DEHUMANIZING NATIVE AMERICANS

DEHUMANIZING NATIVE AMERICANS

The names Americans use for many American Indian tribes are derogatory. European Americans often learned what to call one tribe from a neighboring rival tribe. Sometimes whites simply developed their own contemptuous names for groups of Native people. Markers in Arizona are full of these wrong names. Some Native groups have responded to this confusion by accepting their new name even if it originally had negative connotations. Others are mounting determined efforts to be known by the name they call themselves. Arizona offers examples of both.

NAVAJO INDIANS: BARBONCITO - CHIEF OF THE NAVAJO TRIBE IN NEW MEXICO

By far the largest and most populous Indian reservation in the United States is the Navajo reservation, which occupies all of northeastern Arizona and extends into Utah and New Mexico. Navajo is the name given to these once nomadic people by the already-settled Tewa Pueblo Indians. 1 It may mean "thieves" or "takers from the fields." The Navajos came to the Southwest millennia after the Tewas and call themselves Dine, sometimes spelled Dineh, which means "we the people." 2 Most Native American groups call themselves by names that mean "we the people." Like most societies they were ethnocentric - seeing their own culture as the yardstick of sound human behavior - and these names reflect that certainty.

Tewa Pueblo Indian

The name of another famous Arizona tribe, Apaches, means "enemies." The Zunis named them that. Related linguistically to the Navajos, Apaches too call themselves Dine. In southern Arizona, Papagos means "bean eaters," a name given by the nearby Pimas. Papagos call themselves Tohono O'Otam, or "desert people." Pimas, another southern Arizona tribe, refer to themselves as Ahkeemult O'odham or "river people." "Pima" actually means "I don't know," apparently their reply when asked their name in Spanish by an early explorer!

"Tohono O'odham Woman" circa 1905

Americans have learned to call the people who built the ancient cliff dwellings at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona "the Anasazi." Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning "ancient enemies." Since the Anasazis have "vanished" according to anthropologists, we cannot now ask them what they called themselves. In reality the Anasazi didn't "vanish" but merged into the various pueblo peoples whose descendants still live in Arizona and New Mexico. Most Pueblo Indians prefer to call the Anasazi "ancestral Puebloans" and still know which pueblo includes descendants from which "Anasazi" site.

Inuit

The use of derogatory names is hardly limited to Arizona. Native people living in far northern Canada and Alaska call themselves Inuit - again, "we the people" - while the Crees to their southeast called them Eskimos, "those who eat raw flesh." The Sioux call themselves Dakotas or Lakotas, meaning "allies" or "people," but their ancient enemies, the Ojibwes, called them Nadouwesioux, meaning "little snakes" or "enemies," and the French shortened it to Sioux. In turn, Ojibwes, sometimes written Chippewas, refer to themselves as Anishinabes, "people of the creation." "Mohawk" means "cannibal" in Algonquian; they call themselves "Kaniengehagas," "people of the place of flint."

Salish

Some names take note of physical characteristics of Natives. Thus British Americans called the Salish ("we the people") the Flathead Indians. The French called two groups of Indians "Gros Ventres," "big bellies," apparently derived from their name in Indian sign language. The French also renamed the Nimipus ("we the people") the Nez Perces, "pierced noses," because some of them wore nose pendants.

The Delaware Indians (Lenni Lenape)

A few names were complimentary. On the east coast the British renamed the Lenape "Delawares." They didn't mind once the British explained that Lord De La Ware was a brave military leader. Lenape means - you guessed it - "we the people." 3 The most famous new name of all - "Indians," coined by Columbus for the Arawaks he met in the Caribbean - was complimentary in a sense: Columbus either thought he was in the East Indies or hoped to convince his supporters that he had reached that important trading destination by using the term. 4

Some whites claim that their practice of naming sports teams for Native Americans is complimentary. Thus we have the Florida State University Seminoles, Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, and worst of all, Washington Redskins. Some Indians do consider some of these terms flattering.

The Cleveland Indians defend their name on that basis, claiming it stems from a popular member of the team in the 1890s. "Chief Wahoo," the bucktooth Indian caricature that decorates Cleveland uniforms, offends many Native Americans today however. And Native American newspapers continue to react angrily to the "Washington Redskins." How long would Americans tolerate the "Atlanta Niggers," they ask? Or the "New York Kikes?" Even positive terms like "braves" trivialize Native Americans as mascots, some Indians assert.

"Hopi" means "peaceful ones."

At least two tribes in Arizona are called by their own names. "Havasupai" means "people of the blue-green waters," referring to their homeland's beautiful waterfalls in a side gorge of the Grand Canyon, and "Hopi" means "peaceful ones." Some other Arizona Indians have given in to the renaming. Apaches now acquiesce to being called "Apaches." Many Navajos accept "Navajo" rather than insisting on "Dine." Many Pimas now call themselves Pimas. Papagos, however, are making a concerted effort to be known as Tohono O'otam.

In Minnesota some Ojibwes now ask others to call them Anishinabes. Throughout the world, naming has been a prerogative of power. With colonialism on the wane, calling natives by the name they use for themselves is gradually becoming accepted practice. Thus when leaders in Upper Volta changed its name to Burkino Faso, mapmakers had to make the adjustment. 5 Native Americans who care may win similar respect in coming years. (source: World Free Internet)

Chapter 2: The First Slaves

Chapter Two: The First Slaves

Out of a swampy thicket, near the blue waters of Long Island Sound, 200 old men, women and children stepped into the bright sunshine and entered a new world.

Hundreds of edgy soldiers, mustered from villages and farms across Connecticut, had finally surrounded the Pequots and their leader, Sassacus.

It was July 13, 1637, a critical day in the Pequot War that had consumed Puritan Connecticut for several years. Six weeks before, in a key victory for the colonists, Capt. John Mason had led a massacre at the Pequot fort in Mystic, killing as many as 700 Indians in a single hour.

attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic

This summer afternoon was a jubilant one for the Puritans and their Mohegan scouts who had cornered these "most terrible" Pequots. A new chapter in American history was about to begin: Indian enslavement in Colonial America.

Among the Pequots caught in the bog in what's now part of Fairfield, a group of perhaps 17, mostly children, were thought to have been exported as slaves. Others were handed out to soldiers as wartime booty. Historians believe these 17 Pequots later ended up on an island off Nicaragua. Like many of the Indian slaves sent from America over the next century, there is little record of what happened to them.

Barely five years after their first recorded contact with Europeans, this final battle of the bloody Pequot War conclusively finished a doomed experiment by Indians and Puritans to live side by side. By the time the Treaty of Hartford was signed the following September, formally ending the war, the English had killed or enslaved more than 1,500 Pequot men, women and children, scholars believe.

