Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Death in the Schools

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

In 1908, an anthropologist traveled to the Western states to examine an outbreak of tuberculosis and found that 20 percent–or one in every five–of the residents of Indian Country had contracted the disease. In an effort to contain it, authorities asked the anthropologist to trace the cause of the outbreak and he found it – in the Native American boarding schools. Educating native children was an enterprise that quickly turned lethal as epidemics and contagious illnesses swept through the schools. Sickness infected and killed scores of students. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through Open Table. Learn more at opentable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the fourth episode in our series, Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. At the Hampton Institute, a place that was originally designed to be a school for free Black students, a Lakota teenager was sent home to her father before graduation. While she was boarding at the Hampton Institute, her father was doing what he could to evolve and follow the ways of the white man. He built a new home and was eager to share it with his Americanized daughter. But she returned to him flushed and weak and coughing up blood. Within days, she died from tuberculosis.

A few years later, a second daughter showed signs of the same symptoms. Hampton sent her home where she languished during her final days and was buried next to her sister. At the Hampton Institute, death was commonplace. One out of every 11 Native students died at the school, and even more, one in five, were sent home to their parents on reservations to meet the same fate. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In 1908, an anthropologist traveled to the western states to examine an outbreak of tuberculosis and found that 20 percent, or one in every five, of the residents of Indian country had contracted the disease. In an effort to contain it, authorities asked the anthropologist to trace the cause of the outbreak, and he found it in the Native American boarding schools.

and he found it in the Native American boarding schools. Richard Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian School, once wrote the following note to his students' family, a version of the same note he wrote several times over as the superintendent. Your son died quietly, without suffering, like a man. We have dressed him in his good clothes, and tomorrow we will bury him the way white people do. Educating Native students at boarding schools was an enterprise that quickly turned lethal as epidemics and contagious illnesses swept through the schools. Sickness infected and killed killed scores of children. Alex Hrdlicka was a Czech-born anthropologist. When he was 12 or 13

years old, he immigrated with his father to the United States and started attending high school, working during the day and taking night classes. When he was 19, he contracted a terrible bout of typhoid fever. He was able to recover, and the whole ordeal influenced Alex to study medicine. He was a top student, but his interests began to shift from practicing medicine to anthropology. He graduated from two different medical schools in New York and then interned as an associate anthropologist at the New York State Hospital for the Insane, where he studied the physical characteristics and mental conditions of patients. Over the course of his career, he traversed the globe studying, measuring, and collecting data on skulls and different groups of humans.

Prominent scientists took notice and eventually he directed other anthropologists on their expeditions too. What's most notable for our purposes is that in 1899, Hrdlicka began to study indigenous groups in Mexico and from there, native tribes who lived in the United States. His work earned him the position as Head of Physical Anthropology at the United States Museum, which would become the Smithsonian in 1903. But Alex didn't work behind a desk. He stayed in the field as much as possible, which is how he came to track down the boarding school origins of the Indian Country Tuberculosis outbreak in 1908. Here's what Dr. Lamawema had to say about what happened when residents of a boarding school fell ill.

Certainly in the late 1800s, but even through the early 1900s, there wasn't necessarily time always to contact parents, and there wasn't necessarily much of an effort made. There was certainly not much of an effort made to transport children home if they were quite ill. Sometimes you do see schools in situations where that happened. Tuberculosis, for example, was rampant in these schools, as it was in native communities outside the schools. It was called the wasting disease. It

didn't necessarily move quickly. You see instances where schools would send children home, and I think because they specifically did not want them to pass away at the school. Infectious diseases that work more rapidly in the case of accidents and so on, there, there's not necessarily much of an effort to contact parents. Parents were not given the option certainly to visit. They were often separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles. It was very much after the fact.

