Society, “We were kids
when we were raped and victimized. All the plaintiffs I’ve talked with
have attempted suicide. I attempted suicide twice, when I was 19 and
again when I was 20. We all suffered from alcohol abuse, drug abuse.
Looking at the lists of students [abused in the school], at least half
the guys are dead.”
The Truth Commission report says that the grounds of several schools
contain unmarked graveyards of murdered school children, including
babies born to Native girls raped by priests and other church officials
in the school. Thousands of survivors and relatives have filed lawsuits
against Canadian churches and governments since the 1990s, with the
costs of settlements estimated at more than $1 billion. Many cases are
still working their way through the court system.
While some Canadian churches have launched reconciliation programs,
U.S. churches have been largely silent. Natives of this country have
also been less aggressive in pursuing lawsuits. Attorney Tonya
Gonnella-Frichner (Onondaga) says that the combination of statutes of
limitations, lack of documentation, and the conservative makeup of the
current U.S. Supreme Court make lawsuits a difficult and risky strategy.
Nonetheless, six members of the Sioux Nation who say they were
physically and sexually abused in government-run boarding schools filed a
class-action lawsuit this April against the United States for $25
billion on behalf of hundreds of thousands of mistreated Native
Americans. Sherwyn Zephier was a student at a school run from 1948 to
1975 by St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Marty, S.D.: “I
was tortured in the middle of the night. They would whip us with boards
and sometimes with straps,” he recalled in Los Angeles at an April press
conference to launch the suit.
Adele Zephier, Sherwyn’s sister, said, “I was molested there by a
priest and watched other girls” and then broke down crying. Lawyers have
interviewed nearly 1,000 alleged victims in South Dakota alone.
Native activists within church denominations are also pushing for
resolutions that address boarding school abuses. This July the first
such resolution will go before the United Church of Christ, demanding
that the church begin a process of reconciliation with Native
communities. Activists also point out that while the mass abductions
ended with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), doctors, lawyers,
and social workers were still removing thousands of children from their
families well into the 1970s. Even today, “Indian parents continue to
consent to adoptions after being persuaded by ‘professionals’ who
promise that their child will fare better in a white, middle-class
family,” according to a report by Lisa Poupart for the Crime and Social
Justice Associates.
Although there is disagreement in Native communities about how to
approach the past, most agree that the first step is documentation. It
is crucial that this history be exposed, says Dolphus. “When the elders
who were abused in these schools have the chance to heal, then the
younger generation will begin to heal too.”
Members of the Boarding School Healing Project say that current
levels of violence and dysfunction in Native communities result from
human rights abuses perpetrated by state policy. In addition to setting
up hotlines and healing services for survivors, this broad coalition is
using a human rights framework to demand accountability from Washington
and churches.
While this project is Herculean in its scope, its success could be
critical to the healing of indigenous nations from both contemporary and
historical human rights abuses. Native communities, the project’s
founders hope, will begin to view the abuse as the consequence of human
rights violations perpetrated by church and state rather than as an
issue of community dysfunction and individual failings.
And for individuals, overcoming the silence and the
stigma of abuse in Native communities can lead to breakthroughs: “There
was an experience that caused me to be damaged,” said boarding school
survivor Sammy Toineeta. “I finally realized that there wasn’t something
wrong with me.” 