During the uneasy decades that followed, as the Puritans pushed deeper into Indian country and their numbers swelled, it was difficult to travel through Connecticut, Massachusetts or Rhode Island and not encounter an Indian slave, working in a field, orchard or boatyard.

By the end of the 1600s, there were probably thousands of Indian slaves, many of them servants in homes and on farms. It would become, in the words of Roger Williams, a founder of Brown University, an essential component of "the Unnecessary Warrs and cruell Destructions of the Indians in New England."

In Connecticut and throughout New England, where, 350 years later, descendants of Indians and Europeans still have an uneasy relationship, Indian slavery remains a rarely recited part of our history.

Wampanoag, longhouse

"There are a lot of things that people in America don't have any idea about,"' said Everett "Tall Oak" Weeden, an Indian historian who shares both Pequot and Wampanoag ancestry. "History has been sanitized."

The Indians `have their eyes fixed upon us'

A primal fear of Indians, a desperate shortage of labor, a biblical sense of entitlement - these forces coalesced, leading to the enslavement of the Native Americans in southern New England in the 1600s. The colonists ultimately thought of the conflict as the "civilized" English against the "savage" natives.

"Partly it's social control. But they also want the labor. People wanted household servants," said Margaret Newell, a professor at Ohio State University who is writing a book on Indian slavery.

In Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and to a lesser extent in Connecticut, Newell said, "You would find [Indian] women working as domestic servants, taking care of children. You would find men working as farm laborers, drivers. You would find children taking care of livestock."

For some Indians, servitude lasted only until age 24. But others were bound to masters for indefinite periods. Indian slaves and household servants appear on census rolls and court records well into the 18th century.

This was a time of growing divisions and bloody violence between the native populations and the Puritans. As the colonists sought to settle in to their new home in America, there were conflicts, small and large, all over. It was a time of murdered women and children, of severed limbs and smashed corpses, when it was not uncommon to see Indian and English heads mounted on stakes, wigwams burned and frontier farms devastated.

For many Indians, Mason's brutal Pequot massacre and others after it remained fresh. For the colonists, the scalpings and mutilations, which included flayings and torture, seemed too monstrous for any true Englishman to ever accept.

By the beginning of King Philip's War in 1675, when Indians attacked and destroyed town after town in New England, it would be difficult to overestimate the fear English colonists felt as they sought to conquer and subdue New England. After a string of stunningly successful Indian attacks at the start of the conflict, Puritans were well aware that "all the Indians have their eyes fixed upon us."

Thousands of English and Indians would perish in the bloody two-year conflict, named for a regal Wampanoag sachem, or chief, whose father, Massasoit, sat with the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving feast. By the end of 1675, it was full-scale battle across New England.

"Many of our miserable inhabitants lye naked, wallowing in their blood, and crying, and whilst the Barbarous enraged Natives, from one part of the Country to another are in Fire, flaming their fury, Spoiling Cattle and Corn and burning Houses and torturing Men, Women and Children," wrote one unidentified colonist, quoted in historian Jill Lepore's revealing 1998 book, "The Name of War."

The Indian threat "strained even the most eloquent colonists' powers of description," Lepore writes of a time early in the war when Indians nearly drove the Puritans from New England's interior.

"I was so struck by how strident and how fearful these people were," University of Connecticut anthropologist Kevin McBride said of his research into Indians and Puritans of the 1600s. "These guys must have been panicked."

Enslaving the problems

As the 17th century wore on, and colonists grew to outnumber natives in New England by about 2 to 1, Indians were increasingly pursued. A systematic divvying up of captives from the many Connecticut tribes emerged. The colonists originally focused on the more warlike Pequots, but soon members of the Narragansetts, Nipmucks and Wampanoags were also enslaved.

"The general court appointed certain persons in each county to receive and distribute these Indian children proportionately, and to see that they were sold to good families," wrote Almon W. Lauber in his 1913 book, "Indian Slavery in Colonial Times."

"The custom of enslavement came from the necessity of disposing of war captives, from the greed of traders and from the demand for labor," explained Lauber, whose book is still considered an essential reference.

Captured Indian warriors were frequently executed - or shipped to slave markets around the world. By the time King Philip's War began, Indian slaves, often women and children, were a common sight across southern New England.

From Newport, R.I., to Portsmouth, N.H., Indians came to public auction, "tied neck to neck," and sold for half of what an African might bring.

A 7-year-old girl was toted to Connecticut from a battle in Massachusetts, a spoil of war who was handy around the house. At times, there were so many captured Indians available that a few bushels of corn or 100 pounds of wool sufficed for payment. A New London man left "an Indian maidservant" as part of his estate. Another, a farmer and businessman from the New London area, kept a careful diary noting how common Indian slaves were on the farms and in the homes of southeastern Connecticut.

And on sailing ships, bound for the slave markets in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Azores, Indians were packed away tightly by the profiteers, who kidnapped or bought them wholesale from Colonial authorities eager to finance an increasingly costly war against the Indians.

Indians who surrendered were treated only slightly more gently in the colony, with the Connecticut General Court ordering children sold as indentured servants for 10-year terms, though some would be slaves far longer if they got into legal trouble in Puritan courts.

A note left by attacking Nipmuck Indians after the plundering of Medfield, Mass., in February 1676 reveals much about the time: "We have nothing but our lives to loose but thou has many fair houses and cattell & much good things."

The rewards of war

In the fall of 1676 the sailing ship Seaflower departed Boston Harbor for the Caribbean, its cargo hold filled with nearly 200 "heathen Malefactors men, women and children" sentenced to "Perpetuall Servitude & slavery."

As Lepore recounts in her book - one of the few published scholarly examinations of Indian slavery - the sale and lucrative export of Indians had become by 1676 one of "the rewards of war" that replenished "coffers emptied by wartime expenses." Despite government efforts to regulate it, much of the trade was conducted illegally and ruthlessly.

The slave export began to heat up in 1675 and 1676, when captives from the rapidly expanding King Philip's War were filling New England cities, further frightening the English. Most of the Indians captured and exported out of New England were from Massachusetts, whose towns suffered the most from Indian attacks.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the colonists also found that adult Indian males who were kept as slaves made poor servants here. Mason said as much, when he wrote of captives from the Pequot War: "They could not endure that Yoke; few of them continuing any considerable time with their masters."

African-Indian intermarriage

Records of Indian slaves turn up well into the 18th century, but the practice faded rapidly in the 1700s, because of a growing market for African slaves and the widespread elimination of Indians and their culture. Scholars like Lepore also said that New England at this time began to see itself as a place that celebrated liberty and a growing anti-slavery movement.

