Stealing children: Arizona’s Boarding Schools
The recent news of the 215 children that were found buried at Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada is only surprising to those distant from their own history. In Canada and the United States, the long history of disrupting Native health and lives culminated into a more recent genocide: the removal of Native children and transfer to residential or boarding schools. This alone is a violation of the terms of genocide set by a biased UN. These camps also violated the bodies and minds of Native peoples through assimilation and abuse. More gravesites are being unearthed every week, and there is so much left to discuss. But for now, let’s get into Arizona’s own history of boarding schools while taking in mind that the United States’ boarding schools inspired Canada’s residential schools.
From the 1800s to the 1900s, policy shifted from militarized genocide towards cultural genocide. In 1891 in Arizona, at the formation of the Phoenix Indian School, Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan said:
“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them.”
This school closed in 1990.
The camp was signed off to be closed in a 1988 budget cut by the Reagan Administration and the land sold off because the cost of running it wasn’t worth it — it was not a moral move by the United States against cultural genocide. It was an incidental budget cut. This was not the only boarding school in Arizona, which would include: Tucson Indian Training School, Chinle Boarding School, Fort Mojave, Holbrook Indian School, Keams Canyon School, Many Farms High School, Pinon Boarding School, Pima Indian school, and Theodore Roosevelt Indian Boarding School. This does not include the fact that many Native people whose nation resided in Arizona were also sent to other states’ camps.
Patchwork Policy
Boarding schools were a specific cog in the destruction of Native health and culture. All that existed in the pre-colonized ‘Americas’ was slowly being whittled away: land, animals, health, and culture. The health practices of the pre-existing Native communities were made illegal. The 1883 Code of Indian Offenses made it so Medicine Men were punished for their traditional medicines and ceremonies, healing practices, and funeral rites. The punishment for violations was fines, jail time, or withholding rations. The forced move to reservations and restrictive laws forced a shift away from traditional diets as it became difficult to hunt and gather traditional goods which drastically shifted health.
This made communities unable to use their pre-existing ways of obtaining food. Native American’s exceptional pre-Columbian diets were lost, and a struggle for food became a struggle for health. Furthermore, BIA boarding schools resulted in the physical and emotional trauma of Native children who were forcibly separated from their parents.
While 19th-century U.S. policy used militarism and paternalism to devastate Native communities, the 20th-century would bring a messy combination of instabilities combined with attempts at introducing solutions to the problems the settlers had introduced. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the General Allotment Act would give way to the Snyder Act, the Indian Citizenship Act, and the Indian Reorganization Act. Some have referred to Native American policy as ‘a great patchwork quilt’ as it is pieces of old abandoned programs, and pieces of new, shiny policies that form one entity.
“My mother died while surviving civilization.”
The Bureau of Indian Affair boarding schools were a turn of the century policy created for Native American children to receive a coerced education that followed dominant white American culture. The goal of these schools was total assimilation into Anglo-American culture. Nearly 83% of all Native American school-age children attended boarding schools by 1926.
“The boy is filled with sorrow, to think he can no longer enjoy the freedom of his home, and live with those he loves. He must soon be placed in the care of the pale-face, whom he can not fully trust. He can no longer listen to his father’s stories and legends of the past. The feathers and paint, with which he loves to ornament himself, must be renounced.” — Robert Lewis, 1905 (Attended Phoenix Indian School)
The students were forced to cast off their traditional clothing, were instructed in 24 clock-time by whistle blows throughout the day, and were introduced to Anglo trades: the boys learning shop (wagon making, shoemaking, harness making, blacksmithing, carpentry, tin working, cabinetmaking) and the girls were taught household skills and to play with dolls, which introduced the female gender roles of white American culture. This would destabilize the matriarchal patterns of some communities. Students would be punished for not attending Christian Sunday services, up until 1934 when religious freedom was established. Even so, punishments continued in practice until the 1960s. Still, Native children would sneak off to practice what they could of their traditions in secret. A leader of one boarding school described these children as having “absolutely no idea of obedience.” A compliment if there ever was one.
“As an act of defiance to sending their children to boarding schools and in resistance to farming as white invaders told them to, 19 Hopi men deemed ‘Hostiles,’ surrendered to the U.S. military to be imprisoned at the infamous Alcatraz prison. They were to be ‘held in confinement, at hard labor, until … they shall show … they fully realize the error of their evil ways … [and] until they shall evince, in an unmistakable manner, a desire to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its Indian wards.’”
