Tommy Orange places Richard Henry Pratt in the backstory to his novel Wandering Stars, a sequel to his award-winning There There about American Indians in Oakland, California.
The nonfictional Pratt had been a soldier who fought for the North in the Civil War and then served in the West pursuing, fighting, and negotiating with Indians. He was the primary force behind the famous Carlisle Indian school, whose philosophy influenced many other Indian schools established by the federal government. Pratt believed that Indians were deserving of a place in American society and that racial differences were not innate but the product of environmental factors. He believed that Indians could–and should–integrate into mainstream white society, but here was the catch: He thought this was possible only if the Indians abandoned their tribal communities and culture.
Pratt’s theories required a school away from the native lands. The Carlisle Barracks were an old twenty-seven-acre army installation. They had been damaged in the Civil War and then abandoned. Pratt talked the Army into allowing him to set up the school in the sixteen buildings that needed renovations. Almost immediately, Pratt constructed a seven-foot fence around the property as both a screen against sightseers—the townsfolk were curious about the young Indians—and to control the students.
The school separated both boy and girl students from their language. They were to speak only English. Uttering a native language was punished, and students from the same tribes were scattered among separate dormitories to break up tribal culture.
The students were also separated from their names, partly because the white teachers could not pronounce Indian names, but also to remove another aspect of their Indianness. As Sally Jenkins put it in The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (2007), when they had new, Americanized names, another “piece of their Indian selves had been taken away.”
The males were separated from their hair and that, too, separated them from their heritage. Jenkins reports that braids were a symbol of maturity for Lakotas, who only cut their hair when in deep mourning.
And they were separated from their traditional clothing, often colorful and distinctive. Instead, they all had to dress in drab uniforms, and the students became “an indistinguishable gray mass with no discernible outward differences.”
The very nature of the school itself, however, separated the students from a fundamental aspect of their heritage. Indian tribes had varied cultural differences, Jacqueline Fear-Segal reports in White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (2007), but in no Indian community was education a discrete endeavor conducted in a separate institution or by “teachers.” Education was woven into everyday patterns of living and took place informally in daily interactions.
The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it erased their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions. The goal was not to kill a people, but even so, the goal was to wipe out the Native Americans and replace them with something else.
The school taught subjects whose successful completion was supposed to be equal to an eighth-grade education, but the students were also taught trades and agriculture. To further this training, the Carlisle school had an “outing” program where students were sent to work and board with local families. Students were thus to be introduced to American society and taught to be wage earners. As with much at the Carlisle Indian school, the outing program had mixed consequences. Many of the white families treated the students well, and lifelong bonds were often formed. Other families, however, merely saw a source of low-wage labor.
The influence of the Carlisle school began to wane in the early twentieth century for two reasons. First, sentiment against off-reservation schools began to build. Moreover, Richard Henry Pratt, who apparently found it difficult to act diplomatically with his superiors in Washington, was removed as head of the school in 1904. He was followed by administrators with little ability. The school was finally shuttered in August 1918 and converted to a hospital for wounded soldiers returning from World War I.
The school’s legacy is mixed. Many who passed through its gates praised it; many condemned it. Although the students were encouraged to remain in the East after leaving the school, the vast majority returned to the reservations, many of whom went back “to the blanket.” Jenkins suggests that as an educational school, Carlisle was not a success. Of the 8500 students who passed through Carlisle, only 741 received degrees. However, many others also went on to graduate from public school, which Pratt counted as successes. From its inception, Pratt thought that the school should only be temporary and wanted Indians integrated into white society and enrolled in public schools. Jenkins, however, also concludes that the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was successful as a training institution: “[T]he federal Indian agencies were full of Carlisle graduates working as teachers, clerks, interpreters, police, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, bakers, and tailors.”
Overall, however, the Indian school movement has increasingly been seen as a well-meant mistake. Jenkins says, “Like so many other federal experiments regarding the Indians, what in 1879 was seen as a creative solution had come to seem wrongheaded. Humanitarians argued that removing children from their homes was cruel and counterproductive. Still others believed that Carlisle created false expectations and that it ill-equipped students for the grim realities of life back home. The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it razed their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions.”
The obliteration of language, clothing, hair styles, and other cultural hallmarks may have made sense when the goal was to integrate American Indians into the economy and culture of European-Americans, but the policies went beyond that goal. Not just Pratt, but European descendants more generally, seemed almost personally and morally offended by communal practices of indigenous peoples who believed that land could not be owned by individuals. For them, the land was shared by all. European-Americans, however, believed that freedom and a sound economy depended on private property. Thus, Troy Senik writes in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland that Cleveland did not seek to eliminate Indians. He believed in assimilation by which he meant education and speaking. But most important, Cleveland felt, the collective ownership of land by Indians must end.
This antipathy to shared or non-ownership of the land was not simply a product of America’s post-Civil War Gilded Age. Peter Stark in Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation says that a chief goal of Harrison’s dealings with Indians on what was then the Illinois frontier was to end collective land ownership. When Pratt taught his students that they must give up communal lands, he was only teaching what government officials had been trying to accomplish for a century and were implementing across the continent. Shared lands on western reservations were broken up into parcels of private ownership. Jenkins notes that the U.S. government did not believe in sharing or communalism; it believed in private property. An Indian needed to be taught out West and at Carlisle “so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’”
Why did the European-Americans have such antipathy to communalism? I don’t know, but I believe it is a thread that runs through much of American history and is not limited to relationships to American Indians. Perhaps someone can point me to good studies on the subject. But I do wonder if our world might not be better if we thought more about this earth in terms of “we” and “ours” instead of “I” and “mine.”