Meanwhile, the eradication of Indian males through war, ravaging diseases and slavery led to significant intermarriage between native women and African males in the 18th century and beyond. Thus, as researchers like McBride and Newell note, the arrival of African slaves would help assure the survival of some Indian communities into the 21st century - while also setting the stage for some of the racial tension today.

Narragansett woman dressed up for a powwow

"Slavery really did have a devastating impact on the Native American population. Men were more likely to be exported. You had some tribes and populations where the ratio of women to men is completely out of whack," said Newell.

In the 20th century this would lead to tribes, such as the Narragansett and Pequots, with members who, to an outsider, look distinctly African American - but who nevertheless descend from historic New England tribes.

For many modern Indians in southern New England, slavery remains an essential and too-little-discussed element of their being, a chapter that must be acknowledged to understand the dynamics of today's often fragile relationship between Indians and non-Indians.

Back to the past

Wampanoag, Pequot and Narrangansett in St. David's Island. 2003

This year, on the 365th anniversary of the Fairfield "swamp fight" of 1637, "Tall Oak" Weeden and a delegation of Wampanoag Indians and Mashantucket Pequots went hunting for remnants of this forgotten slavery era.

Searching for clues, they traveled to St. David's Island in Bermuda. There they met with a small clan claiming to be descendants of New England Indian slaves shipped there centuries ago. Those who went came away convinced they had struck gold when they saw the faces, the dances and rituals of the St. David's Indians.

"I was struck by how much they looked like us," said Michael J. Thomas, a Mashantucket tribal leader who went on the Bermuda trip this past summer.

According to local legend, the wife and son of King Philip might have been among those on St. David's. After the king's death, his wife, Wootonekanuske, is said to have married an African man, preserving a genealogical line with Indians in New England.

The Pequots, flush with casino wealth and in the midst of their own 21st century resurgence, plan to dig even further into slavery's hidden history, Thomas said.

"What's to be learned is a more accurate perception of Colonial-era history," he said. "It helps people to understand our insecurities of today."

source: Green, Rick. Hartford Courant. "Chapter Two: The First Slaves: For Early Colonists, Indians Were A Bloody Enemy And The Spoils Of War." 29September2002

Bureaucrat ripped hole in tapestry of Virginia's Indian history

From the Virginia Pilot, "Bureaucrat ripped hole in tapestry of Virginia's Indian history," by Joanne Kimberlin:

Tall and thin, with a neat mustache and white hair, Plecker was Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946. He was the gatekeeper of birth, marriage and death records during the era of eugenics – a movement that combined bans on interracial marriage with the mandatory sterilization of the mentally ill.

The plan was to improve the human race by reducing what was viewed as defective breeding. Virginia was far from alone in its support of the “science”: In the early 1900s, interracial marriage was illegal in 30 of the then 48 states. Nazi Germany’s lethal persecution policies had roots in eugenics.

Virginia, however, had the distinction of being the first to outlaw interracial marriage – a law enacted in 1691 forbidding blacks and whites to marry.

The state’s 1924 Racial Integrity Act reinforced the old prohibitions and sought to clarify the dividing line. Anyone not matching the act’s definition of “white,” with “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian,” was classified as “colored” – including the Indians.

Plecker, an icily efficient man who rarely smiled, carried out a campaign to make sure the vital records of Indians across the state reflected their new racial category.

Indians who refused the change risked a year in jail. Hospitals detained native newborns until parents signed birth certificates designating their child as black.

Natives say Plecker’s “paper genocide” created a gap in their history that makes it nearly impossible for them to prove that their tribes have existed “continuously” – one of the requirements of federal recognition.

Chief Walter D. “Red Hawk” Brown, III. The Cheroenhaka (Nottoway) Indian Tribe, Southampton County Virginia is an Iroquoian-speaking Tribe

But R. Lee Fleming, a director at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, says Virginia tribes aren’t as short on records as they say. Contrary to popular belief, Fleming says, Plecker did not entirely obliterate their bloodline.

Fleming has a file that contains 16 Indian birth, death or marriage certificates from the Plecker era where the race was not altered.

“I just scratched the surface and found these,” he said. “I was certainly surprised. That’s not at all what I’d been hearing.”

Steve Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy, wasn’t shocked to hear that some records escaped Plecker’s purge, but he doesn’t think there are enough to clear federal hurdles: “You can find 16 vital records in any tribe that weren’t changed, but you’ll find 150 to 200 that had the wrong documentation.”

(source: The Virginian-Pilot, 10 June 2009, by Joanne Kimberlin)

Encomienda: Spanish Slavery in the New World

The Encomienda System was established in response to the colonists' need for Indian labour, but became the most destructive system in the history of Spanish America.

When the Spanish arrived in the New World, they brought with them a set of customs and traditions from their old Spain. One of the systems that were commonly practiced in Western Europe was forced labour. In Spain, this was knownas the Encomienda system. An encomienda was a means of providing a Spaniard a portion of land and restricted property rights over a certain number of Indians. The Encomienda system quickly became entrenched in South and Central America. Although it was implemented with the intention to care for and provide for the Native Americans, it became the most abusive and destructive system in colonial New Spain.

The Need to Indoctrinate and Instruct Natives in the Catholic Faith

The Spanish used religion to justify their domination over the Native Americans. The conquistadors maintained it was God’s will that they indoctrinate the Native Americans in the Catholic faith. Under the law of Burgos, any encomendero with more than fifty Natives had to educate one boy in writing and religious doctrine so that he could in turn, teach his people these things. “Some of the Native communities were even divided into territorial doctrinas or parishes with its own priest and church building where Indians would be instructed about the Christian faith,” says Michael Busbin. However, this method “quickly became an opportunity for the encomenderos to exploit and utilize the Indians for their own ends,” says Meredith Scott.

The Belief the Native Americans Were Incompetent

The need to Christianize the Natives was not the only reason for the Spanish to establish the encomienda system. The common belief that the Native Americans were savage and incompetent people unable to live a Christian life and conduct money and trade, fuelled the Spaniards’ desire to establish the encomienda system. Consequently, the Spaniards believed the Natives needed to be clothed, educated and taught about God. If they were left on their own, they would not cooperate with the Spaniards in matters of commerce, and so would ruin New Spain’s economy.

The Responsibility of Encomenderos

King Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain issued an order stating that all encomenderos were forbidden to mistreat the Natives. However, at the same time, they granted the encomenderos the right to persuade the natives to abandon their pagan religions and traditions.

Although the encomenderos were fully responsible for the Natives on their land, the Natives were granted to them for only two or three years at a time. The encomenderos were to pay the Natives a sum for their work and supply them with the provisions they needed to live. At one point, the Catholic Monarchs even encouraged intermarriage between the Spanish and the Natives as a way to completely assimilate the Natives into Spanish society.

