Focus 580; Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families 1900-1940

Beginning in the late 18 seventies the federal government began to take Native American children from their families and put them into boarding schools. Sometimes a long way away from the places that these children were born and grew up they believe the government believed that it would help these children assimilate and they dressed them in western clothing and they cut their hair and they taught them in English and they told them they could not speak their native language as they did what they could to break the connections between these children and their cultures. This morning we'll talk about the Indian School also with historian Brenda child who says that interestingly enough while these schools were designed to separate children from their families and their traditions and their very identities that the parents and the children did indeed work hard to maintain contact. And in fact as she makes the argument that these schools might have in some ways helped to strengthen the very cultures that they were intended to weaken she teaches courses in American Indian Studies and History at the University of Minnesota and has written quite a bit on this subject including. A book titled boarding school season's American Indian families 1900 to 1940 published by the University of

Nebraska Press which was really the first study of the subject that made use of American Indian letters to document the experiences on both sides here experiences of children and experiences of their families. She also has been a consultant to the Heard Museum in Phoenix for an exhibit called Remembering our Indian school days. She's here visiting the campus of the University of Illinois to take part in the sixth annual graduate symposium on women's and gender history. And we're pleased that she could be here and spend some time with us. Questions are welcome as always. We just asked people who called to try to be brief so that we can get in as many callers as possible but of course anybody is welcome to call 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 2 2 2 9 4 5 5. Well thank you very much for being here and happy to be here David in in this book in boarding school season. You say something to the effect that your introduction to this subject much like the introduction of other people was hearing stories about the schools from. A

relative I think in this case it was your grandmother who had been in one of these schools right. Yeah actually most Native American people of my generation have grandparents or other older relatives in the family who were part of the who took part in the boarding school experience in one way or another and actually my grandmother had been a student in the 1920s that the Flandria Indian boarding school in South Dakota and her father my great grandfather was one of the first students from our reservation which is Red Lake in Northern Minnesota where Ojibwe one of the first students to leave the reservation intend the Carlisle School for Indians in Pennsylvania which really was the first of the off reservation boarding schools. And so. So I do have this family history and I did first learn about boarding school from family members. From her conversations with her telling me about what it was like to be a kid how she worked as a domestic servant. As part of the school's outing

program and so that really is what inspired my research how for how long did these boarding schools operate. There actually are government boarding schools that still operate but they're very different than they were in the 19th century they were really kind of born out of this atmosphere of cultural assimilation they're very connected to the land policies of the late 19th century the time when the federal government was trying to convince Indians that they should give up communal property ownership and become you know citizens Christians become assimilated into the mainstream of American society. So we usually date the boarding school era from about eight hundred seventy nine when Carlyle was established although there were earlier missions schools of course that with worked with Indian people. And then I guess I tend to think of that kind of heyday of the government boarding school era being the late 19th and then the early 20th century. I talk about boarding school history up until 1940 in my book because I see the Great Depression as being a very important

factor in native people attending the schools and kind of a later era. And then some of the schools continued many of them were closed down during the 1930s when the federal government actually moved away from the policy of assimilation and began to think that well maybe Indians should go to public schools and perhaps removing young children from their families for extended periods of time was not good and not a good idea. So some of the schools have continued through you know managed to kind of stay operational past the 1930s but really was just kind of a few schools that still exist like the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico has its history as a government boarding school but today it's operated by the all public councils so it's you know very different than it was in its early history. You could talk a little bit about it as far as the government was concerned what the intent was because I'm I'm certain that there were some people who would look at these schools and might be moved to use words like cultural genocide. Right. That it was a definite

and intended to destroy native culture by taking children. Out of it and trying to break those connections. And while indeed that that might have been the intention I would imagine that people at the time would have would have thought that they had they had good intentions that their idea was by making by taking Indian kids and making them more like their quote unquote mainstream Americans that it would be. But that was that that was their idea of progress that somehow that these children would be better off. So how do you assess what it was that the people who started to organize these schools thought that they were doing right. Well I think there were people at the time who were very well-intentioned. I mean politicians reformers missionaries there was a great enthusiasm for this policy when it began in the 19th century. I think there were very few people who disagreed that this wasn't the best route. Who would have you know

