It was Soldier Wolf’s closeness to her family and their stories of abuse at the school that inspired her to become the Northern Arapaho tribal historic preservation officer and work on the return of the children lost at Carlisle.
For Carlisle’s founder, Richard Henry Pratt, an Indian fighter who once served with George Armstrong Custer, the boarding school was another battlefront of the Indian wars. Pratt devised the school’s curriculum of “kill the Indian, save the man” from his experiments in forced education on Cheyenne, Caddo, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche prisoners of war at Fort Marion, Florida, in the early 1870s. The prison experiments impressed Indian reformers in Congress, who authorized the Bureau of Indian Affairs to take control of the Carlisle Barracks to build the nation’s first off-reservation boarding school.
As Pratt assembled Carlisle’s first class of students, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt ordered him to take children from the Lakotas because of their “hostile attitude toward the government.” Hayt hoped to pressure the Lakotas, and other western Indigenous nations, into opening millions of acres of treaty-protected territory for white settlement. “The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” wrote Pratt of his first Carlisle recruitment mission at the Rosebud and Pine Ridge agencies in Dakota Territory.
This is incredibly difficult to look at. I fear this will continue and he will commit even worse crimes against humanity. I believe the UN is sitting on June 27 to discuss the humanitarian aspects of Trumps decisions here.
Glad to see major network coverage of this
So sorry that this isnt snakes but… wow.
The quotes with his face are in Spanish as well as English. This is a reeducation center.
Remove children from parental influence, hold them long enough for them to captor-bond for survival, surround them with a new ideology 24/7. The youngest ones become blank slates, and the older ones wear down and adapt just to belong.
The next step would be to with hold all contact from their parents indefinitely. You could then punish them for speaking or learning their native tongue, and teach them domestic and hard labor skills and “employ” them outside of the camps to [insert synonym for “it builds character” here]. Since they aren’t actually citizens, minimum wage and labor laws don’t apply to them.
Ask the Native Americans and Austriallian Aboriginals how well this system works.
Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.
Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.
A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.
Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor.
How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex.
Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking. The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.
Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.
Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.
Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.
Other children were forced into prostitution rings.
Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered.
It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old.
In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.
In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996.
The Canadian Government is still fighting against making reparations to Native communities, and there are still monuments to people who instituted the residential school system. There are still monuments dedicated to people who offered bounties for scalps.
And despite being ordered multiple times by a Human Rights Tribunal to stop fucking around and stop discriminating against Native children, the Liberal government of Canada is still refusing to put any effort in to helping Native children and Native communities.
Our government is literally spending millions of our tax dollars fighting a legal battle because they don’t want to stop discriminating against children.
I grew up going to school in rural Alberta in the 1980′s and residential schools were mentioned in Social Studies class as something that happened a long time ago and weren’t that bad.
Imagine my horror when, as a 30-year-old adult, I learned that when I was learning this was ancient history, kids my own age were still being forced to live at these schools.
I’m 40 years old (nearly 41). People my age are dealing with the trauma and aftermath of this garbage, and white people in this country keep saying “it’s history, just get over it.”
Because we weren’t taught that it was current events, we were taught that it was history.
Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.
Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.
A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.
Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor.
How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex.
Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking. The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.
Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.
Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.
Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.
Other children were forced into prostitution rings.
Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered.
It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old.
In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.
In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996.
This is probably one of the most depressingly heart-wrenching photos I’ve ever seen. Native American children taken from their families and put into school to assimilate them into white society. the slogan for this governmental campaign ’“kill the Indian to save the man”. no official apology has ever been issued. never forgotten.
This is why we keep talking. Every child in this photo deserves to be talked about. The children grew up to be adults… adults who suffer from mental illnesses and a lack of connection to a culture/people that never wanted them to leave. These scars are passed down from generation to generation… and in reality the above picture is closer to present times than many would like to admit.
The amount of inter generational trauma from these schools ALONE has caused so much fuckery amongst native peoples.
And barely anybody understands it’s impact because the school systems don’t teach you this forced assimilation.
He is associated with the first recorded use of the word “racism”, which he used in 1902 to criticize against racial segregation, as well as the phrase “kill the Indian… and save the man” in reference to the efforts to educate Native Americans.
hell is empty and all the devils are settlers
Where the segregation he was objecting to was a barrier to forced assimilation, of course. In appropriate “Friends of the Indian” style.
Also, interesting how that page is still going on about kidnapping, horrendous child abuse, and cultural genocide in one breath–and “his campaign for fair and humane treatment of the Native American” in pretty much the next. All I can say about that at the moment.
my grandfather is a residential school survivor. he literally has a BRAND of a number on his shoulder. he was a 6 year old child who was branded like a cow. he was given a new last name (he doesn’t even know his real last name) and was essentially brain washed into being white. the man, a full oglala lakota, doesn’t even call himself native anymore because he was beaten into being ashamed of it.
do yall wanna tell me why it’s okay for you to dress up and play “indian” whenever less than 70 years ago, we were literally beaten and killed for being indian?
Reminder that I (A 38 year old) was in high school while residential schools were still active in Canada. Even natives who did not get taken from their family and put in residential schools have lost their identity because of this practice. Many families chose to give up everything they had to keep their children from having to go to residential schools.
Our people survived genocide while white kids dressed up as people who weren’t allowed to dress as themselves. That’s why it’s fucked up.
reminder that the last residential school to close down in canada was in 1996, just a few months before I was born.
My grandmother burned everything of hers so they could not link her to her heritage. I have no Status because that’s exactly how she wanted it to be.She didn’t want her family to be tortured.
When I was a manager at one of my old jobs and they wanted me to put a Tipi out and a Headdress on the Manny in our window for ‘Festival Season’ I flat out refused and wouldn’t let any of my girls do it either.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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