Native Americans as a Source of Immediate Revenue

The Conquistadors, however, ignored the King and Queen’s commands. The Spanish colonists desired wealth without having to work for it. Every Spanish colonist that came to the New World expected to own land and have the natives do all the work for them. The natives were stripped of their rights because they were seen as a source of immediate revenue for the encomenderos.

The encomenderos demanded the natives pay them tribute in response to the provisions they gave them. The natives were forced to work night and day with very little to no pay in return. “This eventually led to the death of many already down-trodden Indians,” says Michael Busbin. In fact the abuse encomiendas inflicted on their Natives took place for several years and, consequently, led to a sharp decline in the Native population in Spanish America. It was not until the middle of the sixteenth century that the Spanish Crown would finally take action against the destruction that was being wrought upon the Natives at the hands of the Spanish colonists in its overseas colonies. (source: Latin America)

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas

Gamble-Williams, an educator, artist and community activist, and her husband, Thunder Williams, of Afro-Carib ancestry from Trinidad and Tobago, have a radio show on D.C.’s WOL-AM Radio, called “The Talking Feather.” The show explores the history and culture of American Indians, blacks and and indigenous peoples from around the world.

“On our show, a lot of Afro-Native people were calling in, questioning why our story was not in the National Museum of the American Indian,” the Hyattsville, Md., resident said.

Later, the couple would attend a viewing of the documentary film, "Black Indians in America: An America Story," which affirmed “this identity issue started 500 years ago,” the radio host said. “When we met Louise Thundercloud, a Native woman with African ancestry, she said our story could not stop with the documentary, and we thought how we could have the story of black Indians told in the museum.”

The Williamses would put together a concept paper with a proposal to tell the story of the rich heritage forged from the relationship between American Indians and blacks and present it to NMAI'S community affairs department in early 2005. On Nov. 10, 2009, four years of work paid off with the opening of the exhibit, "IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas." The exhibit will run through May 2010. An opening symposium drew a standing-room-only audience.

Many in attendance felt that the story of the intersection and relationship of the two peoples was long overdue, although several books have attempted to tell the story of the historical connections between the two groups that began more than 500 years ago. The late educator Carter G. Woodson stated that it "is one of the longest unwritten chapters in the history of the United Sates."

Books like “Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples” by Jack D. Forbes, pointed out that free Africans reached the shores of the Americas as traders and settlers long before Europeans brought African slaves to the Americas in chains. Noted scholar Dr. Ivan Sertima’s “They Came Before Columbus” argues that historical, archaeological and even botanical evidence shows proof of African contact with the New World in Pre-Columbian times.

More recent evidence depicts how the relationships become more complex with the institution of slavery and the Indian Wars that pitted black soldiers against Indian tribes. While documents show the intermarriage of blacks and American Indians, African-Native slave narratives tell the stories of slaves held captive by American Indian tribes. Other times, white settlers held both American Indians and blacks captive.

However, according to Rex Ellis, associate director for cultural affairs for the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a co-collaborator with NMAI, “While there has been excellent scholarship on the subject, the story of African-Native people is one that has not been fully explored in a wide public forum, until this exhibition. It is a story that while painful at times, needs to be told.

“African-Native Americans are inextricably bound, and they no longer wish to hide. Whatever the consequences, they want people to know who they are.”

For some like John W. Franklin, son of noted scholar John Hope Franklin, the exhibit is important “because our stories are shared. Our children need to see the overlap.” Franklin, director of partnerships and international programs for the National Museum of African History and Culture, said his grandfather, Buck Albert Franklin, is pictured in the exhibition. “The picture was taken in 1899. He had been enslaved by Native Americans but was able to escape and serve in the Civil War.”

For 75-year-old Alfred Whitaker, a member of Virginia’s Nottoway tribe, the exhibit means, “Black Indians are no longer invisible. I grew up listening to stories from my great-grandmother who was full-blooded Creek, but I could not say in proper company that my ancestors were Native American. Virginia had a law that said that if you had one drop of black blood, then you were considered colored, effectively disenfranchising Native Americans.”

For Louise Thundercloud, the exhibit “is the beginning of a place of healing long overdue. That we have come together to give a more accurate representation is really exciting.”

Tall Oak, a 73-year-old elder from Rhode Island and an Absentee Mashentucket Pequot, commented that the exhibit shows a more balanced picture between red and black peoples than previously shown in history books.

“For so long, the history books had been sanitized. Before this exhibition came to fruition, I had dreamed of telling the impact of slavery on people. Little Rhode Island was the tail that wagged the dog in the English Colonies when it came to slavery in the U.S. “

A history buff, Tall Oak captivated an attentive audience during a session with his own Afro-Native version of the song ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy” and shared some little-known historical facts.

“The Desire, the first slave ship built in the U.S., was built in Marblehead, Massachusetts,” Tall Oak said. “A year later, there was the Pequot Massacre, and all of the Pequot that were not massacred were sent as slaves to Bermuda. In 2002, we connected with the offspring of those sent to Bermuda, and they look just like us.”

Thunder Williams, who with his wife is part of a curatorial team that includes Robert Keith Collins, Angela Gonzales, Judy Kertesz and Gabrielle Tayac, said he hopes the new Smithsonian exhibit opens the door on a larger scale for reconciliation between Afro-Native people through open dialogue “and for the bigger task of helping a society that has not reconciled with one another,” Williams said.

“Colonization in the Americas inflicted psychic trauma on black and red people, resulting in a loss of identity and a distorted reality. We need a reconciliation with history, ourselves and with others,” said Gamble-Williams.” Let’s get over the fear of Africa and the fear of being identified as having African blood.”

Co-sponsored by local chapters of the Links, the exhibit will travel on exhibition through 2012. The Williamses hope the exhibition will reach numerous groups so that open discussions can be addressed around sensitive issues such as full blood versus mixed blood, and the social and political implications around identity issues.

Thunder Williams says, " 'IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas' will facilitate dispelling negative images and unfounded myths perpetuated by inaccurate historical accounts and unbalanced academic instruction. Understanding how one's personal history fits into the national history and correspondingly into a global history is a cornerstone of cross-cultural enlightenment."

“As a sociologist, I ask, ‘How did we come to have these different ideologies?' " Dr. Angela A. Gonzales, a member of the Hopi tribe, and a member of the curator team said. “This is a huge topic that so many of us are invested in.”

IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas


National Museum of the American Indian: Symposium - Friday, November 13, 2009
A part of the American story has long been invisible—the story of people who share African American and Native American ancestry. Over centuries, African American and Native people came together, creating shared histories, communities, and ways of life. Often divided by prejudice, laws, or twists of history, African-Native Americans were united by a double heritage that is truly indivisible.

