Why do you think it was difficult for assimilated Native Americans to be accepted by their own cultures?

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.

The history of this forced assimilation is far from settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children from the Northern Arapaho tribe who had died at Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s. The children’s names were Little Chief, Horse, and Little Plume—names they were forbidden to use at the school.

Yufna Soldier Wolf, center, of the Northern Arapaho, with tribal elders, Mark Soldier Wolf and Crawford White Sr., holds pictures of Little Plume, Horse and Little Chief. The three Arapaho children died about 135 years ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania, the Carlisle Indian School, where they were buried.

Charles Fox/The Philadelphia Inquirer/AP Photo

Students at Carlisle and the roughly 150 other such schools that the government opened were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 other children were buried in the same cemetery as the Northern Arapaho boys, according to The Washington Post.

Carlisle and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove, or assimilate Native Americans. In 1830, the U.S. forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi to make room for U.S. expansion with the the Indian Removal Act. But a few decades later, the U.S. worried it was running out of places to relocate the country’s original inhabitants.

“As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”

As part of this federal push for assimilation, boarding schools forbid Native American children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s.

Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they’d hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.

“As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.

In addition to the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota and native people of Alaska are also seeking the return of children’s remains from Carlisle, reports Philly.com. Yet if the results of Northern Arapaho’s search are any example, this may prove to be quite difficult.

Yufna Soldier Wolf wipes away tears while kneeling at the grave of her great-grandfather, Chief Sharp Nose of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, at the family cemetery on the Wind River Reservation near Riverton, Wyoming. 

Dan Cepeda/The Casper Star-Tribune/AP Photo

On August 14, 2017, the Army sent the remains of Little Chief and Horse back to their relatives on the Wind River Reservation. The Northern Arapaho will bury them on August 18, 2017. Little Plume, however, was not sent back because he wasn’t found. In what was supposed to be his coffin, archaeologists instead discovered the bones of two others who couldn’t have been Little Plume because their ages didn’t match his.

Researchers aren’t sure who those two people are or where Little Plume could be, and the Northern Arapaho haven’t stated whether they’ll continue to search for him. For now, the Army has reburied the two people found in his coffin, and Little Plume remains one of Carlisle’s many missing children.

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Cultural assimilation was a series of efforts in the United States of America to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream European-American culture between the 1790s and 1920s. George Washington and Henry Knox were the pioneers in the USA to implement the cultural assimilation of Native Americans, in the American context. Education was seen as the main method in the process of acculturation of minorities. Americanisation policies were based on the idea that when Indigenous peoples learned the customs and values of the United States, they would be able to merge tribal traditions with American culture and peacefully unite with the majority of society. After the end of the Indian Wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the federal government banned the practice of traditional religious ceremonies. It established Native American boarding schools that children were required to attend. In these schools they were forced to speak English, study standard subjects, attend church and leave tribal traditions behind.

LAWS TO ASSIMILATE THE NATIVE CULTURE

 In 1806, the Federal Office of the Superintendent of Indian Trade was created to monitor and control economic activity between Indian nations and the United States government. In March 1824, Secretary John C. Calhoun created the Bureau of Indian Affairs to replace the Indian Trade Office, placing control of Indian communities under the U.S. War Department. In addition to controlling trade, the Bureau was responsible for resolving disputes between natives and European-Americans. With the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the first law allowing for the removal and isolation of Natives, most Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River were relocated west of the river to what is now Oklahoma. Native Americans who resisted faced concentration on small parcels of land and were forced to sign treaties that provided for the transfer of large amounts of land, with the Indian Appropriations Act.  In 1851, the first Native American reservations were authorised. However, by the end of the 19th century, reports of the poor quality of life on the reserves led the federal government to switch to a new policy based on forced assimilation rather than concentration and isolation in the reserves. The Dawes Act, approved by Congress in 1887, granted small plots of land to individual tribal members. The aim was to encourage Native Americans to become farmers or ranchers, thus helping them to assimilate. In some cases, the allotted land was then further reduced by opening the excess to white settlers.

