American Experience; In the White Man's Image

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413 and The White Man's Image, Duration 5743, Channel 1, Left, Channel 2, Right, Channel 3, Drupper & Time Code, WGBHTV, All's Up Every Freigment of Their Past was Stripped Away Give Him a Uniform Cut His Hair Take an Indian Man and make him a White Man. Watch how a generation of Indian children survived a drastic experiment, in the White Man's Image, tonight on the American Experience. The American Experience Show 413 and The White Man's Image, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3, Duration 5743, Channel 3,

Mobile Corporate funding for the American Experience is provided by Etna for more than 135 years, a part of the American Experience. Good evening and welcome to the American Experience. I'm David McCullough. In the last part of the 19th century, it was decided by the national government with the ardent support of educators, ministers, all kinds of people of goodwill, that the only hope for Native Americans was to turn them into white men, to force them into the great modern mainstream of American life. This

wasn't a new idea, but making it official policy was new. Schools were to be the answer. The announcement of one of them, the Haskell Institute in Kansas, said Indian youth from 10 to 18 years of age were to be taught the elements of an English education and the simpler domestic industries, to prepare them to become intelligent, industrious citizens. It sounds good, a worthy program, and in ways it was. Yet the real purpose was to stamp out Native American culture, Indian religion, Indian law, legends, and language, and in that it was often very cruel and shortsighted. Richard Henry Pratt, the dedicated head of the Carlisle Indian School, said he believed in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they're thoroughly soaked. The Carlisle Indian School, which figures at the center of our film in the white man's image, was founded in 1879, the same year, ironically, when one of the most eloquent men of

the age, the great chief Joseph of the Nez Perse, said this in a famous speech in Washington. We ask only an even chance to live as other men. Let me be a free man, free to work, free to trade, where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think, and talk, and act for myself. They were the subjects of an educational experiment carried out with the best of intentions. The experiment gave a

new twist to an old saying, the only good Indian is a dead one. It was designed to kill the Indian and save the man. As Americans, we were to be all alike, and that likeness, unfortunately, was to be white and not Indian. What was it? Give him a uniform, cut his hair, remove him as far as possible from the center of his real existence, his spiritual existence, put him in a strange place, you know, a place where he has no advantage whatsoever, and he will become what you want him to become. You can draw a picture and let him look at it, and slowly he will transform himself into the image that he sees there. In

1865, an enormous migration was underway. The once powerful tribes of the plains watched as settlers invaded their land, killed their buffalo, destroyed their way of life. It was a hard time to be Cheyenne. The Cheyenne were on the pilgrimage south. They had just been pushed out of the state of Calderado as we know it today, where they had been massacred at San Creek in the year of 1864. My great -grandmother was there, and she survived. She was traveling with a band of black cattle, and they were encamped along the Washa -Tal River in 1868. When this time, they were attacked by the seventh cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer. My great -grandmother survived

that incident, too. In the burning summer of 1874, the plains explored. War parties of Kiawas, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Narapahos raid into Texas and New Mexico, taking revenge on settlers and soldiers alike. General William, to come to Sherman, demands the U .S. wipe out resistance on the plains once and for all. Punish the raiders, he says. Run them down, starve them out, kill their horses, burn their camps. Scattered bands of Indians are no match for the U .S. Army. The warriors are captured, shackled, and declared guilty without trial. Whitehorse, Isatah, arrested at Fort Sill Indian Territory in 1874, ringleader. Fighter, Zotol, arrested at Salt Fork Indian Territory in

1875, murderer. Boy, a toddler, arrested at Red River in 1875, murderer. 72 warriors were singled out for exile. Henrietta Mann's great -grandmother was there. She saw the blacksmith put in the legards on them. The Cheyenne's were horrified. Some of the women began taunting them, asking them why they were not acting like Cheyenne men. They asked them, where's your heart? Where's your courage? Where's your bravery? Are you just going to do this? One of the men was goaded into trying to make a desperate bit for freedom. And he ran, but he was killed. The warriors were held in an ice house at Fort Sill Indian Territory. An army lieutenant Richard Pratt volunteered to take charge of the prisoners. Pratt was a civil war veteran and leader of