I think there was a great deal of consensus around this policy in the late 19th century. So I do think people some people were well-intentioned. The other issue and I think you know one way to approach trying to understand this area is by looking at the land kind of policies of that time people. Many people did think you know Indian peoples ways of life were going to decline that tribal people would not be able to kind of move into the next century if they weren't assimilated Americans. And and you know a whole number of people were convinced that tribal life was was just going to be you know no more. And we know this was an era of you know great collecting and museums and you know that kind of thing. So but you know the other issue about the land policies it's really important to consider because while people may have been convinced that. You know Germans or other ethnic groups who came to the United States should have also assimilated into mainstream American society. Why were there these

unusual schools developed. You know this whole system of kind of segregating Indians in off reservation boarding schools in order for this to take place. And so I think we also have to keep in mind that the federal government was also very interested in the lands the tribal people were still in possession of in the late 19th and early 20th century. And we can't consider the boarding school era apart from the general allotment Act of 1887 which sought to really reduce the size of Indian land holdings make Indians individual property holders and I know in the part of the country that I'm from. In the Great Lakes and in Minnesota this policy had a very devastating impact on native communities. Some communities in Minnesota lost over 90 percent of their tribal lands in this era. And so the boarding school policy really goes hand in hand with the general allotment Act of 1887 and the land policies of the day. Now people did say this is going to be in the best interest of Indians but yet we have to

realistically assess what those policies were you know at the time and I think have a very critical view of some of the rhetoric of assimilation citizenship Christianity or you know the famous phrase from this era was colonel Pratt who is the head of the Carlisle School who said it was better to kill the Indian and save the man. Well he was a very well-intentioned many people at the time regarded him as a humanitarian educator but obviously you know. Kill the Indian and say the man was was obviously a very destructive policy for Indian children and their families. Even though I think that they managed through incredible ways to be very resilient throughout these years. Well just have a couple callers and where we were just a moment but to pick up on that last point because I think that it's a very interesting one. You know as as you're saying it think it seemed that the idea of the people who set up these schools who took children from their families out of their cultures sometimes sent them a long way away from home so that it was so they certainly couldn't go back and

forth and in some cases children were away from their parents for years. You know that the idea was to try to foster in those children a new kind of identity so that they would no longer see themselves as a good way or as Indians but as Americans. Right. But what really happened one of the things that happened was as the children got to know one another it formed bonds that might not have formed otherwise because it took children from different parts of the country from different tribes who likely would never have met one another otherwise. And. And forged a perhaps a new kind of identity that was tied more tour to being Indian rather than with with their own people and they are like where Lakota and effectively you make the argument that this may be where the roots of a kind of pan indian ism that might later. You can follow that down to maybe you can follow that down to the present time. Yeah well I think that you know if we're going to put a positive spin on the boarding school story

that this may be where native people would would kind of see it because many of us do think today that forging bonds with with other tribal people kind of coming together even though in some ways under and for fortunate circumstances that this is been a very important strategy for native people in the 20th century in the years because they were dealing with so many of the same not just social problems political issues federal policies and so I think there were ties that were formed. In the boarding schools and I'm not trying to say that people didn't consider themselves lucky Navajo Ojibwe after the boarding school years. But I think there has been you know a growing sensibility that that we have issues in common what historians have referred to as pan indian ism and you know you think about it people kind of thrown together from across many different tribal groups as you say the idea was that children should be away from their homes or families for as many often for five years before they would see their families. And so

children within these schools I think they stayed in contact with their families and were very creative about it. But you know they did obviously forge very close bonds between you know between students and I think that was very important to their survival. And it has been you know an interesting kind of movement of the 20th century even as native people have you know urbanized and kind of come into closer contact with one another increasingly I think throughout the 20th century. And you know. Part of the philosophy of the schools was that kids should now speak English right. That's a very important essential part of it. And so now with the boarding school era people have had you know this uncommon right that they were not separated any longer perhaps in the same way as they were before by culture or language. Now geography within the boarding schools. And so you know that has had its benefits as well as its downsides because we're also concerned even you know here in the early 21st century about the declining number of people who speak their tribal languages. So yeah

