“There are but two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings.”
HODDING CARTER
What were federal residential boarding schools?
One of the most pernicious dimensions of the war on Indian culture was the residential boarding school system.1 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, missionary, military, and government officials advocated for the removal of Indian children from their homes to better instruct them in the English language and American culture. Captain Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first of many Indian boarding schools, said, “Our goal is to kill the Indian in order to save the man.”2 The idea of the schools had less to do with giving children an education than it did with taking away their culture. Children were sent to schools as far from home as possible in order to discourage runaways and inhibit parental contact. Their clothes were burned and their hair cut. They were strictly forbidden to speak tribal languages. At Carlisle and many other schools, children spent half the day working in fields or digging ditches and half the day in class. Attendance at Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools or church mission schools was compulsory for Indian children—homeschooling and public schools were not options for most Indian youth in the late nineteenth century.
The schools came under criticism after many children began to die from malnutrition and diseases like tuberculosis; their bodies were not sent home for burial. The commissioner of Indian Affairs defended the situation in 1899, saying, “This education policy is based on the well known inferiority of the great mass of Indians in religion, intelligence, morals, and home life.”3 There were twenty-five such schools in operation that year, with over twenty thousand students every year. Parents did have the option of sending their children to mission schools instead, but those schools were usually just as harsh in suppressing tribal languages and culture and even more likely to expose students to sexual molestation, which was commonly reported.4 Problems were not immediately apparent to parents, who often initially thought that their children would receive opportunities upon graduation and at least three meals a day at the schools, which was more than many families could provide.
The experience was devastating for most families. On returning home, many children could no longer recognize their own parents and could not speak the same language. The economic opportunities advocates hoped would be available for graduates never materialized in the country’s racially polarized climate. Children often felt they could not fit in either on or off the reservations, and those feelings, together with the dire poverty prevailing in most places, simply added to the growing social dysfunction on the reservations.
Ojibwe and other Indian students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania
The schools came under increasing scrutiny and attack as more than half the children at Carlisle had trachoma by 1900 and an influenza outbreak at Haskell (Kansas) in 1918 killed more than three hundred students.5 Official modifications did not change the dynamic, and Carlisle closed in 1918, but other schools actually continued to increase their enrollments. In 1928, the U.S. government commissioned the Merriam Report, which blasted the schools for poor nutrition and health care for students, insufficient clothing, exceedingly harsh physical punishment, and the breakup of tribal families. The next commissioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, began to dismantle and reform the BIA school system. It took many years, but after World War II, day schools started to dominate the educational experience of Indian children in the United States. Four BIA-operated boarding schools are still in existence today, but their policies have been thoroughly reformed.
The long-term effects of the residential boarding school system are profound. People learn how to parent by how they are parented, but with as many as three generations of Indians going through BIA boarding schools, a critical piece of the social fabric was severely damaged. Many native families have rebounded from the effects of boarding schools, but their blessings are derived in spite of the system rather than because of it. Of the remaining 180 tribal languages spoken in the United States, 160 are likely to go extinct in the next thirty years because only elders speak those languages.6 Residential boarding schools are one of the primary causal factors in this development.
One of the preeminent goals of the residential boarding school system—educational achievement for native youth— was directly countermanded by the policy itself. Many Indian people developed or deepened distrust of people in positions of governmental or educational power as a result of their experiences in residential boarding schools. Today there is an astounding achievement gap for Native American youth. One of the reasons is the distrust many family members have of the institutions that seek to educate. Many native parents do not feel comfortable at school conferences and choose not to attend, limiting their ability to provide positive intervention or support for teachers in bettering their children’s education. If the residential boarding school experience had not crushed and alienated so many Native Americans, this dimension of the modern educational experience for Indians would be very different.
How come 50 percent of Indians are flunking their state-mandated tests in English and math?
There is an achievement gap for many subsections of the population in America, but, on closer examination, the “achievement gap” is really an “opportunity gap.” Poverty is one of the factors that strongly contributes to that gap. Children growing up in poverty are far more likely to have a whole set of social variables that hinder their advancement in educational institutions. Most of these causes and effects are very well documented. For black American youth, education for a very long time was an opportunity unfairly denied. Native American youth carry the pernicious history of residential boarding schools and historical trauma: education was a tool used to assimilate. As a result, many Indians rightly question whether modern education is still designed to assimilate. When I went to school, I often heard from my native peers that my education, especially toward my advanced degrees, was an indicator of assimilation. I was called an “apple”—red on the outside but white inside—because I was well educated.
