Wild West Ocean Beach

Surfers on Ocean Beach in San Francisco found themselves surrounded by 100 Indians on horseback on Friday, September 5, 2008. Sadly, the Indians and their horses were painfully thin.

A demonstration of the paucity of Federal treaty promises partially upheld? No, the Indians and horses were plywood cutouts painted by Thom Ross. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that this was Mr. Ross' "Valentine to my home town".

The Western artist used the images from Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show photograph from 1902 in which Bill Cody posed his Indian entertainers along the same portion of the beach.

Mr. Ross is a native San Franciscan, but now lives in Seattle. His art installation continues through September 15, 2008.

Please note that the art installation displays American Indians from the Plains tribes in the 19th Century and are not representative of tribal members from the Northern California area, past or present.

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.

American Indian Citizenship

Most Americans don't realize that American Indians weren't considered U.S. citizens until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which was signed into law by President Coolidge on June 2, 1924. This year is the 84th anniversary of that citizenship being granted to all American Indians who were born in the U.S.

The act was passed in recognition of American Indian men who fought in World War I alongside non-Indian Americans, while not being American citizens. American Indians were the last minority group given citizenship, despite American Indian children being born within the boundaries of the U.S. since nationhood in 1781. Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiians presumably received citizenship with the advent of their statehood, if not before.

Some Indians received U.S. citizenship earlier. The Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee Creek and Seminoles) in what later became Oklahoma were made U.S. citizens by congressional act in 1901 as part of the American policy to terminate the tribes and make a new state.

With Congress having plenary authority over American Indians, American Indians remain the only race for whom citizenship could be removed by congressional act.

Despite the Act, most Indians were denied the right to vote, however, until the 1950s. With Jim Crow laws in some states applying to all people of color, it might have extended for some well into the 1960s.