We very much regret to tell you that your daughter, your son, passed away. That, I think, was much more the norm, very sadly. And as we can imagine today, that was devastating news for parents and families and communities. The wasting disease of tuberculosis meant that school officials sometimes had time to send a dying child home, which served an important purpose. The school would have it on record that the child left the school, not that they died at the school. And certainly not that the operation of the school contributed to the child's death. It was school policy not to send six students home until the very end. The superintendent of the Crow Creek School in South Dakota explained in a report to Congress, when a pupil begins to have hemorrhages from the lungs, he or she knows and the rest know,

despite anything cheerful that can be said or done. And such incidents keep occurring at intervals throughout the year. Not many people die at the school. They prefer not to do so. And their last wishes of themselves and their parents are not disregarded, but they go home and die. And the effect on the school is much the same. But as Dr. Lamauema points out, not all illnesses were slow. Schools sent sick students home when they could, but it wasn't always possible. Many of them died at school and were buried there. Their bodies were not given back to their families or tribes. It wasn't until 1903 that the Office of Indian Affairs thought to require a health screening for incoming students. By this point, boarding schools had been operating for nearly three decades, and their numbers had multiplied exponentially when attendance was made mandatory. That much

growth meant that many schools became flat-out unsanitary, overcrowded, and unsafe. Exactly the right environment for contagious illnesses to flourish. There are recordings of students sleeping two or three to a single bed with a single pillow. And when students got sick, they were rarely separated from the healthy ones. There was no quarantine. Sick and non-sick students shared utensils, towels, beds, and bedding, and classroom space. A former student later remembered, if you caught, oh, chickenpox, the whole place got chickenpox. Everybody was down. For a while, you'd think it was fun, but you were sicker than a dog, all in dorms together. And they'd take care of you. The kids would have to bring the soup up and whatever, and you ate right there. We had a case of mumps one time, and all

the little girls, big girls, everybody, the place was full of it. And you just went through it. You just waited till it was over with. Outbreaks of influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, mumps, chickenpox, measles, and trachoma were common. But crowded conditions weren't the only reason why. But knowing how these schools were run, particularly in their heyday, there was a lot of malnutrition. Children were not fed well. And of course that makes one much more susceptible. Children worked hard. Academic instruction was very minimal, only half a day in a classroom, and the other half was spent on so-called work details, doing all the work that it took to keep these institutions

running. I mean, they were historically always underfunded by Congress. They had to depend on student labor. So malnourished, working hard, suffering from homesickness. I mean, that's an apt term, homesickness. That loneliness and separation, it made people ill. All those things, I think, made children much more susceptible. There was poor nutrition. There was very poor health care across the board. Luther Standing Bear of the Lakota tribe was a student at Carlisle School in the 1880s. He said, of all the changes we were forced to make, that of diet was doubtless the most injurious, for it was immediate and drastic. White bread we had for the first meal and thereafter, as well as coffee and sugar. Had we been allowed our own simple diet of meat, either boiled with

soup or dried, and fruit with perhaps a few vegetables, we should have thrived. But the change in clothing, housing, food, and confinement combined with lonesomeness was too much. And in three years, nearly one half of the children from the Plains were dead and through with earthly schools. In the graveyard at Carlisle, most of the graves are those of little ones. The Carlisle School has 194 graves in its cemetery. In the Kansas Haskell School, the cemetery hidden behind a power plant has at least 103 known graves. Recently, thousands of graves were discovered on school grounds in both Canada and the United States. death was not limited to one or two schools, but was devastatingly commonplace. I think the mortality, the disturbing mortality, the really tragic mortality and

illnesses and so on that characterize these schools, it was disregarded. At the school my dad attended, Chilocco, for example, there was a cemetery in the middle of the cattle pasture. And a school employee, actually a school carpenter in the 1930s, who was himself an alum, said, I would like to put a fence around the cemetery and put up wooden crosses, wooden markers. And the school administration was fine with that. They weren't named graves because records hadn't been kept very well. I think probably for good reasons. School authorities didn't want to, in a sense, advertise the fact that children were passing away in these institutions, but they weren't

actively seeking to hide it either. So I think there's very different native and non-native perspectives on the existence of those cemeteries and grave sites. But certainly today, I think native and non-native share that sense of shock and sadness. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio!