Indian scouts on the frontier. Pratt was actually working day by day with Indians right off the plains. And he was an unusual officer in that he saw the Indians dilemma in a good deal more sophisticated terms than did his fellow officers. For one thing, he viewed the Indians as human beings, which few of them did. In a letter to General Sheridan, Pratt wrote, much can and should be done to reform these young men while under this banishment. With Pratt in charge, the warriors began a thousand mile journey into a world none of them could imagine, and to struggle even the wisest among them could not predict. At

each stop, the curious gathered at the train stations to stare at the savages. Frightened by the crowds, they hid beneath their blankets. There was little Pratt could do to comfort his prisoners. In his autobiography, he recalled a particularly painful encounter. Going through the cars of my oldest daughter, then six years of age, I stopped to talk with a Cheyenne chief, Greybeard. Through an interpreter, he said he had only one child, and that was a little girl just about my daughter's age. He asked me how I would like to have chains on my legs as he had, and to be taken a long distance from my home, my wife and little girls he was, and his voice trembled with deepest emotion.

It was a hard question. The captives continued their seemingly endless journey. At the state line between Georgia and Florida, Greybeard jumped from the train. Newspaper accounts say he was shot like a tiger escaping from the zoo. In May of 1875, the prisoners reached their place of exile, St. Augustine, Florida. To the plane's warriors, this is another universe, hot, human, nightmarish. They are taken in chains to an ancient place, in ancient Spanish fort,

Fort Marion. It is a dank and ominous place. I'm sure it must have been a very apprehensive situation for them on the one hand to see as much water, because we believe that as we go to live in that blissful place above, that we cross over four rivers, I'm sure that they felt as if they were facing death. The prisoners slept on the dirt floor, waiting for execution. In the first few weeks, several died from disease and exhaustion. One warrior starved himself to death.

Early one morning, Lieutenant Pratt removed the chains of the prisoners. To their bewilderment, he ordered their hair to be cut, and their tribal clothing exchanged for U .S. Army uniforms. The great experiment had begun. Maybe the handwriting was on the wall in terms of Cheyenne White contact, and Pratt did have his view of us as American Indians, the unfortunate view of Indians as savages, Barbara, who

had to be raised from the savage state to become civilized, and it was most natural then for Pratt to begin to change them physically, to take off the kind of outer identity by placing them in military uniforms, by cutting their hair to make them into the image of white men, and must have been horrified because to us cutting one's hair is a sign of mourning, of death. Scientists are eager to study the so -called vanishing rays. The Smithsonian sends a sculptor to Florida to make face masks of the prisoners. My plaster casts demonstrate beyond a doubt that Indians have some good qualities

like self -reliance, but they are also destructive, secretive, and inclined to eating and strong drinking. Clock meals sculptor. At the end of their first year of exile, the warriors seemed resigned to their fate. But Whitehorse, one of Pratt's trusted guards, was plotting an escape. Pratt discovered the plan and devised a clever way to foil it. He injected Whitehorse and his two allies with a sleeping potion. In a little while, they were unconscious. The cart was brought in, and each one, apparently dead, was carried out before soldiers laid in the cart side by side, and the cart go out of the fort down to the barracks. The other Indians were watching from their quarters on the terra plate. When the three rebels regained consciousness, Pratt returned them to the fort.