they're always you know complicated issues. We have as our guest here in this part of focus 580 Brenda child she teaches courses in American Indian studies and history at University of Minnesota where she is associate professor of American studies. And again if you're interested in reading on this subject one book that you might look at is her book boarding school seasons which talks about the experience and particularly uses letters that were written back and forth between children and their families to paint a picture of what what life was like as published by the University of Nebraska Press she's here visiting the campus and was good enough to come spend some time with us. We do have some callers ready to go and when we bring them into the conversation we'll start with someone listening this morning in Chicago. Lie number four. Hello. Good morning. I find the subject very interesting because I believe there was a similar program. In Australia where Aboriginal children were taken away from their parents my right off that I believe it was yeah it's really interesting the sort of parallels to this

policy not just in it existed in the United States certainly in Canada New Zealand had a similar program for the indigenous peoples there the Maoris and in Australia they have had a very they they have been it's been a big issue in Australia in recent years surrounding the sorry day which is that the federal government or the government of Canada or excuse me Australia for many years did pursue a policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families often outright adopting them into white families. A lot of times the average neighbors never saw their children again. Yes that's true and so in many ways I think the effects and the legacy of this has been even more devastating in Australia. And the policy lasted longer so that people in Australia tend to be younger you know many of them are people in their 40s now who were were part of this this

policy of removing children from their families. And this story has become kind of more well-known in recent years because of the national conversation they've had in in. Australia about removing children but also many people saw that wonderful film that came out. I think maybe a couple of years ago it's called Rabbit Proof Fence. Yeah and I highly recommend that to everyone. Oh it is. I think I saw it the other day it's on a true story as a channel and I believe I saw it. Yeah I know it's a it's a you know kind of a drama but it is based on the experiences of real Aboriginal children who were removed from their families and then returned to them hundreds of miles running away from home from the school in order to go back. So in Australia sometimes children removed removed for the purpose of education but as you indicate also outright adopting them into white families. Well you know it's interesting in Canada because when they try to integrate the Korean DMZ it led to a tragedy. One of the women and the other one of the Korean DMZ was

sexually violated and murdered and it took years for her to get justice. Her name was Helen video Kamel I believe they did a movie on the call conspiracy of silence. It was a true story it took. Oh I don't know. Several years before they finally brought the Canadian boys to justice and only want to risk it. It's interesting that although they take these children out of a home put them into the schools and want them to dress white and act white they never really let them assimilate and that's right. OK thank you and thank you as go to a nearby community Belgium by Danville line number one. Hello good morning. I'd like to bring into the topic inspected. We're really doing an injustice here from the very beginning. You me and everybody refer to them as an interest to this rule a misnomer. We should come by their real names like YouTube rant and lie and I and all the various types we have we never we never refer to him as what

we really are from the very first day and we do it it's stupid of him to this day. And I think really we even to the point to call them tribes and they were really more than. Cripes they weren't really sure but they were much better organized group of individuals than just a tribe or a post related to everybody else. Right. And so this goes on to the spirit right. I appreciate your comments and I know most of us who are native people have different ways of kind of explaining our identity and often we do refer to us or to ourselves as as Indians because that has just been you know something that we've grown grown accustomed to. But Indian people usually do have much more specific ways of explaining their own identity especially when we meet other native people as I have been doing since I have been visiting the last day here at the University of Illinois. Meeting some of the Indian students and graduate students and faculty members and so we tend to be

much more specific and so when I meet people here I usually identify myself as a member of you know the Red Lake Ojibwe nation from northern Minnesota. But that's what we really do it. A total of justice. Because we can't be fair to them it's maybe it's because you are not a native indian. I don't want to use that word. I still am a Native American because I've been here for several generations. Randy So you've been here several generations the term but it's such a such missed thing that goes into the story today right of center. Thank you very much. Thank you. Well let's go to another caller this is champagne That's lie number two. Hello how you know why stay. Go to see John. Greetings on the reservations out there for all three of the major reservations though I and I know quite about it a bit about what is going on there now which I think is a lot more important than what went on years ago