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and wherever you get your podcasts. Alex Hrlicka discovered in his investigation that most students were malnourished. They weren't being fed fresh fruits or vegetables at the schools. With the overcrowding, most schools struggled with the challenges of feeding everyone. Students weren't served cafeteria food like we picture today. There were no individual fruit bowls or yogurt cups, no steamed broccoli or crunchy carrot sticks. Schools were cooking in bulk on limited budgets, which meant that children were given meals like a ladle full of oatmeal poured into bowls from an industrial sized vat of oats boiled in water. They weren't getting enough nutrition, and they weren't taking in

enough calories either. These were students who were required, remember, to do manual and domestic labor. It takes a toll on a body to do hard labor for many hours a day, even when that body is given enough calories and nutrients. And I have an interesting aside about Alex Hertlichka. In the mid-1920s, he traveled to Alaska. There, he worked with the native Alaskan population, and those who knew him came to call him the Skull Doctor. It was a fitting nickname because Alex meticulously measured the skulls of the native Alaskans. Alaskans. He had a theory, and his theory was that the similarities between the skulls of native Siberian and native Alaskan people might suggest that they once shared a history. But even in the 1920s, evolution was a pretty polarizing subject and often considered to be little more than an opinion, not science. Hrdlicka needed more evidence before he could publish his idea. So as World War II rippled through Europe, Hrdlicka traveled to Siberia where he

measured Neolithic skulls, including one of a recently discovered Neanderthal child. Neanderthal child. In 1940, newspaper readers were shocked to read Hrdlicka's theory of migration. He proposed that during the last ice age, a group of people crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia and ultimately settled in Alaska. The skulls he had studied throughout his professional career led to the discovery of structural similarities between prehistoric Siberian people and those found on the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and on the northwest coastal region of Canada's First Nations people. His life's work, accepted as scientific fact today, made him the father of modern anthropology. According to a 2019 article published in the New York Times, modern genetic testing confirms Herdwichka's theory of human migration.

Returning back in time to the boarding schools that were hastily and shoddily constructed, often with the bottom line more of a priority than sanitary or even operable conditions. Poor plumbing often resulted in sinks and toilets that didn't work, and in dormitories, windows were usually nailed shut to keep students from running away, which meant that the rooms never got any fresh air. In short, students were underfed, overworked, and lived in close quarters without proper ventilation or hygiene practices. When illness hit, many children's immune systems simply weren't strong enough to fight off infection. Even though the government appointed health inspectors to monitor the schools, thorough health inspections were non-existent or at best superficial, and when new students arrived at schools, they were given a cursory glance. Intake staff recorded only the

basics like their height, weight, and pulse, and illnesses continued to spread. In June 1901, a school inspector commented on the almost immediate deaths of 11 of the 15 Shoshone boys who were sent to Carlisle less than a year earlier, saying, The word murder is a fearful word, but yet the transfer of pupils and subjecting them to such tearful mortality is little less. such tearful mortality is little less. It took two more years, hundreds of deaths, and numerous epidemics that spread not only in schools, but from schools to the reservations as well. Before the Indian commissioner at the time, Francis Loop, informed every boarding school that they must declare war on contagious disease. He went on to say that schools had to end their overcrowding and that children's health was more important than attendance numbers, which is easier to proclaim than to put into action. To start, Francis Loop proposed

restructuring one of the boarding schools into a sanatorium for students who were infected with tuberculosis. A school in Arizona in a climate Loop thought would be ideal was reconfigured to house six students, but its actual results were disheartening. 14% of students sent there to recover died within its first five years of operation. Loop entered his role as commissioner believing that the communal living of Native Americans made tuberculosis the greatest menace to the Indian. After several complaints were made about the unsanitary conditions

at the Haskell School in Kansas, Loop inspected it himself. What he found there made him realize that illness wasn't starting and ending on reservations. It was running rampant through the schools. At Haskell, he found dark, overcrowded classrooms and dorms where students regularly shared personal items like drinking cups, coupled with the complete absence of quarantine wings where children could go if they got sick. Haskell was one of the most well-known and one of the largest boarding schools

in the early 1900s, and if conditions there were appalling. Can you imagine what the conditions were like at institutions that were smaller and received less funding? Loop took immediate action. He sent home Haskell's contagious children, which again had the disastrous effect of spreading diseases on reservations instead of containing them. He quarantined those who were suspected of illness or came in contact with the sick students. he also opened the windows and instituted a one-child, one-bed policy. He ordered that schools be completely sanitized, books were fumigated, instruments and hand tools were sterilized, the works. He oversaw the direction of several new sanatoriums in Alaska, California, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota,