Held on the occasion of the groundbreaking exhibition IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, this symposium aims to bring visibility to African-Native American lives and initiate a healing dialogue on African-Native American experiences for people of all backgrounds. Speakers include curators and authors Robert Keith Collins (African and Choctaw descent), Penny Gamble-Williams (Chappaquiddick Wampanoag), Angela Gonzales (Hopi), Judy Kertész, Tiya Miles, and Gabrielle Tayac (Piscataway). Lonnie G. Bunch, III, director of the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, will deliver opening remarks, and NMAI director Kevin Gover (Pawnee) moderates.

500 Nations - Part 2

500 Nations is an eight part documentary on the Native Americans of North and Central America. It documents from pre-Columbian to the end of the 19th century. Much of the information comes from text, eyewitnesses, pictorials, and computer graphics. The series was hosted by Kevin Costner, and directed by Jack Leustig. It included the voice talents of narrator Gregory Harrison, Eric Schweig, Wes Studi, Edward James Olmos, and Patrick Stewart. "500 Nations tries to crystallize the sweeping events that reshaped North America- one of the largest and most pivotal stories in human history - a story we feel is widely unknown. Often painful, sometimes shocking, but in the end it is simply about understanding." Kevin Costner

500 Nations - Part 2

Removal of Southeast Native Americans

FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES

The term "Five Civilized Tribes" came into use during the mid-nineteenth century to refer to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations. Although these Indian tribes had various cultural, political, and economic connections before removal in the 1820s and 1830s, the phrase was most widely used in Indian Territory and Oklahoma.

Americans, and sometimes American Indians, called the five Southeastern nations "civilized" because they seemed to be assimilating to Anglo-American norms. The term indicated the adoption of horticulture and other European cultural patterns and institutions, including widespread Christianity, written constitutions, centralized governments, intermarriage with white Americans, market participation, literacy, animal husbandry, patrilineal descent, and even slave-holding. None of these attributes characterized all of the nations or all of the citizens that they encompassed. The term was also used to distinguish these five nations from other so-called "wild" Indians who continued to rely on hunting for survival.

Elements of "civilization" within Southeastern Indian society predated removal. The Cherokee, for example, established a written language in 1821, a national supreme court in 1822, and a written constitution in 1827. The other four nations had similar, if less noted, developments.

500 Nations -- Removal of Southeast Native Americans, Part 1


500 Nations -- Removal of Southeast Native Americans, Part 2


500 Nations -- Removal of Southeast Native Americans, Part 3

PBS Special: We Shall Remain, After the Mayflower

In March of 1621, in what is now southeastern Massachusetts, Massasoit, the leading sachem of the Wampanoag, sat down to negotiate with a ragged group of English colonists. Hungry, dirty, and sick, the pale-skinned foreigners were struggling to stay alive; they were in desperate need of Native help.

Massasoit faced problems of his own. His people had lately been decimated by unexplained sickness, leaving them vulnerable to the rival Narragansett to the west. The Wampanoag sachem calculated that a tactical alliance with the foreigners would provide a way to protect his people and hold his Native enemies at bay. He agreed to give the English the help they needed.

A half-century later, as a brutal war flared between the English colonists and a confederation of New England Indians, the wisdom of Massasoit’s diplomatic gamble seemed less clear. Five decades of English immigration, mistreatment, lethal epidemics, and widespread environmental degradation had brought the Indians and their way of life to the brink of disaster. Led by Metacom, Massasoit’s son, the Wampanoag and their Native allies fought back against the English, nearly pushing them into the sea.


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 1


We Shall Remain: Episode 1 After the Mayflower Part 2


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 3


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 4


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 5


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 6


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 7


We Shall Remain, Episode 1 After The Mayflower Part 8

Eastern Seaboard Native Americans

Nanepashemet interviewed for Kevin Costner's "500 Nations" (1993) - Part 1


INCLUDES: Was Massasoit a practical man? Why the Wampanoags helped and engaged with Plimoth Plantation; why Plimoth's settlers were simply "lucky"; the consequences of imposing English law in New England; laws on the Sabbath and alcohol.


Nanepashemet interviewed for Kevin Costner's "500 Nations" (1993) - Part 2


INCLUDES: the causes of King Philip's War in 1675; reasons for Native victories early in the war; the fortunes of various New England groups in "praying towns" during the war; Metacomet's or "King Philip's" backgrounds and his will to negotiate.


Nanepashemet interviewed for Kevin Costner's "500 Nations" (1993) - Part 3

The Spanish Settlements

The Spanish Settlements

Father Junipero Serra

The Spanish Empire was the first to create a permanent colony in California. Father Junipero Serra arrived in San Diego during the summer of 1769 and founded Mission San Diego de Alcala, the first of 21 Catholic missions that would spread along the coast of California. At the same time, the first presidio (military base) was established in San Diego. The mission and military presidio in San Diego were the first sites where Europeans and native Californians interacted regularly. A portion of the colonists came aboard ships from ports on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Many colonists, however, traveled on overland routes from the interior of Mexico. The De Anza expedition of 1775 – 1776, for example, walked 1,200 miles from Mexico to establish the town of San Jose and the presidio in San Francisco.

The missionaries, soldiers and settlers came from many backgrounds. The missionaries, who were in the Franciscan order, were mostly Spaniards. The soldiers, however, were far more diverse. Some were born in Spain, but the vast majority came from Mexico and could claim Indian or African heritage. Many of the colonists were Mestizo, or people with mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry. For example, the original settlers of the pueblo of Los Angeles included 26 people of African descent, 16 Native Americans, and two Spaniards.

(source: http://www.weareca.org/index.php/en/era/1540s-1830s/overview_3.html)

The California Missions: Las Misiones de California

From the San Francisco Gate, "The dark, terrible secret of California's missions," by Elias Castillo, 8 November 2004:

Mission in Santa Barbara, California

Sometime soon, the House will give final consideration to the California Mission Preservation Act, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., providing $10 million to help restore California's Roman Catholic Missions --those historic sites where Franciscan friars and California's Indians supposedly existed in gentle harmony.

In part, the act describes how "the knowledge and cultural influence of native California Indians made a lasting contribution to the early settlements of California and the development of the California missions." What the bill utterly omits is that locked within the missions is a terrible truth -- that they were little more than concentration camps where California's Indians were beaten, whipped, maimed, burned, tortured and virtually exterminated by the friars.