and it's been my experience of where the reservation schools now run by the NDA are destroying their own children. And I bent into a lot of trouble over that but I also have a couple of the stories that I wrote up on my website that. It may interest you one of them deals with a former I knew quite a few of the old survivors of Custer's last stand although not of white people obviously and I would have you know a couple other things that I could send to you or you could visit with my website and see what you think of them. Thank you. OK well did you want to tell us what the website is. Sure. W W W M E R al y an ass. C H U T T E R L E dot com. I have some other things that I would be you know some other interesting little stories that I liked especially

about the guy that I wrote about Harry Kingman and I know I still know his relatives and theirs too. Two of the first two little stories you click under stories and have a little article about Harry in it and one of his descendants and I had in school. And Harry is Harry's daughter got to be my godmother. Go back a long way that the Lakota people. I hope you enjoy that and I'm going to head back to South Dakota in two weeks. Lucky you. Well I don't know I'm not all that five years in like Governor Janklow and I didn't get along OK well thank you thank you. Thanks for the call and let's go on again we go to a caller here in Charleston this will be line number four. Oh yes. I think this is relevant in the wrench Larry Indiana. There is St. Joseph's College a Catholic school. And across the street on the east side of

the route there is what we locals refer to as the old Indian school. And would you know anything about that and or if the Catholic Church then participated in it. The process. There were a number of missions schools that educated Indians before the government boarding schools were established and simultaneously so there are a whole. I mean it's it's like kind of story all itself I think the mission schools. And it isn't something so I would not be surprised at all to hear that there was you know an Indian school in this area of Indiana. There certainly were Indian schools in the Midwest in the upper Midwest in you know the southwest and pretty much all over the United States where there were native populations. So I would not be at all surprised to hear that for the purposes of my own research you know as a historian

I tended to focus a little bit more on the federal boarding schools operated by the United States government. Just for the purpose. You know sometimes when you're historian you need doing research it's easier if you can kind of. You have to kind of narrow down the archives you're going to work with so I didn't myself do research on the mission schools now in Canada the Federal Government of Canada funded residential schools funded missionary organizations to work with Indian communities. And in fact the residential schools are very connected to the church especially in Canada and that tie was broken a little bit earlier in the United States whereas the federal government did fund missionary organizations the Episcopal Church the Anglican Church the Catholic Church Presbyterians their whole number of of you know church organizations that did establish mission schools. And gosh

there's one memoir that I really like a lot Well couple of them that I might mention one is. The middle five by Francis le Flash who was an Omaha man who attended a mission school in Nebraska in the 19th century and his book which talks about recalls his experience and especially his close ties with his friends in that school is really wonderful even though it was published around 1900 it's still in print by print by the University of Nebraska Press and I often have my students read that it's really a very beautiful memoir. Another one from Canada is Basil Johnston's Indian school days and he attended a Jesuit residential school in Ontario and basil Johnston's Ojibwe he's an older man now but was a student in the 1930s and he tells the story of when he was a child. The Indian agent coming in to take he as well as his sister to residential school. And he says one of his sister that was supposed to go with him to school was sick

and so she couldn't go. And the agent was supposed to bring two kids into the school so he arbitrarily took Basil Johnston's younger sister to school so. She was four years old so he and his younger sister ended up in this school and he mentions arriving there the sort of trauma of arriving and then not seeing his sister again for months because she was in the girl's school and he couldn't see or interact with her. Despite the fact the story sounds very sad. It's really kind of a triumphant story in many ways because he talks about the rebellion of students the resistance of students and it's actually a very funny memoir and that's published more recently by I think the University of Oklahoma press. And so those both deal with more of the Mission School Story. Thank you very much. Yeah. Well again our guest in this part of focus 580 is Brenda childs She is associate professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota. She's here visiting the campus to take part in the sixth annual graduate symposium on women's and gender history and she's written quite a bit on this