From the collection of Jeremy Rowe, Mesa, Arizona. © 2002
These schools likely ought to be called camps, as they acted within Erving Goffman’s ideas of “total institutions” which enforce “mortifications of the self.” These mortifications include “removal of personal possessions, loss of control over your schedule, uniforms, hair-cuts, and the inability to escape from organizational rules and procedures.” Other examples include prisons, monasteries, and residential medical facilities. These spaces were also militarized and industrialized.
This was also a push into individualistic and capitalist structures. These systems prepped Native children for low-paid labor roles and normalized militaristic structures. Rev. Howard A. Billman put this succinctly when he stated his belief in “civilizing the Indian by teaching him the beauty of blistered hands.” He was the director of Tucson Indian Training School and resigned in 1894 to become president of the University of Arizona. Or to put it a different way:
“In 1888 John Oberly, superintendent of Indian schools, argued that the objective of the schools was to wean the student from the tribal system and to imbue him with the egotism of American civilization, so that he would say ‘I’ instead of ‘we,’ and ‘this is mine,’ instead of ‘this is ours.’ If Indians could appreciate tangible wealth, they could be encouraged to pursue its accumulation. Respect for and recognition of the importance of private property and wealth were integral parts of the lesson of self-reliance. ‘I had to earn all of my spending money and my hands were never still,’ wrote Helen Sekaquaptewa in her journal. ‘I was always doing embroidery or crochet or tatting, making things to sell.’” — Owen Lindauer
During this time, children were not permitted to see relatives or speak their Native language. The boarding schools also prohibited native culture (dress, hairstyle, religious practices, philosophies) and replaced these experiences with Western trade skills, Christianity, and conformity.
I saw mention that despite difficulties, some people had “success” at these schools. The test is indoctrination and assimilation, and “success” is a violent measure of the end result. You have been fully assimilated. Congratulations, you can now be an upstanding member of White Society. Sorry about the graves. I guess they failed the test. It is a mockery to judge the actions of survivors of this system as anything other than the resistance of that colonization. This doesn’t mean that we can generalize every experience in these programs or deny that for some assimilation offered an avenue to survival — it simply means that, regardless, it a by-product of colonization, and required violence to exist. Measuring it is a legitimization of that violence.
The shadows of these institutions are all around us. I had the pleasure of watching Shonto Begay paint in Flagstaff, Arizona a few years ago, and fell in love with the Navajo artist’s work. His art stirred me deeply, but so did his story. He described his experiences in boarding schools as he grew up:
“I survived boarding school partly because of my spiritual strength and retreat into my drawings. I was always drawing. ‘Arts Save Lives’ has been my mantra ever since. Some people did not survive like me. They are walking traumas of my generation.”
“It was a casualty. Mentally, physically–it took a lot of lives. A sense of hopelessness. It was a brutal situation. It was a really brutal experience. I survived it and that’s why I do art. It keeps me from going to a place where I don’t want to go. It has allowed me to stay alive–painting–that’s why I say art saves lives. Every day, this is how I spend my days, to create beauty, externalize the pain, the angst, and really dance with the demons that have been haunting me.” — Shonto Begay for Forbes
The camps also led to various physical traumas. The boarding schools were overcrowded with lacking hygiene standards. Poor ventilation led to inadequate sanitation which in turn led to a lack of cleanliness. There was improper food preparation, inadequate medical attention, and alcohol use. These camps also fostered the spread of diseases like tuberculosis.
This separation from parents, land, and culture had an enormous ripple effect on the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children. Children were beaten for disobedience, beaten for speaking their native languages, beaten for not attending church. The facilitators would try to use hierarchal structures to turn these students against each other. They would use male figures to harm female figures if they resisted, further instituting abusive gender roles. Emotionally, these children endured a lack of parenting as well as historical trauma. There was a sense of dislocation and alienation from both white American culture and their own Native culture. The effects of these traumas would be felt throughout the following generations.
“Our History is the Future”
There are still seeds of this in Arizona and the United States today. The trauma of older generations is still very real — but there is barely time to heal as issues continue to mount. Healthcare is still massively underfunded on tribal lands, and the mental health of Native communities is still disrupted by ongoing colonial projects; In Arizona alone, we see the struggle of the San Carlos Apache’s fight for Oak Flat, the Tohono O’odham’s fight for Quitobaquito Springs, the Navajo and Hopi’s suffering after the 43-year land freeze and fallout of uranium mining, leading to increased cancer rates. Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn, Girls, and Two Spirit (#MMIWG2S) is still an active struggle for communities. COVID-19 also revealed the effects of past U.S. policies, as the disease tore through Native communities at a much faster and more deadly rate than the white American population. This is a direct result of U.S. policy and history. Older generations that had their youth stolen have now lost their last years as well.
