White Men in Paradise and the Tragic Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
The blood of Indian children spilled in the name of assimilation by our state and federal governments left a stain on our national character that can never be washed out...
by Paul VanDevelder
On a wind-scoured piece of short grass prairie near Mandaree, North Dakota, a cemetery of small graves is mute witness to a piece of American history you’ll likely never know. The ground slopes gently downhill toward a swale of poplars and Russian olive trees. Killdeer swoop and wheel in a light breeze that flutters plastic flowers adorning a blizzard of weathered crosses bearing the faded names of Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara children. They bring silent testimony to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s initiative, Road To Healing, a series of public hearings in Indian Country soliciting testimony about children taken from their families and Indian tribes and interned at Indian boarding schools around the country. Some of those children are buried here, shoulder to shoulder, in tiny graves. What holds it all in place is the weight of the blue dome overhead and what native peoples call “the longest silence.”
"We didn't know anything about racism or white nationalism until federal agents started kidnapping Indian kids right out of their homes and disappeared them into boarding schools," says Cruso Cross, a member of the Prairie Chicken clan that adopted Sakakawea into their Hidatsa family more than two centuries ago. “My dad was one of those kids. He was lucky, he survived. A lot came back in boxes if they came back at all. They’re buried here.” He scuffs the ground at the foot of a small grave with the toe of his boot. “Then came Pick-Sloan.”
Cruso’s father, Martin Old Dog Cross, was the tribal chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes when the Pick-Sloan Plan – a stepchild of the Flood Control Act of 1944 that brought dams to the mainstem of the Missouri River - arrived at Fort Berthold in the late 1940s. Until then, the Three Affiliated Tribes were best known for hosting Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery through the withering winter of 1804. “Before World War II we had very little social interaction with white people. We had always been self-sufficient, we never took a dime from the Uncle Sam, we lived by barter, nobody needed folding money, and we still spoke our tribal languages. That was one reason the Indian agents kidnapped our kids and sent them away. They wanted us to speak English. Federal Indian policy said, ‘kill the Indian, save the man.’
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“Between the floods and boarding schools, Indian kids were dying all over the place…Some ran away from the schools and years later we’d find out that they died trying to get home.”
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When the Army Corps of Engineers began surveying the countryside to build Pick-Sloan’s Garrison Dam - the largest ‘rolled earth’ structure in the world - Cruso’s father became a ‘suitcase Indian,’ so called because he spent most of his tenure in Washington D.C. fighting the downward mobility of federal Indian policy. As Garrison Dam was being built in the 1950s, thousands of tribal members were forced off the Missouri River ‘bottom lands’ by the looming ‘floods.’ When their world vanished under the rising flood waters, gone were the gardens and pasturelands that had sustained these tribes for nine centuries. Gone was the river. Gone were their villages and schools and churches. Then came the twin evils of termination and relocation, federal policies designed to terminate treaties and to forcibly remove native people from their homelands.
“Pick-Sloan wiped us out,” says Cross. “Then came termination and relocation. First they took our homes and towns, then they gave us one way bus tickets and meal vouchers to white cities all over the map, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco. These were foreign countries to us. That’s when we learned that arguing with racism is like trying to carry on a conversation with people who speak a foreign language.” He bends over to set a little cross upright and rearrange the flowers decorating its base. “Between the floods and boarding schools, Indian kids were dying all over the place. Mostly, hunger and exposure got ‘em if loneliness didn’t get ‘em first. Some ran away from the schools and years later we’d find out that they died trying to get home. I can show you little cemeteries like this all up and down the Missouri River. Standing Rock, Fort Peck, the Assiniboine, the Brule, the Crow, the Shoshone, the Cheyenne. These graves tell a story, an American story.”
The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara story - like that of the Sioux, the Crow, the Cheyenne and Pueblo and hundreds of other federally recognized tribes, weave a thru-line through the American narrative from 1491 to 2023. When General Sherman was asked by reporters to explain the administrative function of ‘Indian reservations,” he replied: “I’m glad you asked that, gentlemen. An Indian reservation is land set aside for the exclusive use and well-being of the Indians, surrounded by thieves.”
The specter of those thieves tormented George Washington a century earlier when he peered into the looking glass at the end of his presidency. He knew that no laws would ever restrain the appetites and aspirations of common men and women, and he worried aloud in his farewell address that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would ultimately be leveraged on the enslavement of African Americans and the eradication of Native Americans. The swath of lawless destruction that defined this nation’s first century validated Washington’s fears, and more. The Winchester repeating rifle and King James Bible of the 19th century would be replaced in the 20th and 21st by AR-15s and the next episode of Yellowstone, a popular cartoon about an American crime family complete with bucolic landscapes and fly-fishing on horseback. Nothing is harder to kill in America than self-serving mythologies.