subject. And again one of the if you're interested in reading one of the books that you might look at is her own which is titled boarding school seasons and it is published by the University of Nebraska Press. You are one of the things that maybe sets this book apart a little bit from from others is that you used letters right there were written people wrote to their children the kids wrote back to talking about their experiences with their what was going on with them at school. Also parents tried to keep children aware of what was going on back home. Well when I started doing the research one of the things that concerned me is that there had been very little work done prior to that time that focused on native peoples interpretations of the boarding school experience. We've had books that talked about federal policy reformers educators like Pratt. But nothing really where native people were telling their stories other than in these wonderful memoirs and life histories that I have mentioned already. And so it was very important to me to try to locate

documents I was trained as a historian so my first instinct was to go into archives and I was sort of warned at the time that it would be very difficult to accomplish this because you know people said if you're going to go in the National Archives and do this kind of work you're going to find documents you know mostly written by non Indian people. The official correspondence with with Washington and the reports from the school and that sort of thing. And when I went in did the research I found actually you know of course I did run into a lot of that material. But as I was going through the boxes and boxes of. Of materials in the National Archives from some of the former boarding schools I began to find letters that Indian people wrote and I found that the letters kind of logically divided into certain topics and I really just organized the book around the letters and I tried to as much as possible let the Indian people kind of speak for themselves. I found letters that my grandmother had written to the school in the 1920s I

found a letter that her great grandfather had written to the school requesting that she come home for the summer. These were not their letters were not important. You know historically in any particular way but it was of course very meaningful to me and it was the first time I'd seen my great grandfather's handwriting this was. He had passed away before I was born. And so what I really like about the letters is it shows that even though. You know Native people were part of these institutions and were you know had to kind of live through these very difficult years of forced assimilation and acculturation. What really inspired me was how families managed to stay in contact with one another. How children managed to you know stay connected to their families their homes their tribes their communities. And if anything I hope that's what the boarding school my book boarding school seasons the story it tells because more than the history of any particular institution I really

look at it as the history of Indian families and communities in particular people from the upper Midwest like my own people the Ojibway and their experiences. So if I could just read you just one short letter to give you an example of some of the the letters that I found. This is actually a read or a letter written you know in the later period during the Great Depression. And I was trying to understand. Why Indian families sent their kids to school. Because obviously we know early in the boarding school era it was about forced assimilation compulsion and there were compulsory attendance laws passed in Indians had no choice in fact they could be arrested if they did not send their children the government boarding schools. And there is a very well known story out of the Southwest that I just mentioned in passing in the book but it's about the story of Hopi people from Arizona who a group of whom spent time in the federal prison at Alcatraz because they did not send their children to school Hopi man during the assimilation years. It's really kind of a stunning story.

Shocking in many ways. So I wanted to understand why in later years if you know if these were always controversial institutions with Indian people why would anyone send their kid to a government boarding school. And I found that actually in the 30s the great depression turned out to be a very important story this was a time when many native people had in some cases lost their land their traditional economy had declined in one way or another through a variety of circumstances some of them work for wage labor at the time. And these were some of the first people here in the Great Lakes anyway where I'm from who were unemployed to be unemployed during the Depression. And so there actually were a lot of letters from parents asking to enroll their children in government boarding school. And let me just read you an exit for a short letter. This is from a father from Wisconsin or Jeb way father. And he had been recently widowed and he wrote to the superintendent of Landru the boarding school in South Dakota describing his situation and I quote him he says I've lost my wife and left me with six children. I would

like to ask you to send these little folks over to you two or three years so I can get along. It is hard for me to stay here alone home because children not used home alone when mother gone. When I'm going working out it is hard for them. And this is all I ask you if you have a place for them. So. I think it's very important to keep in mind this idea of family preservation and thinking about the later boarding school era because you know this man is not saying you know I want my son to become Christianised speak English learn a vocation and assimilate into the mainstream of American society and play the piano or whatever you know he's he's describing a situation he's faced with he has very few options. And so it's interesting to kind of think that early in the boarding school these institutions started out as places you know what his one historian is called weapons of assimilation. But in later years they do become very familiar institutions to Indians there were lots of native people thousands of Native people educated in these schools like my grandparents