Healing is an upwards struggle against ongoing problems and past traumas. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced that the U.S. will begin investigating the boarding schools here, which could be a step in facing the truth of what this country did. While an important project, ‘memory can be no substitute for justice’ and remembrance will not take the place of healing and restitution that is owed to the resisters of the U.S.’s colonial project.
Zigmund Hollow Horn, a Cheyenne man in his 70s who attended a boarding school as a child, said that “they got us when we were young. I used to speak my native tongue when I went down there, and I can’t even talk now. They beat it out of me. If you spoke your language, they held you down, put a bar of soap in your mouth.” I am reminded sharply of a friend of mine, who upon speaking Spanish at school, was smacked on the wrists by the teacher until she finally stopped in Flagstaff, Arizona. She is around 30 years old. These systems seem far away and gone, but in reality, they still perpetuate our educational systems.
Not all of these schools are closed, with 73 open and 15 still operating as boarding schools. But beyond this, our education and child service programs have simply taken on the roles of boarding schools. We have to address our past, but more than this, allow it to shape our future. The United States has to decolonize education and create systems of reparations for our crimes towards Native Communities. Decolonizing education might sound like an empty platitude, but consider that boarding schools were compulsory, assimilation devices into rigid time structures and capitalistic job roles, which indoctrinated students into individualistic societal roles and obscured history. Ask yourself, has much of this has changed?
Harold Begay worked in 2013 on the Navajo (Diné) Reservation as the superintendent of Tuba City Unified School District. He was attempting to educate in a way he felt he lacked growing up, by blending both Navajo knowledge and Anglo knowledge. He said that personal responsibility is a quality of the Diné, and more so, “that responsibility comes in many forms, and getting those skills is a tool you use to enter the wage economy.” Here school is explicitly framed as preparation for the wage economy. I am not trying to detract from his efforts, which seems like good work. It can’t be understated how important his goal of reinvigorating the Diné language is. And in a sense, he’s not wrong.
The best chance these kids have is being taught how to get good grades, and get standardized test scores, and go to college, and enter the wage economy. But the haunting assimilation lingers, even as the educators dedicate themselves to cultural integration. The goal hasn’t really changed, just the approach. When Captain Richard Pratt, the founder of Indian Boarding Schools, said, “To Civilize The Indian; Get Him Into Civilization. To Keep Him Civilized; Let Him Stay,” he was proposing the future we currently live in, which is the acceptance of performing civilization as the ultimate goal. This has become a reality for not just for Native students, but for all American children.
As David Treuer, an Ojibwe educator, said, “education was something that was done to us, not something that was provided for us.” Yet he also acknowledges the current generations have less trouble with their identity, partially due, I imagine, to educators that fought for cultural integration like Harold Begay. Still, I question if there are fundamental underlying ways to decolonize education: the end of standardized tests, the end of indoctrination into capitalistic wage structures like rigid time structures and grade-focused testing, the removal of coercion from schools, etc. Some of this process is already being fought for, such as diversifying educational texts and improving history curriculums.
Nick Estes, University of New Mexico assistant professor and writer, titled his book, “Our History is the Future.” A phrase heavy with meaning. He proposes that subjugation of a people requires the destruction of that people’s visions of the future. He challenges the notion that this future has been destroyed. The history of indigenous resistance is the future, the visions of the future are still strong, Native people who have resisted for hundreds of years are still resisting. The vision of the future is not defeated. This could be the way forward.
One of the positive meanings of the title of the book, Our History Is the Future, is that in times of great turmoil and destruction, people didn’t just stop being humans. They didn’t just give up. And while we think of resistance in many ways as a kind of act of defiance that’s spectacular and militant, it also happens in everyday realities, in how we keep alive these stories. People still had children in times of destruction. People still raised families. They did their best to keep alive the nation through genocide. — Nick Estes
Sources:
Promises to Keep: Public Health Policy for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the 21st Century, Mim Dixon (Editor), Yvette Roubideaux (Editor)
Health and Social Issue of Native American Women, Terry Maresca, “The Impact of Federal Government Policies on American Indian and Alaska Native Health Care”
Learning How to Heal: An Analysis of the History, Policy, and Framework of Indian, Betty Pfefferbaum, Rose L. Pfefferbaum, Everett R. Rhoades, and Rennard Strickland.
“Archaeology of the Phoenix Indian School”
Colonial Education is Still War. Indigenous knowledge & rage is power.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