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"Congress destroyed the only world we knew," says Cross. "They started by kidnapping kids from the reservation and sending them off to boarding schools, thousands of miles from their home reservations. “
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When historians remove Native Americans, African Americans and Latinos and Asians from the Euro-American narrative, the remaining residue of history dissolves into clatter. A lot of that clatter – then as now - emanated from a U.S. Congress and federal courts whose uninformed policies and unfounded opinions have sought to untether the sovereignty of Native American governments from their trust arrangements - through ratified treaties - with the federal government. These policies and opinions bump up hard against Chief Justice John Marshall’s landmark opinion, in Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, which ever since has formed the backbone of federal Indian policy by formally recognizing treaties with native peoples as a granting of rights from sovereign Indian Nations to the sovereign federal government. In a 1999 case that pitted the Mille Lacs Chippewa against sports fishermen and the state of Minnesota over fishing rights, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor reminded an indignant Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist that the federal government had an unimpeachable trust relationship with tribal governments, secured in perpetuity by Marshall’s ruling in Worcester. Conversely, in 2023, in a deeply misguided split ruling in Navajo Nation, the high court turned its back on that trust responsibility by refusing to acknowledge the federal government’s treaty obligations to the Navajo people to perfect and secure their long-standing water rights on the Colorado River.
Worcester notwithstanding, the proxy agents of elected politicians have for nearly two centuries violated tribal sovereignty with wanton disregard in the cruelest of fashions. Of Marshall’s opinion, President Andrew Jackson is said to have retorted, “If that be Mr. Marshall’s opinion, then let him enforce it.” Jackson then sent thousands of Cherokee, Choctaw and Chickahominy Indians to their death on nine different ‘Trail of Tears’ after removing them from their ‘treaty protected homelands’ at gun point. With that sordid chapter as prologue, it was a small step for the federal government to follow the Indian Wars of the late 1800s with a program to ‘kidnap-and-educate’ Indian children in order to ‘kill the Indian and save the man.” Today, a karmic wire is strung so tight across Indian Country that if you accidentally brushed against it with your shirt sleeve it would put off a dissonant hum for a thousand years.
"Congress destroyed the only world we knew," says Cross. "They started by kidnapping kids from the reservation and sending them off to boarding schools, thousands of miles from their home reservations. Parents petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs for information about their kids but those petitions were seldom answered. Kids just vanished. Our homelands, our agency, our tribal governments, were supposed to be protected by the U.S. Constitution. Ask any Indian that lives on this reservation how that worked out. Ask the kids in those graves.”
When WWII began, hundreds of men from the Three Affiliated Tribes volunteered for the armed forces. They rode off to induction centers on horseback and fought in every theater of that war. President Eisenhower praised native soldiers for their steadfast loyalty and bravery, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs medical records showed they were the healthiest soldiers in the armed services; no cancers, no heart disease, no diabetes, no chronic illnesses. “Today,” Cross told me, “more than half of the tribe is on kidney dialysis. Infant mortality rates on this reservation would be a scandal in Ghana. The traumatic consequences of white nationalism get passed from one generation to the next until that trauma moves right into your bones. Add things like voter suppression, stolen mineral royalties, cultural isolation and systemic poverty. White men have been digging Indian graves for a long long time."
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“I don’t know about forgiveness ,” he said, quietly. “The wise ones tell us that forgiveness is a gift to yourself. I understand that. But five hundred years is a long time to live with a boot heel on your neck.”
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Fenimore Cooper, America’s first home-grown novelist of the 19th century, foresaw how America’s story would play out in The Prairie. His iconic hero, frontiersman Natty Bumppo, realizes that the freedoms he idealized in the unfenced panorama of the American West would soon morph into contradictions. The farther Natty pushed beyond the frontier, the faster civilization chased him down and destroyed it under wagon wheels, tar paper, centrifugal pumps. Along the way to a dénouement, America’s Garden of Eden collapsed into maps and charts and roads and boundaries and cities where all of us went to live.
In those towns and cities we finally came face to face with one another, with our story, and with the paradox of freedom. Classical liberalism challenged us to reconcile that paradox - for you to enjoy the fruits of freedom I have to give up a piece of mine, and visa versa – because it turned out that no man is an island. The resulting home grown cataclysms of the 19th century – the Washita, Sand Creek, the Little Big Horn, Wounded Knee - brought betrayals, enslavements, broken treaties, forced removals and massacres, lynchings and land theft – not to mention the self-concept of millions of non-indigenous citizens shaped by racially sanitized history books - and forged a polarized nation of citizens handicapped by the crippling cognitive dissonance we encounter in that graveyard in Mandaree.
In the end, wrote the western writer, William Kittredge, reconciliation, generosity and forgiveness will be the only path out of our violent legacy of dishonor into any future worth passing on to unborn generations. Kittredge called it ‘our Last Chance Saloon’ and he and his protégé, Wallace Stegner, acknowledged that any reckoning with that paradox might dissolve – as it has so often – into the hyperbole of wishful thinking. Who, today, would argue otherwise? When I asked him about that, Cruso Cross was on the fence.
“I don’t know about forgiveness ,” he said, quietly. “The wise ones tell us that forgiveness is a gift to yourself. I understand that. But five hundred years is a long time to live with a boot heel on your neck.”
As Secretary Haaland travels the country chronicling sins committed by Indian agents and Indian boarding schools against thousands of native children, their families and their tribes, a mawkish Republican leadership sits on its hands in Congress in mute surrender to a ‘Freedom Caucus’ of men and women who champion white nationalism. Meanwhile, tiny graves on a windswept hillside you’ll likely never know whisper to us Chief Seattle’s haunting encomium from the other side: "Treat kindly with my people for the dead are not altogether powerless."
This is hard to read but so important to understand and accept. I wish, as a child, I had been taught the truth. Children are open to change and unburdened with resentment. We might not be in the current mess we are in had we taught our children more truths.