Mission in San Diego, California

"Corporal punishment is inflicted on the Indians of both sexes who neglect the exercises of piety, and many sins, which are left in Europe to the divine justice, are here punished by iron and stocks. And lastly, to complete the similtude between this and other religious communities, it must be observed, that the moment an Indian is baptised, the effect is the same as if he had pronounced a vow for life. If he escape, to reside with his relations in the independent villages, he is summoned three times to return, and if he refuse, the missionaries apply to the governor, who sends soldiers to seize him in the midst of his family, and conduct him to the mission, where he is condemned to receive a certain number of lashes, with the whip." (San Diego History)

The California Indians, as the proposal says, did have a culture, but they never got a chance to contribute it to California. The Spanish crown decreed in the 1760s that the Indians were to be rounded up, baptized into Christianity and their culture destroyed. It was the same policy that Spain had followed in eradicating the complex and advanced cultures of the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs in Latin America.

Vasali Turkanoff, a Russian captive, was a more rabid detractor of the mission system and bitterly criticized the treatment accorded Indians at the missions. He was particularly incensed by the harsh punishments inflicted upon mission runaways when captured. Typically the Fathers and a squad of soldiers went in pursuit. Turkanoff claimed that when the deserters returned:

They were all bound with rawhide ropes, and some were bleeding from wounds, and some children were tied to their mothers. The next day we saw some terrible things. Some of the runaway men were tied to sticks and beaten with straps. One chief was taken out to the open field and a young calf which had just died was skinned and the chief was sewed into the skin while it was yet warm. He was kept tied to a stake all day, but he died soon and they kept his corpse tied up. (source: San Diego History )

In 1769, that near-genocidal policy was launched, under the direction of Father Junipero Serra, with the founding of California's first mission. One scholar, Robert Archibald, has written that the missions were akin to the "forced movement of black people from Africa to the American South." With the help of Spain's soldiers, the Indians were herded to the sites of the missions. Once there, they became slaves, directed by the friars to build the missions. Once within the mission boundaries, they were forever forbidden to leave. No less an authority than the U.S. National Park Service has documented and described the hellish and tragic fate of the California Indians, especially the coastal tribes. They were not warring tribes, but instead gentle harvesters who lived in equilibrium with their land and seashore.

Mission San Carlos Borromeo in the Monterey

Their terrible fate at the hands of the Spanish and friars was described by Jean François de Galaup de la Perouse, a French explorer and sea voyager hired by the French government to report on the western coastal areas of North America. In 1786 he visited Mission San Carlos Borromeo in the Monterey area and described the severe punishments inflicted on the Indians. The friars, he determined, considered the Indians "too much a child, too much a slave, too little a man." California historians Walton Bean and James J. Rawls, described La Perouse as likening the missions to the slave plantations of Santo Domingo.

Colonial stocks

Commandants of the presidios were also asked to report on punishments used at the missions and their descriptions were at variance with Lasuén's. Uniformly they maintained that from 15 to 50 lashes were the norm although a novenary of twenty-five lashes per day for nine days was sometimes applied. Stocks, shackles and hobbles were also applied to neophytes accused of neglect of work or religious duties, overstaying leave of absence, sexual offenses, thefts and quarreling. (source: San Diego History)

Yet, the Indians did not easily accede to the cruel mission life. They rebelled several times, in one instance burning nearly all of the buildings of Mission La Purísima in Santa Ynez. Historian Robert F. Heizer attributed the flare-up to the "flogging of a La Purísima neophyte" (as the Indians were called in the missions).

In the late 1820s, Mexico rebelled against Spain and won its independence. Within a decade, it also declared that the missions had to vest half their property to the Indians while the other half went to the friars and government officials. It was the beginning of the end for the missions. By the late 19th century, the missions were in ruins, abandoned by the friars who could not continue operating them without the slave labor of the Indians, whose numbers had been decimated by hard labor, starvation and disease. It is estimated that California's Indian population was about 310,000 at the beginning of Spanish rule. At the close of the 19th century, they had been reduced to approximately 100,000.

Restoration of the missions was started at the beginning of the 20th century by well-meaning persons who either ignored the cruelties inflicted on the Indians or simply were unaware of the horrors that had occurred within them. While enough historians have accurately documented those terrible ordeals, however, their findings are not well known. Visit any of the missions and there is no mention of Indians being put in stocks, whipped or chained. Instead, the usual description is of friars and Indians living side by side in peaceful harmony and happily helping each other.

Santa Barbara Mission

Lasuén's ultimate defense of the system which he served rested upon the defective character of the natives. The Father President's refutation included a scathing indictment of the very people whom he served. "Here are aborigines whom we are teaching to be men, people of vicious and ferocious habits who know no law but force. . .They are a people without education, without government, religion or respect for authority, and they shamelessly pursue without restraint whatever their brutal appetites suggest to them. Their inclination to lewdness and theft is on a par with their love for the mountains. Such is the character of the men we are required to correct, and whose crimes we must punish." (San Diego History)

The California Missions Preservation Act is expected to be voted on soon. Besides the potential and obvious conflict of its violating the constitutional separation of church and state, there is the moral responsibility that if government funds are to be used in restoring the missions, the granting of those funds must be dependent on memorializing the suffering of California's native people in the missions.

This nation has recently opened the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. It is a monument to the Native Americans of North, Central and South America. The existence of the museum mandates that the ordeal of California's Indians cannot continue to be largely ignored and forgotten. Too many Native Americans died within the missions, which were supposed to be monuments to God's mercy, forgiveness and benevolence.

Mission in San Jose, California

The act must require that descriptions of the enslavement of California's Indians within the missions and the horrible ordeals they endured be clearly and visible provided to all visitors. America has not buried the shameful history of slavery in its Southern states; instead, books have been written and museums opened so that all may forever know of the cruelties of that practice. Why then, should the shameful history of the missions be hidden and ignored?

Additionally, the act must also require that funds be set aside for research to be conducted on mission grounds for the purpose of determining if mass graves of Indians exist within them. While some missions have clearly marked graveyards set aside for the friars, little knowledge exists of what happened to the thousands of deceased Indians who toiled within the missions. If sites are found containing the remains of those Indians, those areas must then be clearly marked for visitors and declared hallowed ground.

Mission San Miguel Arcangel

California and the nation cannot continue to look the other way at what happened in the missions; it must confront that awful specter and unveil it as a dark chapter of the state's history. It does not matter that those vicious practices occurred during Spanish rule. The missions are now revered as beloved monuments. Their continued restoration must also bring to light the most frightful chamber of their history.

(source: San Francisco Gate)

Trail of Tears

We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears Pt. 3 of 5

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

Program: American Experience
Episode: We Shall Remain: Trail of Tears Pt. 3 of 5
On May 26, 1838, federal troops forced thousands of Cherokee from their homes in the Southeastern United States, driving them toward Indian Territory in Eastern Oklahoma. More than 4,000 died of disease and starvation along the way.

“Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans

Some of this crap makes you want to puke. Read the account of Captain Richard Pratt's Native American cultural alienation and assimilation into their proper place in Anglo-American culture--YUCK! I like how Pratt holds up America's treatment of the African Americans (300 years of unpaid labor, orphaned on the auction blocks, lynching, castration, Medieval tortures, black laws, slave codes, and slavery in putridity) as an example of "civilized" treatment of human beings. Although this article is certainly disturbing, as are most of my posts, it is important to see the words of the man, Pratt, without whitewashing history. --Ron Edwards, US Slave

“Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans

Son-of-the-Star (Arickaree), Carlisle Indian School

Beginning in 1887, the federal government attempted to “Americanize” Native Americans, largely through the education of Native youth. By 1900 thousands of Native Americans were studying at almost 150 boarding schools around the United States. The U.S. Training and Industrial School founded in 1879 at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, was the model for most of these schools. Boarding schools like Carlisle provided vocational and manual training and sought to systematically strip away tribal culture. They insisted that students drop their Indian names, forbade the speaking of native languages, and cut off their long hair. Not surprisingly, such schools often met fierce resistance from Native American parents and youth. But some Indian young people responded positively, or at least ambivalently, to the boarding schools, and the schools also fostered a sense of shared Indian identity that transcended tribal boundaries. The following excerpt (from a paper read by Carlisle founder Capt. Richard H. Pratt at an 1892 convention) spotlights Pratt’s pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for “civilizing” the “savages,” including his analogies to the education and “civilizing” of African Americans.

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.

We are just now making a great pretence of anxiety to civilize the Indians. I use the word “pretence” purposely, and mean it to have all the significance it can possibly carry. Washington believed that commerce freely entered into between us and the Indians would bring about their civilization, and Washington was right. He was followed by Jefferson, who inaugurated the reservation plan. Jefferson’s reservation was to be the country west of the Mississippi; and he issued instructions to those controlling Indian matters to get the Indians there, and let the Great River be the line between them and the whites. Any method of securing removal - persuasion, purchase, or force - was authorized.

Jefferson’s plan became the permanent policy. The removals have generally been accomplished by purchase, and the evils of this are greater than those of all the others combined. . . .

The Outing system was one of the pet projects of Carlisle Indian School's head, Richard H. Pratt. Carlisle students were "placed in families to learn English and the customs of civilized life." The students worked, often as common laborers or maids, for $5 a month ­ half of which was sent back to their student accounts at the school. Outing field agents kept careful track of the students, their behavior and their earnings. Carlisle records indicate that in 1903 alone, "there were 948 boys and girls placed out, and their earnings amounted to $31, 393.02." Between 1904 and 1907 Jim Thorpe was absent from the school for 22 months on Outing assignments. Although the Indian youths were supposed to be accepted as part of the family by their patrons, that was not always the case. Thorpe's first experience was on the farm of A.E. Buckholtz in Summerdale, Pennsylvania, where he was made to scrub the floors and eat alone in the kitchen. Conditions were so bad he ran away, back to Carlisle.

It is a sad day for the Indians when they fall under the assaults of our troops, as in the Piegan massacre, the massacre of Old Black Kettle and his Cheyennes at what is termed “the battle of the Washita,” and hundreds of other like places in the history of our dealings with them; but a far sadder day is it for them when they fall under the baneful influences of a treaty agreement with the United States whereby they are to receive large annuities, and to be protected on reservations, and held apart from all association with the best of our civilization. The destruction is not so speedy, but it is far more general. The history of the Miamis and Osages is only the true picture of all other tribes.

“Put yourself in his place” is as good a guide to a proper conception of the Indian and his cause as it is to help us to right conclusions in our relations with other men. For many years we greatly oppressed the black man, but the germ of human liberty remained among us and grew, until, in spite of our irregularities, there came from the lowest savagery into intelligent manhood and freedom among us more than seven millions of our population, who are to-day an element of industrial value with which we could not well dispense. However great this victory has been for us, we have not yet fully learned our lesson nor completed our work; nor will we have done so until there is throughout all of our communities the most unequivocal and complete acceptance of our own doctrines, both national and religious. Not until there shall be in every locality throughout the nation a supremacy of the Bible principle of the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, and full obedience to the doctrine of our Declaration that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal, with certain inalienable rights,” and of the clause in our Constitution which forbids that there shall be “any abridgment of the rights of citizens on account of race, color, or previous condition.” I leave off the last two words “of servitude,” because I want to be entirely and consistently American.

Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experiences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlightened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable—citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.

There is a great lesson in this. The schools did not make them citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their present place. No other influence or force would have so speedily accomplished such a result. Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people; became healthy and multiplied, because they were property; and industrious, because industry, which brings contentment and health, was a necessary quality to increase their value.

The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them. . . .

We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them. Although some of the policies now prominent are advertised to carry them into citizenship and consequent association and competition with other masses of the nation, they are not, in reality, calculated to do this.

Federal boarding school enrollments swelled from 6,200 at 60 schools in 1885 to more than 17,000 in 153 schools at the turn of the century. By 1932, nearly one-third of Indian children were in boarding schools, a total of about 24, 000

We are after the facts. Let us take the Land in Severalty Bill. Land in severalty, as administered, is in the way of the individualizing and civilization of the Indians, and is a means of holding the tribes together. Land in severalty is given to individuals adjoining each other on their present reservations. And experience shows that in some cases, after the allotments have been made, the Indians have entered into a compact among themselves to continue to hold their lands in common as a reservation. The inducement of the bill is in this direction. The Indians are not only invited to remain separate tribes and communities, but are practically compelled to remain so. The Indian must either cling to his tribe and its locality, or take great chances of losing his rights and property.

The day on which the Land in Severalty Bill was signed was announced to be the emancipation day for the Indians. The fallacy of that idea is so entirely demonstrated that the emancipation assumption is now withdrawn.

We shall have to go elsewhere, and seek for other means besides land in severalty to release these people from their tribal relations and to bring them individually into the capacity and freedom of citizens.

