Who said kill the indian save the man

American Indian children were recruited from across the country to attend. If parents resisted, they were often coaxed or coerced into the idea that it was just about education. In the end, they were torn from their families and severed from their indigenous culture. At Carlisle and at other Indian boarding institutions, American Indian children were strictly forbidden to speak their tribal languages or practice their native religion.

They learned English and were forbidden to speak tribal languages. They wanted to turn the children into white citizens with job skills. Carlisle became the template for the first 26 off-reservation boarding schools in 15 states and territories, including Stewart. Over the decades, conditions at the school slowly improved and a federal law did away with the policy of assimilation. When federal authorities closed the school in , some students and parents protested the decision. Today, some alumni of the school praise their experiences there, but others remember bullying and corporal punishment.

The effects of the often-misguided school policies still echo across the generations of alumni and their descendants. During the first decade of its existence, enrollment was limited to children from the Great Basin tribes: Washoe, Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone. Enrollment grew to more than 85 students in the first year, and as more buildings were constructed, more children were sent to the school.

By the s, the annual student population was between and pupils. From to the s, Stewart was led by eleven short-term superintendents, five of whom held the post in succession in alone. Children often ran away and a truant officer would be sent to track them down.

When the fugitives returned, they faced harsh punishments. The crowded conditions and lack of health care resulted in epidemics, illnesses and deaths. An infirmary was built on campus in and electric lights were installed in Religious instruction was mandatory and a Baptist mission opened in Students came — or were sent — to Stewart from nations all over the Southwest, including from Hopi, Apache and Navajo reservations in Arizona.

The s saw other improvements at the school. Dances and socials were allowed and movies were shown in the campus auditorium. But the assimilation theory remained rooted in school policy. The government, by paying large sums of money to churches to carry on schools among Indians, only builds for itself opposition to its own interests. We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization.

America has different customs and civilizations from Germany. What would be the result of an attempt to plant American customs and civilization among the Germans in Germany, demanding that they shall become thoroughly American before we admit them to the country? Now, what we have all along attempted to do for and with the Indians is just exactly that, and nothing else. We invite the Germans to come into our country and communities, and share our customs, our civilization, to be of it; and the result is immediate success.

Why not try it on the Indians? Why not invite them into experiences in our communities? Why always invite and compel them to remain a people unto themselves?

It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose.

Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit. These results have been established over and over again beyond all question; and it is also well established that those advanced in life, even to maturity, of either class, lose already acquired qualities belonging to the side of their birth, and gradually take on those of the side to which they have been transferred.

As we have taken into our national family seven millions of Negroes, and as we receive foreigners at the rate of more than five hundred thousand a year, and assimilate them, it would seem that the time may have arrived when we can very properly make at least the attempt to assimilate our two hundred and fifty thousand Indians, using this proven potent line, and see if that will not end this vexed question and remove them from public attention, where they occupy so much more space than they are entitled to either by numbers or worth.

The school at Carlisle is an attempt on the part of the government to do this. Carlisle has always planted treason to the tribe and loyalty to the nation at large. It has preached against colonizing Indians, and in favor of individualizing them.

It has demanded for them the same multiplicity of chances which all others in the country enjoy. Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and then moves them out into our communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have.

Carlisle does not dictate to him what line of life he should fill, so it is an honest one. It says to him that, if he gets his living by the sweat of his brow, and demonstrates to the nation that he is a man, he does more good for his race than hundreds of his fellows who cling to their tribal communistic surroundings.

No evidence is wanting to show that, in our industries, the Indian can become a capable and willing factor if he has the chance. What we need is an Administration which will give him the chance.

The Land in Severalty Bill can be made far more useful than it is, but it can be made so only by assigning the land so as to intersperse good, civilized people among them.

If, in the distribution, it is so arranged that two or three white families come between two Indian families, then there would necessarily grow up a community of fellowship along all the lines of our American civilization that would help the Indian at once to his feet. Indian schools must, of necessity, be for a time, because the Indian cannot speak the language, and he knows nothing of the habits and forces he has to contend with; but the highest purpose of all Indian schools ought to be only to prepare the young Indian to enter the public and other schools of the country.

In October , the Canadian government revealed the names of 2, victims of residential schools for Native American minors. Today there are already more than 1, nameless graves found in these boarding schools, but the debate continues, not bearing any fruit because no one wants to say the word. Unfortunately, this atrocity is but one of many chapters in a long history of repression and subjugation that today is more than years old.

The warmongering policy was expensive and unproductive, while establishing a network of public boarding schools to which to forcibly drag every indigenous minor to was substantially cheaper and more effective.

On January 24, , James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and this caused the outbreak of fever that dragged settlers from all corners of the world to what is now California. The situation reached such a point that a preacher, Reverend Whitmer, took the matter to the United States Congress.

He asked before the House how many Indian warriors had fallen in encounters with the United States Army. No one dared to answer. Maybe neither do we. And the Union army had lost nearly 6, men.