Kill the Indian, Save the Child

On my law school graduation ring, the artist who designed and made it put lightening bolts. He told me it was to remind me to live each day as though it were my last, for we never know when death might come.

He could not read, write or do math despite a federal education. He was an intelligent enough man. He had the misfortune to be an American Indian during his childhood.

He is Navajo. He might be ten years older than me. The federal government school he was forced to attend didn't feel that Indians needed to know such lofty concepts as the Three Rs that were taught to other American children.

Instead, he was trained to be a janitor. That was the limit of the American Dream he was allowed to dare to hope for.

From the 1870s through the 1970s, the U.S. government ran boarding schools where American Indian children were forcibly removed from their parents and tribes and sent to boarding schools, often hundreds of miles from home. Parents were not allowed to visit their children in school or see them other than school breaks.

The schools were part of the shameful assimilationist period of federal American Indian policy. With great disdain for American Indians or their civil rights, Henry Ward Beecher summarized the goal of the schools as:

"The common schools are the stomachs of the country in which all people that come to us are assimilated within a generation. When a lion eats an ox, the lion does not become an ox, but the ox becomes a lion."

The boarding schools were designed to strip Indian children completely of their culture and Indian appearance. Thus the motto, "Kill the Indian, Save the Child". Children were punished for speaking in their native language, practicing their culture and even their appearance was forcibly changed to make them appear more white.

Despite the First Amendment, American Indians both on the reservation and in boarding schools were not allowed to practice their religion. In the schools, the children would be severely punished. The government schools practiced the officially sanctioned Christian religion and the government paid to indoctrinate the Indian children in the official religion.

Even the children's names were Christianized. They were no longer allowed to use or answer to the names given to them by their parents or clans. To do so one faced punishment. An Indian child's complete identity was wiped out by the American governments organized brain washing experiment.

The school administrators took great pride in taking before and after pictures of Indian children as they arrived in native dress, then afterwards with their long hair cut short and in uncomfortable American clothes.

Many Indian children endured abuse, both physical and sexual. Many more were not taught to read, write or do mathematics despite attending the schools. Most were trained to be domestic servants, janitors or farmers because that was all the BIA thought Indians would be capable of contributing to American society.

On Wednesday, June 11, 2008, Canada officially apologized for its schools and will pay damages to its Indigenous population for a similar program run by the Canadian government during the same time period with the same motto. The damages and apology came as a result of a lawsuit against the government by Canadian Indians who suffered under the scheme.

Australia ran an even worse program where children were literally stolen from aborigine parents and never returned. The Stolen Children were never allowed to know their birth parents and grew up in institutions and prison-like schools. Australia officially apologized to the Aborigines earlier in February 2008.

In contrast, Canada and the U.S. did allow Indian children to go home for short breaks between school terms. The children were allowed to return home to their reservations after graduation whereas in Australia, they were not.

America has never apologized to any Native Americans for any of its treatment of American Indians or other Native American groups, including children taken from parents.

Every time I look at my ring, I think of the artist who created it and the damage done to him by the U.S. government that forcibly took him from his loving parents and raised him to be someone he is not. When does life begin for someone who has suffered such a fate? And then Americans wonder why alcoholism and drug use is rampant on reservations? Such unfettered hubris we unflinchingly display when refusing to look at what ills to God and man that we have done.

I hope he and the others get an apology soon. But I'm not holding my breath. Lightening will strike me sooner than the U.S. would deign to admit its crimes against the lost generations of Indian children.

In the meantime, I live my life as though each day could be my last. It's the least he deserves.