over the years. And so later especially as policies kind of relaxed and and administrators were more likely to send children home for summer and that sort of thing. It in these years sometimes Indian people did ask to enroll their children in boarding school especially if their experience and hardship which I think was the situation with my own grandparents my grandfather was a single parent. His wife had passed away and my grandmother ended up in boarding school during the 20s and that was a very typical experience for students. When we have some other people here we can bring them into the conversation. The next in line is someone listening this morning in Indiana and London before right here. Hello. Hello. Two things. Earlier in the program you mentioned that somebody or the government you know quote unquote finally decided it wasn't really a sensible thing to pull children away from the families. Right. And I was wondering whether you know how that came about were there certain

severe cases of mental illness or children just leaving the school and getting lost trying to get back to their original land. Right. You know it was a very particular politician who said you know this is this is crazy. We've got to change if that's the first question. Right. Second question deals with the missionary schools and what you call the government boarding schools I presume of course the mission schools came on heavy with Christianity. And I was wondering. When the government supported boarding schools whether you know you had to adopt Christianity or you know things were going to be pretty tough for you. Right. Just in that and I guess it's of I guess in some ways as difficult as you talked about the fellow talked about earlier and the above are insulated. I live close to Plymouth and there was a forced march from Plymouth Indiana into Illinois I think is around 800 people were forced march then I was a graduate student down in North Carolina.

I learned about the really difficult for smarts it started in North Carolina out to the west and I always I mean the removal era always bother me and I just wanted to mention that so you think you think about that one right. Well I'll try to answer both of your questions which are very excellent questions. I would say during kind of the foremost of the boarding school era that. You know we tend to think of this idea oh there's a separation of church and state and so forth in our longer history in the United States but actually it probably wouldn't have been tremendously different to attend a mission school or a government off reservation government boarding school Christian church attendance was compulsory for Indians in the government boarding schools as well. So at this time native religions and worldviews were you know not tolerated. They were viewed as as pagan very much inside the boarding

school just as as we know ritualistic dancing ceremonial life that kind of thing were being suppressed on Indian reservations certainly the same experience was true for children in the off reservation boarding schools. The difference might be that they probably had a choice of religion that is if they had if their families were and some Indians were you know in I know in Minnesota Catholic or by the time they attended Government boarding schools they could have their choice of which church services to attend but attending church. And you know adopting anyway outward symbols of Christianity and attended church was was very much a part of the boarding school experience. You asked if you know who turned away from the policy of forced assimilation and so forth and there is a figure who does kind of loom very large in discussions of policy during that era. And that is John Collier who was commissioner of Indian Affairs during the

New Deal era during He was Roosevelt's commissioner of Indian Affairs. FDR as commissioner. And he was someone who was very opposed to the boarding schools. He in fact he would always refer to them as medieval institutions and he called the people who ran the schools folks who lived in the dark ages and so he was not an advocate of boarding schools and he I think not coincidentally was someone who did also have a great great appreciation for an Native American religions and he had had interesting experiences particularly in the southwest with public people that had really had a great impact on him and he thought that there was of course much beauty and art in Native American life and culture and thought it was certainly worth preserving and that native people had the right to do it. And so he when he became commissioner of Indian Affairs in the 30s he began closing the schools down and argued for the very sensible. Alternative

a public school education for Indian people. And so you start to see the kind of gradual move toward public school education for Indians in the 1930s and one of the sort of ironic things about this was that and there were funds that the government set aside for school districts in the United States to provide for the extra cost of educating Indian kids as they moved into public schools in the United States. Some states didn't do very well using the funds for the purpose they were intended. But the state that I'm from Minnesota actually was one of the states that was better it at using these funds that we call the Johnson Johnson O'Malley funds. But the interesting thing is when I was doing research for boarding school seasons I found that there were still a lot of kids who wrote to the school in the aftermath of you know in this era when they could go to public school who were writing to superintendents asking to enroll in the Indian schools finding that the security of that kind of all Indian environment was

something that they would rather do I remember actually I don't know if I can find it quickly but there was a letter in the book from a kid named Melvin from northern Minnesota and he wrote to a superintendent saying you know I want to come back to flan Drew. I'm the only Indian boy and he underlined at Park Rapids high school in Minnesota. I will tell you more when I get there. So obviously the transition to public school was not something that always went easily or well for American Indians just because there were funds set aside for it and I think there's a whole interesting story there with the integration of Indians into public schools in the United States. So and you know one of the illusions that you made in your wonderful question too was about resistance you know. And I you know I mentioned John Collier and people in government because we tend to talk about their impact because they did make real changes in the 30s but obviously Indian people and their families had in various ways resisted these institutions as well. Kids ran away from school.