Just now that land in severalty is being retired as the one all-powerful leverage that is going to emancipate and bring about Indian civilization and citizenship, we have another plan thrust upon us which has received great encomium from its authors, and has secured the favor of Congress to the extent of vastly increasing appropriations. This plan is calculated to arrest public attention, and to temporarily gain concurrence from everybody that it is really the panacea for securing citizenship and equality in the nation for the Indians. In its execution this means purely tribal schools among the Indians; that is, Indian youth must continue to grow up under the pressure of home surroundings. Individuals are not to be encouraged to get out and see and learn and join the nation. They are not to measure their strength with the other inhabitants of the land, and find out what they do not know, and thus be led to aspire to gain in education, experience, and skill,—those things that they must know in order to become equal to the rest of us. A public school system especially for the Indians is a tribal system; and this very fact says to them that we believe them to be incompetent, that they must not attempt to cope with us. Such schools build up tribal pride, tribal purposes, and tribal demands upon the government. They formulate the notion that the government owes them a living and vast sums of money; and by improving their education on these lines, but giving no other experience and leading to no aspirations beyond the tribe, leaves them in their chronic condition of helplessness, so far as reaching the ability to compete with the white race is concerned. It is like attempting to make a man well by always telling him he is sick. We have only to look at the tribes who have been subject to this influence to establish this fact, and it makes no difference where they are located. All the tribes in the State of New York have been trained in tribal schools; and they are still tribes and Indians, with no desire among the masses to be anything else but separate tribes.

The five civilized tribes of the Indian Territory—Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—have had tribal schools until it is asserted that they are civilized; yet they have no notion of joining us and becoming a part of the United States. Their whole disposition is to prey upon and hatch up claims against the government, and have the same lands purchased and repurchased and purchased again, to meet the recurring wants growing out of their neglect and inability to make use of their large and rich estate. . . .

Indian schools are just as well calculated to keep the Indians intact as Indians as Catholic schools are to keep the Catholics intact. Under our principles we have established the public school system, where people of all races may become unified in every way, and loyal to the government; but we do not gather the people of one nation into schools by themselves, and the people of another nation into schools by themselves, but we invite the youth of all peoples into all schools. We shall not succeed in Americanizing the Indian unless we take him in in exactly the same way. I do not care if abundant schools on the plan of Carlisle are established. If the principle we have always had at Carlisle—of sending them out into families and into the public schools—were left out, the result would be the same, even though such schools were established, as Carlisle is, in the centre of an intelligent and industrious population, and though such schools were, as Carlisle always has been, filled with students from many tribes. Purely Indian schools say to the Indians: “You are Indians, and must remain Indians. You are not of the nation, and cannot become of the nation. We do not want you to become of the nation.”

Before I leave this part of my subject I feel impelled to lay before you the facts, as I have come to look at them, of another influence that has claimed credit, and always has been and is now very dictatorial, in Indian matters; and that is the missionary as a citizenizing influence upon the Indians. The missionary goes to the Indian; he learns the language; he associates with him; he makes the Indian feel he is friendly, and has great desire to help him; he even teaches the Indian English. But the fruits of his labor, by all the examples that I know, have been to strengthen and encourage him to remain separate and apart from the rest of us. Of course, the more advanced, those who have a desire to become civilized, and to live like white men, who would with little encouragement go out into our communities, are the first to join the missionary’s forces. They become his lieutenants to gather in others. The missionary must necessarily hold on to every help he can get to push forward his schemes and plans, so that he may make a good report to his Church; and, in order to enlarge his work and make it a success, he must keep his community together. Consequently, any who care to get out into the nation, and learn from actual experience what it is to be civilized, what is the full length and breadth and height and depth of our civilization, must stay and help the missionary. The operation of this has been disastrous to any individual escape from the tribe, has vastly and unnecessarily prolonged the solution of the question, and has needlessly cost the charitable people of this country large sums of money, to say nothing of the added cost to the government, the delay in accomplishing their civilization, and their destruction caused by such delay.

Lakota boys: "Before"

If, as sometimes happens, the missionary kindly consents to let or helps one go out and get these experiences, it is only for the purpose of making him a preacher or a teacher or help of some kind; and such a one must, as soon as he is fitted, and much sooner in most cases, return to the tribe and help the missionary to save his people. The Indian who goes out has public charitable aid through his school course, forfeits his liberty, and is owned by the missionary. In all my experience of twenty-five years I have known scarcely a single missionary to heartily aid or advocate the disintegration of the tribes and the giving of individual Indians rights and opportunities among civilized people. There is this in addition: that the missionaries have largely assumed to dictate to the government its policy with tribes, and their dictations have always been along the lines of their colonies and church interests, and the government must gauge its actions to suit the purposes of the missionary, or else the missionary influences are at once exerted to defeat the purposes of the government. The government, by paying large sums of money to churches to carry on schools among Indians, only builds for itself opposition to its own interests. . . .

The same three Lakota boys: "After"

We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization. America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success. Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why always invite and compel them to remain a people unto themselves?

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.

As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.

The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them. It has demanded for them the same multiplicity of chances which all others in the country enjoy. Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and then moves them out into our communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have. Carlisle does not dictate to him what line of life he should fill, so it is an honest one. It says to him that, if he gets his living by the sweat of his brow, and demonstrates to the nation that he is a man, he does more good for his race than hundreds of his fellows who cling to their tribal communistic surroundings. . . .

No evidence is wanting to show that, in our industries, the Indian can become a capable and willing factor if he has the chance. What we need is an Administration which will give him the chance. The Land in Severalty Bill can be made far more useful than it is, but it can be made so only by assigning the land so as to intersperse good, civilized people among them. If, in the distribution, it is so arranged that two or three white families come between two Indian families, then there would necessarily grow up a community of fellowship along all the lines of our American civilization that would help the Indian at once to his feet. Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country. And immediately he is so prepared, for his own good and the good of the country, he should be forwarded into these other schools, there to temper, test, and stimulate his brain and muscle into the capacity he needs for his struggle for life, in competition with us. The missionary can, if he will, do far greater service in helping the Indians than he has done; but it will only be by practising the doctrine he preaches. As his work is to lift into higher life the people whom he serves, he must not, under any pretence whatsoever, give the lie to what he preaches by discountenancing the right of any individual Indian to go into higher and better surroundings, but, on the contrary, he should help the Indian to do that. If he fails in thus helping and encouraging the Indian, he is false to his own teaching. An examination shows that no Indians within the limits of the United States have acquired any sort of capacity to meet and cope with the whites in civilized pursuits who did not gain that ability by going among the whites and out from the reservations, and that many have gained this ability by so going out.

Theorizing citizenship into people is a slow operation. What a farce it would be to attempt teaching American citizenship to the negroes in Africa. They could not understand it; and, if they did, in the midst of such contrary influences, they could never use it. Neither can the Indians understand or use American citizenship theoretically taught to them on Indian reservations. They must get into the swim of American citizenship. They must feel the touch of it day after day, until they become saturated with the spirit of it, and thus become equal to it.

When we cease to teach the Indian that he is less than a man; when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood; when we act consistently towards him in accordance with that recognition; when we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences; when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact—then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can be truly civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian.

******
Source:
Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.