‘Loss of Language and Culture’(fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

‘Loss of Language and Culture’
Schools tried to wipe out identity

by Andrew Metz
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
November 9, 2003
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/state/ny-stside093532795nov09,0,4484123.story?coll=ny-statenews-headlines

 It began in Carlisle, Pa. with the philosophy: Kill the Indian and save
the man.

 This was the pedagogical mission of the Carlisle Indian Industrial
School, the model for a system of forced assimilation that plucked
children from reservations and tried to wipe out their native language
and identity.

  Founded in 1879 by Army Lt. Richard Henry Pratt, the government school
was the alma mater to more than 10,500 American Indians during its
39-year existence, notably Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. For most Indian
people, though, it remains the grim touchstone of an era where their
tribal ways were shocked out of them.

  "Carlisle was considered the elite of the off-'rez [off-reservation]
boarding schools because the father of them was the one who developed
the policy," said Barbara Landis, the school's biographer for the
Cumberland County Historical Society. "It was his experiment and
Carlisle was the site of that first experiment."

  While some children were shipped away by relatives or tribal officials
who hoped they'd escape the despair of reservation life, many were
forcibly enrolled in the schools by the government. Upon arrival at
Carlisle or the scores of institutions it spawned in the United States
and Canada through the turn of the century, students were stripped of
their traditional dress, bathed, clothed in Western garb and made to
cut their hair.

  Pratt's intention was deprivation from all things native and total
immersion in white society, a "baptism," as he once was quoted as
saying in an address to Baptist ministers. "I believe in immersing
Indians in our civilization," he said, "and when we get them under,
holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked."

  In the years following the U.S. military's defeat at the Little
Bighorn, the schools became a key weapon in the campaign against the
Indians, imposing an ethnic oppression that has traumatized native
people even decades after most of the institutions closed or converted
into more palatable places of learning. Carlisle was shuttered in 1918,
however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs still funds several dozen
residential schools.

  "There is still a legacy from boarding schools," said Carmen Taylor,
executive director of the National Indian School Board Association.
"All the way from a lack of parenting to feelings of oppression, to say
nothing of the loss of language and culture."

    Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.