When most Native Americans were confined to reservations, the federal government engaged in a campaign of cultural assimilation by forcing thousands of Native American children to attend boarding schools. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania was founded by Richard Pratt, who believed that the assimilation of Native Americans would not be successful unless their traditions, customs, and beliefs were eradicated. Based on Pratt's philosophy “kill the Indian in him and save the man,” the Carlisle school became a national model.

More than 400 boarding schools have been built near reservations, most of them run by religious organisations. About 100,000 Native Americans were forced to attend these schools, forbidden to speak native languages, forced to renounce native beliefs, and forced to give up their Native American identities, including their names. Many children were placed with white families as indentured servants. The Association on American Indian Affairs in 1969 and 1974 revealed that 25-35% of all Indian children had been separated from their families and placed in foster homes, adoptive homes, or institutions, and 90% of these placements were in non-Indian homes. Parents who opposed the removal of their children to boarding schools were imprisoned and forcibly taken away from them. A 1928 investigative report commissioned by the Department of the Interior condemned conditions at Native American boarding schools, citing insufficient food, overcrowded dormitories, poor medical care, and exploitative child labour practices. By the 1930s, most boarding schools were closed.

SOCIO-POLITICAL SITUATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS

In the 1990s, Congress recognised the right of tribes to have more decision-making power over the development and implementation of federal programs and policies that directly impact them and their tribal members. This was accomplished through the two Indian Self-determination and Education Assistance Acts of 1975, as amended and the Tribal Self-Governance Act of 1994. Congress thus granted tribal governments the authority to independently administer programs and services usually administered by the BIA for their tribal members. This has made it possible, albeit only in part, to claim certain rights that for years had been systematically denied and violated. Among the most debated rights is the right to own and use one's land and natural resources.

This right is directly linked to the right of self-determination and to the economic and spiritual relationship that Natives have with their land, which is, therefore, an essential element for the survival of the identity of the Native peoples. Following the historical development of the international community, in the ILO Convention No. 107 of 1957 on Indigenous and tribal peoples, the right of communities to own their land is not effectively protected. In fact, if in article 11 the right to the land of these peoples is recognized, in article 12 it is stated that, for reasons of security or economic development, the populations in question may be transferred from their lands against their will. However, article 13 (ILO Convention No. 107 of 1957) establishes that “procedures for the transmission of rights of ownership and use of land which are established by the customs of the populations concerned shall be respected, within the framework of national laws and regulations, in so far as they satisfy the needs of these populations and do not hinder their economic and social development”. Furthermore, in the subsequent ILO Convention of 1989 on the rights of Indigenous and tribal peoples, the question of land rights is central in the second part of the Convention (articles 13-20). In addition, it is established that measures will be taken to safeguard the rights of peoples to use land that is not exclusively occupied by them, but that has traditionally been accessible for their livelihoods and to carry out their traditional activities.

NATIVE RESISTANCE TODAY

In the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted in 2007, there are two main articles worthy of being highlighted. Article 8 declares that “states shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for (b) any action that has the purpose or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;" and article 25 states that "Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relations with the lands, territories, coastal waters and seas and other resources traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used and to support their responsibilities towards future generations in this sense".

One example is the Klamath people, a tribe that is historically based in Oregon. They have succeeded in regaining about 700 hectares of prairie, lakes, and mountains in southern Oregon, part of the 10,000-odd times larger territory that was taken from them by the US government 150 years earlier, during the so-called conquest of the west. The reservation granted to them by the Washington authorities was initially over 7,000 hectares, but even that was gradually extorted by law. Now the tribe, using new regulations and partly public funds, has been able to buy back a piece of their ancestral land, on which they intend to develop traditional activities such as hunting, fishing, and grazing. The Oneida nation, for example, bought back two-thirds of the 25 000 hectares of the original reservation it had in Wisconsin. The Yurok tribe did something similar in California and the Cherokee tribe did the same in North Carolina. The negotiations are legally complicated, because the natives, once in possession of the land, want to protect it with special legislation that grants them tax breaks and special permits.