Parents refused to send their children to schools. Sometimes they showed up at school to pick them up and bring them home they were not sort of passive people throughout the boarding school era. And even though you know I look at this as. A very misguided policy in a number of ways. Native people I think were very creative at surviving the boarding school era and stayed in touch with their children managed to stay connected as parents and children. And so I think we have to consider that important story as well. We have maybe about 12 minutes left in this part of focus 580. Our guest is Brenda child she is associate professor of American Studies at University of Minnesota where she teaches courses in American Indian Studies and History has written on this subject in her book boarding school seasons American Indian families in 1998 40 published by the University of Nebraska Press. We have some other folks here will triumph and see if we get everybody in the time that remains our next caller is in Champaign

on line 1. Hello. I basically have a comment and a question. My comment is we're going to be awfully traumatic for a child to put in school when they don't know the language or maybe I'm just torn away from her family. And the second question I have is what is so very a languages of India. Those are very good questions. I'm just writing them down so I don't forget. I think it was very traumatic for students when they first arrived at boarding school. On the cover of my book which sadly you can't see but I have a photograph that shows the youngest children who are enrolled at the Haskell boarding school in Lawrence Kansas. And there are over a dozen kids in this photo and they're holding up a sign that says Haskell babies indicating that they are the kindergarten

class. Well you know I have a 4 year old daughter at home and an older son and I can't imagine separating for them for four five years or easily giving them up and you can imagine you know that it was a very. You know a traumatic experience for the kids themselves as well as for their parents. And what I see in the letters is that parents themselves were often expressing their you know their sadness their despair their unhappiness that being separated from their children and actually a lot of the day to day correspondence with the school is trying to convince superintendents that they be allowed to have their children come home for summer visits and that kind of thing even in the era when you know the IEDs the rationalization of the school in the early boarding school era was always you know that we can't send the kids home for the summer because it's going to undo all the good work that we've done during the course of the year so it's a mistake to do that but I think it was terribly

traumatic for the parents I think it was very traumatic for the children to be separated from their families. I have one chapter in the book that I call home sickness and I really in that chapter just use letters in there where children and parents talk about how they're dealing with their separation. And I think you know it's difficult to you know understand the depths of despair some people must have experienced during this time. I'll just read you a real short letter this is not from a kid but it's from a parent who writes from a reservation in northern Minnesota to one of the schools where her son was in South Dakota. She says My son Charlie seemed to be discontented at the school and what am I going to do about it. He's written to some friends here that he don't like it there and if he feels that way don't you suppose it's best for him to come home and the mother asked the school superintendent to speak kind to him and advise him to stay there and be a good boy not to think about running away from school. Tell him I figured on him learning some trade while there and I

feel very much disappointed in him not liking the school. And there are lots of I think you know ways that students expressed their their unhappiness and and loneliness and I thought it was very important to have a chapter just called homesickness because it's such an important part of the boarding school story as native people indicated again and again in these letters. And even though historians don't always write about emotions or the history of emotions I think it's a very important part you know of the boarding school story that is just. It would be a mistake to to avoid it. I know I've done some. I was telling students that I met with here at the university yesterday about some workshops that I've done with elders there were some elders up in Manitoba who had been residential school students who came down to Minnesota because they wanted to meet me and were trying to work out how to get together and they couldn't come down to Minneapolis and at the time I couldn't go up to their particular community in Manitoba So we met in Northern Minnesota and we had a great weekend together

where we talked about my work and they testified and talked about what their experiences were kids as children. Many of them mentioned going off to school at 5 or 6 not knowing the language as you indicate. And that just you know here they were many of them 75 80 years old and it's still a very a bitter thing that they're still trying to get over you know as sort of senior citizens and so it's it's a very sad part of the boarding school story. Regarding the language issue. You know it's it's another kind of fascinating story. I think even though we do look at the boarding school era as contributing very much to the decline of tribal languages across North America there has been a very important movement I don't know if we would think there's a there's I if I could name a more kind of impressive and significant movement going on in Indian Country Today. Then the effort to revive revitalize