Goodness, that was just the most awesome and impressive thing that he could have done. They saw that he had great power. I mean, if he could literally kill people and then bring them back to life, was just living proof that he was a very powerful spiritual man. The prisoners were now under Pratt's control. With the help of his wife Anna, he recruited local volunteers to teach them English. News of the school for savages spread beyond St. Augustine. Harper's Weekly carried a story about the prison school. The old men do not care to attend the school, but the younger prisoners have become enthusiastic in their studies, which it is hoped will turn their thoughts from the wildlife that they have here to for lead, and will stimulate them to an emulation of the best features in the life of the white man. In return for the kindness shown them by these excellent ladies, the Indians

instruct them in archery, in the practice of which they are becoming very expert. Beyond archery, there was little white Americans wanted to learn from the Indian. Pratt shared the dominant assumption of his class that there was nothing worth preserving, that the Indian salvation lay in divesting him completely of all the trappings of his own culture and making him in every way except skin color, another white Anglo -Saxon Protestant. You know, I mean white Anglo -Saxon Protestant. The white man saw the Indian as idle. Pratt set out to teach him the value of work. The prisoners filled drawing books with pictures and sold them to tourists. They moved to church in downtown St. Augustine.

They work as baggage handlers at the local railroad station. And they look with wonder at the strange new world around them. Here were 72 planes Indian prisoners and they barely structured safe environment. And I'm sure that the St. Augustine community, along with Pratt, began to say, well, they're nothing but human beings. The color of their skin may be a little bit different, but obviously they possess an intelligence of their own. Look at them. In the summer of 1876, when news of General Custer's death at the Little Big Horn reached St. Augustine, the townspeople were as outraged as the rest of America. They demanded that Pratt lock up his Indians after dark. He reminded them that these same savages had recently

stayed out until 2 o 'clock in the morning, helping citizens put out a fire. As their time at Fort Marion drew to a close, the warriors looked back on a long, strange journey. Their far away life on the plains. The train ride to Fort Marion. First view of the ocean. Fishing for water buffalo. The new Cheyenne name for sharks. Performing tribal dances for the tourists. Listening obediently, while a visiting bishop preets the gospel. And some of them became Christian converts. And I think they saw it not so much a discarding of the old for the new, but an

amalgamation of the two. And it did appear to some of us that perhaps the white man's god was a little bit powerful than the Cheyenne creator. So not why not take the two, put them together, and bring the powerful spirit back to us as Cheyenne people. In 1878, after three years of exile, word comes from Washington that the prisoners are free. They promise to be good Indians. For some, conversion is complete. Making medicine a gifted artist is destined to become a deacon in the Episcopal Church. I have led a bad life on the plains, wandering around, living in a house made of skins. I have now learned something about the great spirits road and want to learn more.

Give us our wives and children, our fathers and mothers, and send us somewhere where we can settle down and live like white men. For others, it was a simpler matter. One said, I want to live in a woodhouse. It will be easier to be good if I live in a woodhouse. Most of the prisoners returned to their homes and families in Indian territory. Pratt was reluctant to see them go. For he was convinced their education had just begun. For the rest of America, this was a time of growth and power, of competition and survival of the fittest. The nation was progressing, moving forward, seen by the Americans at least as the

greatest nation on earth. There didn't seem to be a place anymore for Indians. They were considered a vestige of the past, something that couldn't really exist in a modern world. But Pratt continued to believe that education would save the Indian. He enrolled 17 of his former prisoners in the only school that would accept them. The Hampton Institute for Negroes in Virginia. Hampton was a manual training school designed to teach black people industrial skills to help them survive in a modern world. Pratt sought as a model for Indian education. In the east, Pratt met a group of Christian reformers who called themselves Friends of the Indian. They were enthusiastic about Pratt's crusade to lead savages into civilization. No one was better motivated. Nobody had the welfare of the Indian more at heart. Then

Pratt and all of those people who subscribed to this approach. It was the goal that society set for the immigrants who were coming from Europe at this time, to transform them into this ideal American. That was the mindset at the time. While his Indians walked the white man's road at Hampton, Pratt conceived a far more ambitious plan and took it to Washington. Give me 300 young Indians and to school in one of our best communities he challenged the Secretary of State, and I will show you how to solve the Indian problem. Pratt knew that grown men can change only so much. To transform a people, you must start with the children. Dakota Territory, 1879. Richard Henry Pratt arrived to

recruit children for his government school for Indians, a thousand miles away in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But Spotted Tail, famous leader of the Brule Sue, refuses to let the children go. The government deceived us in the black hills treaty. The government knew that gold was there, and it took the land from us. And so the white people get rich, and the Indians become poor. The white man has always cheated us, and we do not want our children to learn to do that way. Pratt argued that if Spotted Tail had been educated, he would have been able to read the words of the treaty, and his people would never have lost the sacred black hills. Give me your children, he said. And let me teach them our language and our ways, so they may come back to the reservation and help you in your position as chief. The argument worked, but it wasn't the whole truth.