Another interesting example to analyse in the case of the Dakota pipeline wanted in 2017 by President Trump, which would violate sacred sites of the Sioux tribe and thus the Fort Laramie Treaty. During the spring of 2016, the Sioux tribes led a revolt, which saw 300 Native American tribe flags waving. Each tribe sent their representatives as a testimony of their solidarity with the Lakota and the Dakota, against the realisation of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). They rose against the project of building a new pipeline, blamed for threatening the safety of the Missouri River, the only source of water that supplied the reserve, violating numerous sites deemed sacred as well as the sovereignty of the three tribes residing in the reserve of Standing Rock. Meanwhile, the protest against the implementation of the DAPL had achieved concrete results of primary importance. However, despite the numerous protests, on 7 February 2017, President Trump agreed to build the oil pipeline through the Missouri River and Lake Oahe in North Dakota. This decision caused the forced eviction of thousands of members of the Sioux tribe of Standing Rock, a place not officially inhabited by the Natives, but considered sacred by them.

As already mentioned, the pipeline would have to cover almost 2,000 kilometres and cross four states to bring crude oil to refineries in Illinois, violating some of the places considered sacred by the Sioux tribe. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, ratified by the United States, established the official assignment of the territory of Wyoming and the Powder River - as well as the Black Hills, considered sacred by the Indians - to the Sioux peoples. Article 2 of the treaty is relevant, as it states that “the United States agrees that the following district of country, to wit, viz: commencing on the east bank of the Missouri river where the 46th parallel of north latitude crosses the same, thence along low-water markdown said east bank to a point opposite where the northern line of the State of Nebraska strikes the river, thence west across said river, and along the northern line of Nebraska to the 104th degree of longitude west from Greenwich, thence north on said meridian to a point where the 46th parallel of north latitude intercepts the same, thence due east along said parallel to the place of beginning; and in addition thereto, all existing reservations of the east back of said river, shall be and the same is, set apart for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians herein named (…)”.

With the Treaty of Fort Laramie, precisely at the end of the 1800s, the territories of the Sioux tribe were recognised, protecting their sacred places and the right to have safe waters for fishing and for hunting, just as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples states. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC, in June 2017, ruled that federal permits allow Energy Transfer Partners to build the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across the Missouri River, a short distance away from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reserve, are not compliant with the National environmental policy act (NEPA). For this reason, President Donald Trump and the State of South Dakota have violated the law. Judge Boasberg has already mentioned some cases in which some works were interrupted: in the case of Montana Wilderness Association v. Fry, a federal court in Montana closed a working oil pipeline for NEPA violations. In another case, Davilla v. Enable Midstream Partners even though the ruling is not based on a NEPA violation, on that occasion the judge ordered the block and removal of a pipeline in Oklahoma for trespassing on tribal lands, without having been approved by the Indians.

CONCLUSION

The history of Natives in the United States of America has always been conflicted because it was based on the notion that the Natives had to be assimilated into Western culture. Based on countless treaties that were rarely respected, the culture of indigenous peoples was destined to disappear from American soil. The different policies adopted led to Natives being marginalised, first in reservations and then in cities. Today, despite the attempts to recognize tribal jurisdiction, protect the culture, and recognize certain treaties defining sacred territories and indigenous property, the concept of “self-determination of peoples” is still far away. The decisions made in the past and the constraints suffered by the Indigenous people still result in a system that denies rights and assistance to the tribes in the US territory. For this reason, despite the various conventions signed to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples, it is difficult to recognize the sovereignty of these tribes, for economic reasons and interests (such as the case of the oil pipeline wanted by Trump), and for political reasons, as the vote of the Natives is valid. Respecting the demands of the tribes, however, would involve substantial funding for their projects and the return of countless hectares of land.