and maintain our tribal languages at the University of Minnesota where I work I'm a historian but we do have colleagues who work in teach Dakota language which is one of the you know languages which is spoken in the southern part of the state by Dakota people there many of whom were removed out of Minnesota in the 19th century but there still are Dakota people in communities in Minnesota and I think it's very important that we teach that language at the university because it's part of our state history it's one of our state treasures. And then there are more people in Minnesota who speak the Ojibway language which is my you know tribal group and. We offer you know language study in Ojibwe and we also have at our university one of the premier North American Indian Algonquian linguists in our department so students can actually take you know courses in kind of like you'd say conversational Dakota and Ojibwe and then they can get advanced language study as well so that if they want to

teach or develop curriculum language planning work that kind of thing they can also you know do that at the university and that's just one thing going on in our community. Of course now one of the things that you know we all know that it's much better to learn a language when you're a little kid than when you're in college I think many of us had that experience with Spanish or something that we're not fluent in these languages that we we studied in college and so another really exciting movement in Indian country is the immersion schools that have been created. There's one in Wisconsin for a job ways that some of our graduates of the University of Minnesota have started. There is a really successful program in Browning Montana on the Blackfeet reservation where they now have little kids speaking Blackfeet in the community again. One of our graduate students at the University of Minnesota has been one of the leaders in Miami language revitalisation which hasn't been spoken by people since the 1960s and through they have a lot of historical documents that recorded the

Miami language and then through studying languages by people who speak similar languages like Kickapoo today they've been able to work on revitalizing that language and one of our students actually is from what is the town Kokomo Indiana. And he is is he's just a young guy in his 20s but he's a great language teacher in addition to being talented in an in a number of ways. And so that's to me wow that's really an exciting story I mean to think you know that this languages you know people talk about language death and they say that their language was just you know sleeping and now it's being revitalized. And I take a lot of encouragement from those those movements going on in Indian Country Today. And I would say you know these are not just something not just something going on a movement in you know in North America but we've been very There has been a lot of. Gosh cooperation between indigenous peoples worldwide over this issue of language revitalisation our department at the University of

Minnesota has a very close relationship with Maori studies where they have revitalized the Maori language in New Zealand and so in the native Hawaiians have been very good in this work and so some of the methods and there's a lot there's a lot of sharing that kind of goes on among language teachers and people active in this in this movement and in fact we're having a conference up on the fonda Lac reservation in early April. And if anyone's really interested in this topic they could contact the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and learn about this language conference which is bringing together a lot of Dakota energy away people in Minnesota but also other people from North America native Hawaiians and there's even a Maori contingent coming from New Zealand. So it's better you know. I like the strength in numbers thing going on with language. Thank you for that wonderful question. Yeah very I appreciate the question the caller and we're just so short on time. I think probably we're not going to be able to take any more callers and my apologies. We

just hope I only have so much time for our and we can only do so much with it. I think it's really a fascinating story and that it's I think it at the very least it's good that now this is a story that seems to be through your books and I know there are other people who have written about this is a story that is being told and then and people are it's people are seizing part of their their history right and looking at it both for for what was bad about it and what might possibly be right about it. Right. And I would encourage many people since we're still getting snow here and you know like if anyone wants to go to Phoenix there's a wonderful exhibit called Remembering our Indian school days at the Hurd museum in Phoenix that will still be there for the next year that explores you know the history of this policy in the United States and its impact on tribal communities and so you can kind of you know read books as we say there's interesting films out there like Rabbit Proof Fence talking about Australia and museum

exhibits and I think it's a topic that you know has meant a lot to me because my family's history but it's also one that we really need to know to understand more about the history of the United States. Our guest Brenda childish she teaches courses in American Indian Studies and History at the University of Minnesota where she's professor of American studies. If you would like to read more on the subject you can look for her book boarding school season's American Indian families 1500 to 140. The University of Nebraska Press is the publisher of the book. Well thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you.