His plan was much more comprehensive than that, and in the end, he had no intention that the children returned to their groups at all. In fact, his ideal was that they would not. He used to say that the Indian had to die as an Indian in order to live as a man, which meant that you had to wipe out all the remnants of culture. The Cheyenne's had a great prophet visit them, prior to Anglo contact, and he said, these white people will come to you. He says, and there will be so many that you cannot stand before them. He said, they will ask you for your flesh, meaning your children. He said, and you must say no. He said, for those that they take to educate,

we'll forget their ways as a people. Pratt left Dakota Territory with 169 children, among them a boy named Plenty Kill, later to become Luther Standing Bear. In his autobiography, my people, the Sioux, Standing Bear recalled that first train ride into the unknown. I took one of the seats, but presently changed to another. I must have changed my seat four or five times before I quieted down. We admired the beautiful room and the soft seats very much. Suddenly, the whole house started to move away with us. We expected every minute that the house would tip over, and that something terrible would happen. We rode in this manner for some distance, and we're getting very tired.

The big boys began to tell us little fellas that the white people were taking us to the place where the sun rises. Where they would dump us over the edge of the earth. On a cold October night, the tired and hungry children arrived at their new home, an abandoned army post in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This is how Pratt described them to a reporter. They were the regular blanket Indians. Some of the young men had buffalo robes, and most of them had deer skin leggings, worked with beads. Their hair was braided with beaver skin or red flannel, and they wore earrings. They were absolutely wild Indians. The children spent the first few days sleeping on cold floors with a little to eat.

And like the exiles at Fort Marion, their Indian identity was about to become a dream. One of the first things they did was get new names, and they were taken into a room where names were put on a blackboard, and they were asked to choose their own new names. And of course didn't know what these names meant or anything, so they were kind of blindly picking their new names. Luther picked his as he might have counted Koo on an enemy. He says he was using the stick to point to his new name as if it were an enemy. Every fragment of their Indian past was stripped away. Marcusons gave way to leather boots, feathers and robes to military uniforms, and then it was time for their hair to be

cut. Luther Standing Bear said that he thought when he left home that he would probably do something very, very brave or never, ever return. He actually felt he probably would die. So that's one testimony, but surely many of the children might have felt this, having been taken so far from their families, not entirely understanding what was happening to them, and recognizing that they're powerless. I felt that I was no more Indian, but would be an imitation of a white man. The first year at Carlisle was a year of struggle. Food and clothing were in short supply. Teachers difficult to recruit, and from all over America came the voices of doubt. Trying to teach an Indian anything above the barest elements makes no more sense. You can no

more civilize in a patchy, and you can civilize a weapon. The swine will return to his wallow, the savage to his barbarism. The only good Indian is a dead one. Pratt countered his critics with pictures. He commissioned a series of before and after portraits of his students, designed to show their progress from savagery into civilization. They were half -clad, some with only a blanket, dirty, greasy, and all wore a scared look. If all the people who observed them in this condition could only see them after they go through the civilizing process at the school, all prejudice against Indian schools would vanish. The change is marvelous. It must be seen to be fully appreciated. The difference is striking. Not in the mere change of clothing and improved carriage, but the development of intelligence shown by the faces. In his mind,

I'm sure that Pratt was absolutely convinced that he could take an Indian man and make him a white man through a simple process of changing appearances, changing values. What was it? Give him a uniform, cut his hair, teach him English above all. Forbid him from speaking his native language, remove him as far as possible from the center of his real existence, his spiritual existence, put him in a strange place, a place where he has no advantage whatsoever, and he will become what you want him to become. You can draw a picture and let him look at it and slowly he will transform himself into the image that he sees there. Well, it doesn't work that way, it's not that simple. Behind the propaganda lay a different story. Like many Carlisle students,