In addition, the modern educational system has been more sensitive and responsive to the black and Hispanic communities in revising curricula, perhaps because their numbers are so much greater. That is not to say that curricula is perfectly responsive to blacks or Hispanics. But there are strands in the social studies curricula for most states that require education about topics like the civil rights movement. Yet all that one can be sure of learning about Indians is a sugarcoated version of Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving. As a result, the curricula employed in most American schools is still largely about assimilation when it comes to Indians.
It is not the intent of those who develop state curriculum guidelines to alienate anyone or limit their opportunities, but that is exactly what happens in Indian country. An Indian student in the modern educational system will navigate many curricular strands before high school, but the teaching about the people who made America great (not them), the heroes, presidents, and cultural icons (not theirs), the success stories (not theirs), the culture and history of great civilizations (not theirs) serves to engineer a blow to self-esteem. The omission of Indians from the curriculum means that Indian children can go to school and learn all about the rest of the world but nothing about themselves.
The opportunity to learn about one’s self is not the only gap that negatively affects the performance of native kids in school. The skill sets emphasized in modern education (math and reading) are great for some things and from some perspectives—but not all. Native people often have different values, different skill sets of emphasis, different learning styles, and different cultures. None of those differences are well supported in the modern educational system. All of these factors contribute to the opportunity gap for native youth.
Is there anything that works in the effort to bridge the achievement gap?
Some schools run by tribes and the Bureau of Indian Education meet No Child Left Behind requirements every year. But throughout the United States, Indian youth underperform and underachieve in many places. Often, only half the Indian youth in a given school district are passing their state-mandated tests in English and in math. Everyone is scratching their heads trying to figure out how to remedy the situation.
To me, the answer is quite simple. We need to transform the schools that educate Indian youth from schools designed to assimilate (and to teach curricula designed to assimilate) into schools that enable people to learn about themselves and the rest of the world. This approach is a big part of the success for tribal schools that are making the grade on state-mandated tests. In Wisconsin, an Ojibwe language immersion school called Waadookodaading has had a 100 percent pass rate on state-mandated tests in English administered in English for ten years in a row. But the teachers there never instruct native youth in anything other than the tribal language until the highest grades. That says a lot. And we should all pay attention. Assimilation does not engender educational achievement, but access to tribal language and culture for Indian youth does.
How does No Child Left Behind affect Indian country?
All educational institutions in the United States rely heavily on funding from state government. This is true for all public schools, most private schools, and all tribal and charter schools. Without state-supplied per-pupil funding, most schools would not be able to operate. The federal government pressures states with education initiatives such as No Child Left Behind. And state governments in turn keep pressure on school districts to generate educational achievement among their students. Money follows success.
There are many problems with the policy. It holds schools accountable for the achievement of their students at a certain level. It does not matter if the teacher brings a kid from the first-grade reading level to the eleventh-grade reading level. If that kid is in twelfth grade, the teacher still failed. The challenges are pronounced in Indian country, where the educational achievement (opportunity) gap is severe. In some places, tribal youth are failing state tests in English and in math 50 percent of the time. These stats have brought tremendous pressure on many school districts that serve a lot of native youth. Some are in very rural areas. Should the ultimate consequence—closure of the school—occur, most of those children would be looking at a bus ride of an hour and a half in each direction to get to and from school. While accountability is necessary and understandable, the accounting measures should consider not just achievement at a benchmark but progress from one benchmark to another, demographics, and other variables in constructing a fair measure of teacher and school performance.
Brenda Cassellius, the Minnesota commissioner of education, is actively changing this situation in her state, and some others are trying to make similar reforms. But No Child Left Behind has long been pressuring those who educate Indians away from teaching tribal language and culture and toward teaching math and English reading. While those pressures may be slowly shifting, the heightened sense of alienation and distrust in Indian country will take far longer to abate.
Do all Indians have a free ride to college?
Indians do not all have a free ride to college. Most tribes have scholarship programs, usually requiring a high grade point average of successful applicants. Some of those scholarship programs are very well funded, but many others are not. Also, most scholarship benefits are only extended to enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. Considering the many issues with tribal enrollment in the United States, there is a great deal of unfairness and discrepancy in scholarship benefits for Indians. Tens of thousands of scholarships are offered across this country for all sorts of reasons, and native scholarships make up their own small part of that number.
Many Americans feel that Indians are somehow financially privileged in the realm of education. Although only a small percentage of Indians obtain significant financial help with college, I believe it would be perfectly fair if all Indians did get a free ride. As a matter of not only historical experience but also direct government policy, many Indian people have been made to suffer. They suffered not just in the nineteenth century during the height of violence; they suffer today. The Indian population is disproportionately unemployed and impoverished. Financial opportunities have been slow in coming to Indian country. Considering all that America does to address poverty throughout the world, including funding the United Nations and the World Bank, it is high time for this country to do more for its Indian citizens. And rather than a handout, I think educational benefits would be perfectly appropriate.