Apache children when they arrived at the Carlisle Indian School ...		and four months after their arrival           (source)

“Today, western schooling is responsible for introducing a human monoculture across the entire world. Essentially the same curriculum is being taught, and it’s training people for jobs – very scarce jobs – but for jobs in an urban consumer culture. The diversity of cultures, as well as the diversity of unique human individuals is being destroyed in this way.”

—Helena Norberg-Hodge

Buildings and students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, circa 1900. More than 12,000 Indigenous children from more than 140 nations between 1879 and 1918, were forcibly brought to this site to be assimilated into white man’s ways. The school was the model for nearly 150 Indian schools. (source)

“Kill the Indian, Save the Man” —Richard Pratt

 

Indian Schools were designed to destroy American Indian cultures, languages, and spirituality. Students had to accept white culture, the English language, and Christianity. The first, and most well-known of these schools, was the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School. The school was established in 1879 by an Army officer named Richard Pratt, and was located in an abandoned Army post in Pennsylvania.

 

Pratt conducted a social experiment with Apache prisoners of war. The captives were shackled and sent by train to a camp in Florida thousands of miles from their home. He cut the men’s long hair, put them in uniforms, forced them to learn English, and subjected them to strict military protocols. During the course of this experiment, some of the men were severely traumatized by the experience and committed suicide. Most of the prisoners survived and learned the English customs and language. Using this social experiment as a model, Pratt went to Congress and requested funding for the similar education of all American Indians.

 

The Pratt/Carlisle Model Sweeps Across North America

 

By 1900, most American Indian children were taken from their families. They were transported by train and later by bus to American Indian Boarding Schools where they would be put into uniforms, have their hair cut, and be forced to act and speak like white people. Many spent their entire childhood in the American Indian Boarding School system, without seeing their parents and families for many years.

 

Upon graduating, these young American Indians still retained certain aspects of their traditional culture yet acted, spoke, and thought like English-speaking, white Americans. They would often return to their families and communities feeling like outcasts and in most instances, their families and communities treated them as such. No matter how much time, money, and effort was made to assimilate American Indians, white society still did not readily accept them. No longer finding an identity in either the white or tribal society, thousands of American Indian adolescents were thrust into an abyss of lost identity. (source, and local copy)

Tom Torlino, 1882		Tom Torlino, 1885          (source)

“The first day in the land of apples [in 1884] was a bitter-cold one; for the snow still covered the ground, and the trees were bare.... But this eating by formula was not the hardest trial in that first day. Late in the morning, my friend Judéwin gave me a terrible warning. Judéwin knew a few words of English, and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our

Zitkala-Ša, 1898

long, heavy hair. Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards!

 

“We discussed our fate some moments, and when Judéwin said, ‘We have to submit, because they are strong,’ I rebelled. ‘No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!’ I answered. I watched my chance, and when no one noticed I disappeared... What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know. I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair.

 

“I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”

 

Zitkala-Ša recounting her first day at White’s Manual Labor Institute
in Wabash, Indiana in 1884 (source)

Wounded Yellow Robe, Timber Yellow Robe, and Henry Standing Bear Taken upon their arrival in Carlisle      (hi res)		Wounded Yellow Robe, Timber Yellow Robe, and Henry Standing Bear six months after entrance to school      (source)

U.S. Army officer Richard Henry Pratt:

 

1881:
“We are encouraged in our Indian work every day by the advance of public sentiment. If we succeed in what we are doing, it will be through building up a strong and a bright hope in the breast of the Indian. A hope that they may become white men, and follow the white man’s road.” (source)

 

1892:
“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man....

 

“It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth, and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.” (source)

“School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of God’s own handiwork ...It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual...a manufactory for grinding out uniform results. I was not a creation of the schoolmaster: the Government Board of Education was not consulted when I took birth in the world.”

—Rabindranath Tagore, 1927 Nobel Prize Winner for Poetry