Ernest White Thunder never adjusted to life at boarding school. Ernest became a kind of non -cooperator. The children were supposed to write to parents or to a relative every week, and when he was asked to do this at one point, he said to his teacher, he didn't have any relatives to write to, at one time he had an aunt, but a bearator. And so he didn't want to participate in this, but he did write to his father in complaint, saying he didn't like what was happening to him at this school. He said, we are all soldiers now, which he clearly felt bitterly about and so forth. His father asked him to have a photograph taken of himself. He said, you say you all look like soldiers now, have a photograph taken of yourself and send it to me. Not long after his portrait was taken,

Ernest came down with a fever. He refused food, refused medicine, refused to speak to anyone. Pratt worried because Ernest was the son of an influential chief, but there was nothing he could do. In a matter of weeks, the boy was dead. Pratt wrote a very grief -filled letter to White Thunder informing him of Ernest's death, and saying that he didn't have an image of Ernest that he thought that White Thunder would like. And so his father never did see the photograph that had been made. Ernest was buried on the Carlisle campus, in a cemetery that would later be filled with the graves of hundreds of Carlisle students. Most would succumb to epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, and influenza. But a few like Ernest White Thunder would die of homesickness, in a place called

Carlisle at the edge of the Earth. 10 years have passed since the first students arrived at the deserted Carlisle barracks. Carlisle is now honed with a thousand Indian children from all over America. Its marching band is in great demand in the east. Physical education demonstrations are popular attractions at fairs and expositions. Pratt's mission to kill the Indian and save the man has become national policy. Indian industrial schools spring up across the nation. The Chamowah School in Oregon, the Santa Fe School in New Mexico, the Genoa School in Nebraska. Over the next

decade, the US will establish 25 Indian industrial schools in 13 states. We were controlled by whistles and bugles. A bugle sounded when we were to get out of bed. We got into formation and we marched to our meals. At the dining room, a triangle was used. And when the first triangle sounded, we sat down on stools. The second triangle indicated there was to be complete silence and we were to bow our heads and say our prayers. And at the third triangle, we began to eat. Sid Bird was just six years old when he left home for the Genoa Indian School in Nebraska. It was 1925, but the formula for civilizing Indians hadn't changed since the early days of Carlisle. The regimentation at the school was quite

systematic and all parts of their day were planned, very, very carefully. They would go to school half a day, they would work the other half a day in one or the other of the trades that they were learning or in the support systems of the school itself, in the kitchens, in the laundries, in the bakery, and so forth. A simulation is a policy of the federal government by this time. And what's going to be taught at the school is a value system consistent with an industrializing society. So you're going to teach hard work, ambition, and a willingness to be a total individual to stand alone. In the Lakota way, you are responsible, not to yourself, but always to the oyate, to the group. Whereas in the school, you say you have to be your own person, you have to acquire an education, and you had to do that by yourself, you could not be

responsible to the group you were responsible. So you take care of number one, and you get to the top at the expense of others. The key to making the system work was separation. For their first few years at school, the children were allowed to go home. And when their parents came to visit, it was a bittersweet occasion. The family was a very strong organization in the Indian tribes. Everyone belonged wholly to his family. His first allegiances were to the family. Everything that sustained him in his life came directly from the immediate relationships of the family. So to give up a child, it was like death, and the loneliness of the children being uprooted from that

and placed in what was effectively a prison, had to make for a loneliness that is difficult to imagine. Cut off from their families, the children had little choice, but to become good Indians, at least while their teachers were watching. They wanted to survive. They had that instinctive compulsion to survive. They were doing what everyone expected them to do because then they wouldn't be punished. It was simply to perform the tricks that the white man wanted to jump through the loops and the hoops like a dog. They learned Christian hymns and attended Christian services. Their teachers believed they were saving Indian souls,

never acknowledging that the children had spiritual values of their own. My father used to tell me about an old man who came to the house and every morning he would paint his face and pray the sun out of the ground. That was what was held on to with such desperation and secretly much of the time. It was private, it was kept so. Pratt would not have been aware of that because they wouldn't let him be aware of it. To give that up was to lose everything. They had to keep that. Some students rebelled openly, refusing to go to church, refusing to speak English, refusing to respond to the whistles and buccals. Runaways at all the schools were common and they were punished.

