Towards Truth & Reconciliation in the U.S.A.
What we can learn from Canada's project and why without it, history repeats in the ugliest of ways.
Oh hey folks,
In honor of Indigenous People’s Day (a day late), today’s NSFS is focused on the way in which white people have sought to “save” the souls of Native Americans through boarding schools that were more like prison labor camps. Special shoutout to the country of Canada (which Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks is run by a president, yay murica) for being marginally better at handling the genocidal history of white settlers in North America.
I have to admire the way in which Canada has handled the project of Truth and Reconciliation Commision (TRC), which is dedicated to documenting the legacy of the Indian Residential Schools system. It was the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history and began to be implemented in 2007. This act of recording the witnesses to the violent and traumatic history of these schools is a part of providing reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Meanwhile, back in the old U.S. of A, the appropriation of Native American art and culture by settler (white) communities often comes with a form of cultural amnesia about how ancestors regarded Indigenous communities as backwards, savage, and in desperate need of a capitalist Christianity’s version of “salvation.”
This is the “truth” part of reconciliation, and one that U.S. is fond of abnegating. (in fact, the ACLU is currently suing the state of Montana for refusing to teach Native American heritage and culture, read all about it here).
This post addresses the damning legacy of Indian residential schools in the U.S. and how history continues to repeat itself because we are not teaching real history.
What I’m watching on Indigenous History:
If you have a moment, I recommend watching (or re-watching) the documentary “In the White Man’s Image,” because it speaks about the cultural geneocide of white washing Indigenous culture that has been as central to the founding of the U.S. as it is to justifications of the school to prison pipeline, which continues to overwhelmingly target Black and Brown students. A depressing theme of U.S. education has always been history repeating itself under different guises. It’s an old documentary but it still holds up, I highly recommend.
Background: On March 3, 1819, the U.S. Congress passed a mandatory education act for Indigenous children. Government officials believed that forced attendance would eventually assimilate Indians into the lower strata of white society. Through education, the so-called Indian “problem” would be resolved. As the documentary explains, the first of these schools, the Carlisle School was an “educational experiment with good intentions” that “gave new twist to old saying: “the only good Indian is a dead one.” As the founder of the first Indian residential school in the U.S, Richard Henry Pratt, declared in a speech: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
During it’s 39 year history, over 10,500 students from almost every Native nation in the U.S. (as well as Puerto Rico) were enrolled at Carlisle. The first were deliberately recruited from tribes regarded by the government as militarily troublesome: Lakotas, Kiowas, Cheyennes. There is no mistaking the clear and direct link between Native land dispossession and the schooling of Native youth. Also, let’s be clear: these children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.
White Saviorism 101: Generic White Man of the 19th Century Award
“The solution of the Indian problem hinges upon the destruction of the present systems and in the devising of means that will disintegrate the tribes and bring them into association with the best of our civilization.” - Captain Richard H. Pratt, 1891
Make no mistake, this cultural genocide was justified through both science and religion. Pratt commonly referred to his evangelical-inspired boarding school as the foundation for establishing “Christ’s kingdom” in this world. Native Americans were seen as having a spiritual deficiency in addition to their racial inferiority. This was all based on “scientific” measurements of skulls and the long-debunked practice of 19th century eugenics and phrenology. No, none of it makes sense or holds up under close scrutiny so don’t try too hard to make it make sense.
Speaking to a convention of Baptist ministers in 1883, Pratt explained his philosophy for transforming Native children so that they could emulate white men and women:
“In Indian civilization, I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”- Pratt, founder of Carlisle School
Ok. A lot to unpack there from Mr. White Savior, but I think I’d like to begin (and end) with the reality that what he describes in the above quote is waterboarding and/or drowning. Like last week’s Generic White Woman, Marjorie Taylor Greene, if you look closely at the meaning of Pratt’s words, you understand that they don’t make any damn sense (which is because they’re not supposed to, they’re simply meant to evoke a feeling).
However, it does make perfect cents (forgive the pun). As Max Weber defines the term “Market Christianity” as a “a simultaneous interaction of faith and praxis that seeks to merge the dual concerns of salvation and profit.”
And make no mistake, Indian residential schools were profitable. Part of their education involved being sent out into the local community to “train” doing the washing and manual labor, for free. So that their souls may be saved.
I firmly believe that it’s only through taking a cold, sober look at the assumptions that this country’s cultural and societal capital is based that we can all begin to heal. Violence works both ways, and white people are not immune to the spiritual harm of all that hate and anger flowing through our veins. Christ’s teachings illuminate all this, after all.
Until we begin to confront the reality of historical record and the incredibly Christian justifications for violence, the U.S. project of “truth and reconciliation” will remain an abstract concept rather than lived reality.
And that is how history repeats itself. Taking away children, for their own good, has never gone away. In Caitlin Dickerson’s cover article for The Atlantic for September 2022, “‘We need to take away children’ The secret history of the U.S. government’s family- separation policy,” starts with the very recent history of the federal government taking away children from their parents with no plan to return them. Today’s history lesson is what we did with the brown children inside the country first. It’s only in taking this long view of history can one begin the personal project of truth and reconciliation.
What I’m reading:
If you’re itching to do a historical deep dive into residential schools, here’s what I’m reading on the topic:
Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, Nebraska: 2016.
Messianic Fulfillments: Staging Indigenous Salvation in America, by Hayes Peter Mauro, Nebraska: 2019.