Kill the Indian

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be small differences between the text and the audio you hear above.**

ED: We’re back with BackStory. I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. We’re talking today about the long history of kids being separated from their families to start new lives in a new place in America.

ED: In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania. This was the first federally funded off-reservation school designed to educate Native American children by erasing their native heritage. Backers wanted to, quote, “kill the Indian, save the man.” Officials taught children English, made them give up their native dress, and tried to convert them to Christianity.

BRIAN: As the century wore on, the government founded more and more of these schools out west. And many of them remained open well into the 20th century. One of those was the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, located on the Kansas-Oklahoma state line. After its founding in 1884, the US government brought thousands of Indian students from all over the region to, in effect, teach them to assimilate.

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: My family was introduced, shall I say, to Chilocco when my dad and his older brother were placed there by order of the court.

BRIAN: This is Tsianina Lomawaima. She is Muskogee and an indigenous studies scholar at Arizona State University.

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: Because their mom was an Indian woman– their dad had left the family, so by definition, as an Indian woman trying to raise her kids by herself, she was deemed incompetent. So my dad, Curtis, was about eight, nine years old. His brother Bob was a little bit older when they went into Chilocco in 1927. And my dad remained there until 1935, when he managed to get away.

BRIAN: Inspired by her father’s experiences, Lomawaima began a research project collecting oral histories from other Chilocco alumni. While at the school, she says, her father and others bristled under the school’s military-style organization.

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: Students wore uniforms. They marched in close-order drill. There were 22 bugle calls every day. Even though they were schools, academic instruction was quite secondary and never proceeded much higher than the equivalent of grade six. Students were taught to labor. And that was an important part of the ideology of believing that what civilization meant was that native people were required to learn how to work. It was assumed that they were not by nature industrious, self-disciplined people.

So work details, as they were called, constituted half of the school day. The reality is that the schools were never funded by Congress at a level that would have been sufficient to keep them running, so student labor was fundamentally important. The ideology was, well, we’re teaching them to become civilized through this labor. But the reality was it’s what was necessary to keep the schools functioning.

BRIAN: What about your father’s story? You’ve mentioned that he went to this school, and he didn’t have such a great experience.

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: Well, he was young. He was eight years old. I think at that age it was impossible to understand the emotional dynamics of being placed there. And he did not take well to the military discipline and the attempt to eradicate individuality.

So he was about 14 or 15 the first time he ran away. He did not make it far the first time. The second time, he hopped a freight. He made it all the way Los Angeles and was caught there and was brought back. It was the third or fourth time he made it home to Wichita, and that’s actually why he was running away. He had not seen his mom since he had been brought to school at age eight.

So at that point, the school authorities allowed him a summer off to go home and spend that time with his mother. And he came back in the fall to give it another try and just could not stand it. Just could not stand it. So he ran away again. And by that point, he and his mother were pretty estranged. They just were not able to reestablish a relationship, so he hit the hobo trail.

He rode rails as a teenager all over the western United States. Worked on hotshot fire crews, and ended up in a CCC camp where the commander of the camp is the caring adult who took an interest in him and enabled him to finish high school and actually go to college.

BRIAN: As an anthropologist looking at the history of these schools, how do you explain the long-running practice of separating kids from their families, often against their families’ will? How do you explain that in America, which claims to value family life and individual choice so highly?

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: That’s a wonderful question, because you do hear this mantra of family values so often. The key thing to remember is whose family. I think what this speaks very directly and very transparently to is a very longstanding reality upon which the nation, the US, was founded, which was the dispossession of Indian land.

So you have a fundamental tension from the very creation of this nation of what do we do with native people. That was defined as the Indian problem. And the problem was, frankly, that Indians were sticking around– rather uncomfortable reminder. So I think this long-term– and it’s still going on– denigration of native society, the assumption that native people live in the past and cannot cope with modernity and can only be defined by something authentic that only existed several hundred years ago, that’s deeply ingrained into the US perception of self as a nation.

So native families by definition, I think, could not be valued. That was a way of life that in the ideology of the US had to pass away. It had to pass away, because that would show that Euro-American civilization really was a better way of life, that Christianity and the technology and capitalism really were chosen by God.

BRIAN: Thinking back on this as a scholar, how might caring adults have been inserted into young Native Americans’ lives more effectively than shipping them away from their families?

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: Well, I imagine the most direct way to do that would have been to have left them with their families.

BRIAN: That seems kind of logical to me. Call me crazy.

TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA: So this is the thing. There were some caring adults who made key connections with my dad and some of the other people I interviewed, but they were not their family members. They were not their community members. They were white people. That speaks fundamentally to what these schools were trying to do, which was to destroy the fabric of native society and community and family life, to break that up. And in some cases, all we can say is, sadly, they were successful.

I think to a miraculous degree, thanks to the creativity, resilience, and strength of native people, they weren’t always successful. But that’s key to what the schools and the federal policy was trying to do, was to create a different kind of family for Indian kids that would move them out of native life and into this subservient working role in US society.

BRIAN: Tsianina Lomawaima is a professor at Arizona State University. Her book on the subject is They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School.