Pratt was above all a military man. A military man turned educators who saw education as a means to conduct a kind of peaceful war. So in the school, he modeled the disciplinary system on the disciplinary system of the U .S. Army. We have a guard house built by the Hessians having two light cells and four dark cells and we've used that for confinement for the young men to a limited extent. It is one of the best methods it can be administered to a criminal till that him have only his own company. But if life at boarding school was difficult, at least it was secure. On the reservations, things were falling apart. Squeezed on the marginal land,

Indians were living with poverty and disease, depending on the government for survival. Marty Day Montagno grew up listening to her grandmother's stories about boarding school. They were happier than her memories of home. When she was born on the Potawatomi Reservation, north of Depeca, Kansas, her father married four different Potawatomi women. Each one would die and he'd marry another. And there were many children and stepchildren. And I have a feeling that she was not taken care of or watched out after. As a matter of fact, she said one time to me when I asked her who raised her. She said, I said, who raised you? And she said, nobody. In 1908, when she was 13 years old,

Bonora Marty's grandmother became a student at the Haskell boarding school in Kansas. It was a new world and she welcomed it. I think she felt safe at Haskell. I think there was order there. And I think she felt safe. At Haskell, the Nora learned to speak English. She studied typing in the shorthand. And she joined the drama club. Every year, they used to put on the play, Hayawatha, based on Longfellow's poem. Longfellow apparently took legends and stories from the Great Lakes area. And whitewashed them, changed them, and took out parts that didn't fit white values. And then imported a character, a real person, a culture hero of the Uruguay people from New York State, Hayawatha, as the hero. By the shores of Kichigumi, by the shining, big sea

water, stood the wig on the necomis. La Nora played the lead in Hayawatha, wearing a ribbon -work dress made by her father. When Haskell took the play to Denver, she walked about town with an Indian cradle board on her back, advertising the evening's performance. It was a safe way to be Indian. What that does is give them a history, but a history from a certain point of view. And that makes a simulation complete. If you accept the white men's version of your culture and your history, your white. But the real test of assimilation took place outside the walls of boarding school. During summers and holidays, the students lived with white families in a program Pratt called The Outing. Here they would learn what it really meant to be civilized. By living in daily contact with civilized people.

But the Indian students were never accepted as equals by their white hosts. Instead, their boarding school training made them excellent servants. On the outing program, students ran into considerable difficulty from time to time in the towns where they lived. They would be called nigger, for example. They would feel discrimination in the schools and so forth. And they wrote back of these events. One student had gone to live with a family, had lived with them for a number of years, in fact. And fell in love with the daughter of the white family. And she was him. And they planned to get married. And the parents forbade the marriage. And asked him to leave the household. And he eventually committed suicide. Always the Indian was somehow made to feel

less of a person. And the teacher saying, you will never amount to anything. You will always be an Indian. And you are just an Indian. Why can't you do as well? And finally, the voices, I am just an Indian. You told me that yourself. Having learned the white man's way, boarding school graduates set out to compete in the white man's world. Once again, they faced rejection. An Indian in a business suit was still a red skin. He was told to look for a job on the reservation, where he belonged. A few did find success. Luther Standing Bear became a rancher and a writer, and played the part of an Indian in Hollywood films. Chauncey Yellow Road, described by Pratt as a fine specimen of gentlemanly manhood, married a white woman, and worked as a disciplinearian in the boarding school system. But most students returned to their homes on the

