9
ASA’S INDIAN SCHOOL STORY
Our entire extended family knows only the bare-bones facts of our ancestral connection with the troubled history of Indian schools in North America. This part of our family story could be written on a matchbook cover or on a small sticky note, like some reminder pasted on the refrigerator.
What do we know? Asa Wall, my Potawatomi grandfather, attended not one, but three of these infamous schools (first, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, then the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and finally the Hampton Institute in Virginia). His involvement with them swallowed up most of his early childhood and continued through his nineteenth year (1895 to 1906). He told us little more than that he had had a feeling of great loneliness. Beyond this, Grandfather’s life at the schools presented us with a mystery. Until yesterday.
Yesterday afternoon Carolyn and I attended a musical theater production, Children of God, which portrays life in Canadian residential schools in the early to mid-twentieth century. The Canadian boarding schools for First Nations children were very similar to Indian schools in the United States, except that the Canadian schools were active through the end of the twentieth century, decades after most U.S. schools had closed, and Canadian schools were administered by churches, not by government officials.
On both sides of the border, these institutions were created to force cultural assimilation upon Indian children. Upon arrival, they had their long hair cut, were given military-style uniforms and English names, and were compelled to cease speaking their tribal languages. The goal was to destroy, brutally if need be, the part of the child that threatened to preserve Indian culture for another generation. In U.S. Indian schools, the phrase used to describe this policy was “kill the Indian to save the man,” attributed to Richard Pratt, the guiding force behind the schools. In Canada the phrase was “kill the Indian in the child,” attributed to Duncan Scott, minister of Indian affairs from 1913 to 1932. Indeed large numbers of Indians actually died at the schools, many from the poor food and severe physical deprivation. Others died from diseases such as tuberculosis, a fatal and common affliction at the crowded institutions.
Typically children were removed from their homes under duress. Parents who refused to let Indian agents take their children were threatened with arrest and/or reduction of any meager services the government might be providing under treaty obligations. For parents such as my grandfather’s, living on marginally productive desert land in the Oklahoma territory in the late 1890s, having children taken away may have been both a curse and a relief. We have a letter indicating that Asa’s parents encouraged one Indian agent to take their child and place him in a boarding school. But such letters were often part of the coerced separation. It is agonizing to wonder if my grandfather was removed from tearful, loving parents waving from the doorway, or if he was shown the door with a sigh of relief and then left with a final memory of turned parental backs.
Asa was not alone in suffering extreme loneliness and homesickness. His cousin, Jim Thorpe, my first cousin twice removed, was also sent to the Chilocco Indian School. Cousin Jim ran away—running twenty miles to escape and get back to familiar home ground. Sent back to Chilocco, he ran away again and again. Eventually Jim Thorpe would become famous for running—with a football. Difficult circumstances sometimes operate in unpredictable ways to bring out individual strengths, at least for those who survive.
As young adults, both Cousin Jim and Grandfather Asa also attended the Carlisle Indian School, which became a model for other Indian schools across the United States. In theory, Carlisle was to give its students basic competency in reading and writing in addition to manual labor skills. In fact, for many there was little meaningful intellectual education, but a heavy dose of vocational training.
Discipline was harsh at all Indian schools, partly because of the military background of their guiding spirit and designer, Captain Pratt. Uncooperative students were locked in the guardhouse, sometimes for weeks, and given bread and water. Corporal punishment was common. The Carlisle Indian School archive contains numerous detailed records of complaints from students and outside auditors documenting harsh student discipline.1 Such practices became a national scandal at the time. But as is still a familiar pattern with abuse, offending staff escaped unpunished or were transferred to other Indian schools. The culture of abuse continued even in the daylight of major newspaper stories.2
Some students did manage to get a fair amount of formal intellectual education. Our grandfather was well read, and in his later adult life he could often be found sitting in his upholstered rocker in the living room behind the Sunday New York Times. Another relative, Aunt Emma, received an education at Chilocco that she described as “splendid training as a disciplinarian, housekeeper, and dressmaker.”3 Eventually graduating as valedictorian from the school’s literary department, Emma had an illustrious career as a teacher at Indian schools across the southwest United States.
As I have mentioned, Aunt Emma was a founding member of the Society of American Indians (1911–1923), the first advocacy organization run by and for Native Americans. This pan-Indian movement was a direct outgrowth of the Indian schools, which brought diverse tribes together and provided them with shared experience, opportunities to establish alliances based on common concerns, and skills in cross-cultural communications and organization. Graduates of the Indian schools, particularly Carlisle School, became leading Native American intellectuals. As advocates for minority rights, these Red Progressives were decades ahead of their times, both in Native American communities and in mainstream white culture. In African American communities, the rights and identity movements led by W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey were expanding at the same time.
This extraordinarily mixed and confusing history left me and my extended family wondering what it was really like for Asa at his schools. What was his psychological and spiritual life during the difficult years away from home, during a shattered childhood and adolescence? Children of God, I thought, might answer some of our questions.
As is becoming a familiar pattern in my life, the discovery of Children of God was first visited upon me by way of our occasional weekends in Lachine. I heard about the production during a radio interview with the musical’s creator, Corey Payette. His message about using the arts for healing was beamed across the St. Lawrence River. It was broadcast by the Kahnawake Mohawk radio station, situated on the same reserve as other recent sources of information and inspiration, such as the Kateri Center, which we can see from our balcony.