reservation. The white man called it going back to the blanket. To Pratt, it was nothing less than betrayal. Whenever the boys or girls come to me, expressing a desire to go that direction, I feel a sort of contempt for that peculiar quality in them. There's no striking out, no reaching up for higher and better things, but the desire to go back into lower things. Of the thousands of boarding school graduates who returned home, most were never heard from again. But in 1890, a Carlisle graduate named Plenty Horses went back to the blanket with a vengeance. After five years at the white man's school, it returned home to Dakota Territory. Plenty Horses found on the reservation what so many Carlisle returned he did. He was not a white person now. Nobody would hire him as a white person, but he was no longer an Indian. And he had lost the acceptance of his

own people as an Indian. And what he ended up doing is existing in a shadow world, neither Indian nor white. But Plenty Horses found hope in a new religion called the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Danceers believed that by dancing, they could magically bring back their old way of life. The white people would be swept away. All of their ancestors and the buffalo would return to the earth. The Ghost Dance upset the white settlers surrounding the reservation and their cries of alarm brought government troops to head off violence. Instead, violence was the result. The massacre had boomed in knee in December of 1890. Plenty Horses himself visited the battlefield. It was an awful sight, he said. The survivors told such a pitiful tale. A few days later, Plenty

Horses took his revenge. He drew his Winchester rifle and shot an army officer named Lieutenant Casey in the back. On January 8, 1891, newspapers throughout the United States headlined the murder. Later, at his trial, Plenty Horses explained why he killed Lieutenant Casey. Five years, I attended Carlisle and was educated in the ways of the white man. I was lonely. I shot the lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among my people. Now, I am one of them. I shall be hung and the Indians will bear me as a warrior. I am satisfied. But Plenty Horses was not to get his wish. His attorneys argued that he wasn't guilty of murder since a state of war existed on the reservation. The implications of the state of war issue had begun to sink in on the army. And

it dawned on military authorities that if a state of war did not exist, then all those people killed at Wounded Knee had been murdered by soldiers who ought to be brought before the bar of justice. And so an army officer was sent to testify that, yes, a state of war existed whereupon the judge simply threw the trial out of court and Plenty Horses went free. But free doesn't exactly describe the rest of his life. He went back to the reservation to the much the same situation that had led him to kill Lieutenant Casey in the first place and lived for many years in poverty up on the reservation until his death sometime in the early 1930s. They were very tragic case, very symptomatic of the results of

the Indian education program. Like so many others, Plenty Horses was a victim of the white man's good intentions. Designed to give Indians the gift of civilization, boarding schools were creating a generation of confused and lonely children. A simulation was not working according to plan. As long as the reservations exist, Pratt claimed, the Indian will cling to his outmoded identity. In 1904, Pratt retired from his position as superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School. He died in 1924. Two months before American Indians were granted citizenship. His monument at Arlington National Cemetery calls him Friend and Counselor of the Indians. In the 1930s, the Indian New Deal inspired a reversal in government policy. Many

off -reservation boarding schools closed. Indians were urged to take back their languages, their traditions, and their pride. When the Genoa School closed in 1934, Sid Bird took the train home to South Dakota. My grandparents had been informed and they were standing waiting at the train station. I was practically leap from the train. Tears of joy streaming down my cheeks and I ran to my grandmother, and she embraced me, and she said, Tracoja, Tracoja, Tranth and Agaliso. My grandchild, my grandchild, he came from a long ways, and she embraced me. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I suddenly discovered that the people that I loved and longed to be with, I could no longer communicate with them. My own language had been beaten army, and so I could no longer

communicate with these people. And I wept bitterly, and I vowed that I would relearn my language. In 1875, a group of Indian warriors had arrived at an ancient Spanish fort expecting to die. Instead, they found themselves engaged in one more battle. Not for their lives, but for their souls. The struggle changed them profoundly, as it transformed the thousands who followed. For the white man, it was a story of conquest. For the Indian, it was a story of survival. I always feel like what they can never change me. I have not for one second given up what it means for me to be a shayan person, the shayan spirit is endearing.

In 1875, a group of Indian warriors had arrived

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