Corey explained how his production grew out of and built upon the work of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (established in 2008) and the 2006 Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. The central idea behind both of these initiatives is to educate the public about the history of Canada’s First Nations people, to expose the truth about the harm that was inflicted, and to begin a healing and restorative process.
The idea of using an artistic platform to help accomplish this was intriguing. So Carolyn and I made a snap decision to obtain tickets and managed to get one of two remaining pairs of seats for a Sunday matinee. Front row, far right.
We arrived early at the Segal Performing Arts Centre in Montréal, which is situated adjacent to several Jewish cultural centers, and is surrounded by a primarily Jewish neighborhood. This seemed a highly appropriate venue for a performance about genocide.
What I did not know then, and only discovered by accident the morning after, is that the neighborhood where the theater is located is in the borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (the English translation is “Hill of Snows—Our Lady of Grace”). The name seemed appropriate, given the snow and ice on every surface and the temperature, which was far below freezing.
As I repeated the name “Côte des Neiges,” it sounded oddly familiar. Then I remembered the name of the birthplace of my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Jacques Vieux, the voyageur who called us back to Lachine a few summers ago. The family history, as told by Jacques’ son Andrew, documents: “Father . . . was born in lower Canada in Cour de Neige (or Snow Court) in the suburbs of Montreal, May 5, 1757.”4 A quick search of my family archive confirmed that eighteenth-century Cour de Neige was quite probably the current Côte des Neiges. Any doubt about these two places being one and the same vanished when I discovered that the main industry of the eighteenth-century village of Cour de Neige was producing leather from animal hides. Jacques must have leaned about animal pelts in his home town. This background education would serve him well when he became a voyageur and pelt trader for various North American companies.
Once again I was spiraling homeward.
We arrived early at the theater and found the lobby filled with large posters about Canadian residential schools and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Several posted advisories informed those attending that the production touches upon emotionally difficult topics and that viewers could take a break from the presentation if it became overwhelming. An indoor tent was designated as a safe space. From it emanated the gentle aroma of burning sage, which is used in Native American purification rituals. We met a kind and gentle First Nations woman, who explained that she would be available during the performance to counsel people if needed. Her wonderfully understated presence was profoundly welcoming and comforting.
As we browsed the program for Children of God and had tea in the cozy lobby, we prepared ourselves. I wondered if anyone would comment on the T-shirt I wore on top of my turtleneck shirt, which had huge lettering stating “Potawatomi” in the form of an eagle. No one approached me or commented. I began to wonder anxiously if we would connect with the performance or the audience.
When we finally found our seats in the far right front row, we realized that the stage was within one meter of us and just barely higher than our knees. The small orchestra was far to the left side. I felt that I might be as much a participant in as an observer of the play. When the lights dimmed and the first characters appeared on stage, it indeed became apparent that we were about to experience theater, not in the distance, but as storytelling literally at arm’s length. This was going to be an intimate encounter. I grabbed the arms of my seat as if in a plane about to accelerate down the runway on takeoff.
Then they appeared—gray-suited actors playing the roles of residential school inmates. They scrubbed floors, commiserated, plotted schemes to run away, and repeatedly confronted and then cowered before a priest and nun, who were their tormentors. Talented actors and singers conjured emotions that mere spoken words could not. My sadness and anger were overwhelming at first. If I had had a tomato, I do not know if I could have resisted the temptation to use it to hit the actor playing the priest smack-dab in the middle of his self-righteous face. I had increasing doubts that I could handle this at such close range.
Then something happened, rather suddenly, like the image in a kaleidoscope turned or shaken and unexpectedly coming into focus. The performance of moving dialogue, song, and dance ceased being an artistic endeavor with an unbearable sense of oppression and became instead the unfolding of a long-awaited and welcome tale: Asa’s untold story of his life in the boarding schools. The words and images he could not tell us flowed in musical form, like water slowly and gently released from a stream too long dammed up. The release was not just for us, his descendants. It was also for my grandfather and his spirit, which, until the story unfolded before us, had remained a silent captive of the Indian schools for more than a century.
I began to feel relief instead of anger. And I could feel it for my grandfather, as he at long last allowed himself to weep with all of us in the room. It was cleansing, for him, his spirit. And perhaps also for his French great-grandfather, on whose territory this performance was taking place.*9 I cannot but believe that Jacques Vieux was there comforting his great-great-grandson.
On rare occasions, when we have assembled four generations of our extended Native American family, we have set a plate at the table for the fifth-generation past: my grandfather Asa’s spirit. But never before had we been connected so far back in time. And never before had strangers literally reached out to share our family history in this intimate way. At the close of the performance, the entire production crew came out to take a bow. They linked hands and stepped forward to connect in a chain with the audience. The hands they first connected were those in the two front seats, far right. Carolyn and I made the first link between audience and performers, and unbeknownst to the performers at that moment, between those here and now and many generations of ancestors of at least one family in the room.
The postproduction discussion involved actors and the kindly First Nations counselor we had met earlier. I presented the production crew with braided healing sweetgrass and expressed gratitude for giving voice to a part of our family history that no amount of print matter from archives and books could ever accomplish. I explained that as a child, I had sat on my grandfather’s lap and he had told me stories of his experience in World War I and the horrors of mustard gas. And then I said, “But he could never speak the story you told today for him. Miigwetch, thank you.” The pouches of kinni-kinnick in our pockets must have been on the verge of igniting in such intensity.