and Washington State. As white settlers claimed more western land for themselves, it left smaller parcels for reservation land. New settlements sprung up close to those reservations, which meant that the risk of tuberculosis or other illnesses spreading to infect white communities increased. And that was exactly what the United States wanted to avoid. The general public blamed Native communities for the outbreaks of disease on reservations, believing that it was an Indian problem. Their genetics and lifestyle made them more susceptible to disease. One military observer wrote, civilized people in any good climate do not die at such rate. But in his 1886 report, an army surgeon asserted the true case for the alarming spread of tuberculosis on reservations. He said that

tuberculosis deaths were higher among Indians who had been quote-unquote civilized, forced to accustom themselves to the food and the habits of an alien race. On the whole, tuberculosis was so rampant at the turn of the 20th century and caused so many deaths that the entire world was on edge. Countries worked together to form the International Congress on Tuberculosis. Paris and Washington, D.C. between 1899 and 1912 to report on its status and exchange information about how to combat the infectious disease. The United States had to invest their attention into the TB outbreaks in native boarding schools because they couldn't run the risk of those outbreaks further infecting other populations as well. In 1906 alone, around 138,000 deaths from tuberculosis were recorded. When Loup's term as commissioner was up in February

1909, his successor, Robert Valentine, followed in his footsteps with a serious and comprehensive plan to improve the health of boarding school students by tackling nutrition, sanitation, sterilization of eating utensils, a new health class, a traveling health exhibit, and even more tuberculosis hospitals. But a plan is just a plan. In order to actually take action, you need money. In 1911, three trachoma specialists traveled from boarding school to boarding school across the western U.S. to test 20,000 indigenous people, mostly children. They made a similar discovery to the one that Alex Hrdlicka had made when he studied tuberculosis a few years earlier. 20% tested positive for trachoma.

And if you aren't familiar, trachoma is a bacterial infection that affects the eyes. It's highly contagious and can spread through contact with an infected person or even something an infected person has touched. Without proper treatment, trachoma can cause permanent blindness. Congress had approved a small amount of money to battle trachoma a few years earlier, but the $12,000 they allocated did not go far. More cases of infection were affecting children, and while blindness was a worrisome condition, the infection's earlier symptoms were no picnic either.

Infected children's eyes itched and burned and swelled shut. They leaked pus full of bacteria. They'd swipe at their eyes and then reach for the communal tools as they worked or shared napkins in the dining hall and spread bacteria through the student population. In response to the huge number of cases being recorded, Congress spent around $40,000, or the equivalent of about $1.3 million in modern money to get it under control. But it wasn't enough. Four years later, they had to increase the amount to the modern equivalent of $9 million. Public health reformers argued for more.

What they wanted was regular, ongoing funding to ensure that they could continue to battle new outbreaks. But Congress was not persuaded. that they could continue to battle new outbreaks, but Congress was not persuaded. No more money was spent on preventing the spread of contagious diseases in boarding schools. So the work done by Commissioners Loop and Ballantyne did make a difference. They sounded the national alarm about the unsanitary conditions in schools and were able to facilitate some funding to improve the health of students. Some schools added more nurses to their staff. Nurses like Allie Barnett, a black nurse who was hired to work at the Stewart Indian School in Nevada. Allie spent nine years at the Stewart Indian School caring for the children there and teaching them hygiene skills. She asserted that the students needed outdoor time

in the fresh air to keep healthy. She also wrote that cleanliness of clothes and body is equally as important as cleanliness of surroundings. But in the end, the money, the nurses, the health education, it was a band-aid. It couldn't stop the spread of diseases because schools were still overcrowded and understaffed. Real change wouldn't come for decades after the Indian Reorganization Act, which we will talk about in a future episode, and of course the introduction of antibiotics into treatment plans. I mentioned earlier that Francis Loop was the Commissioner of Indian Affairs during the Teddy Roosevelt administration. Teddy Roosevelt, of course, was our 26th president, and his relationship with indigenous Americans was not great during his presidency.

Not great. During his presidency, Teddy, or TR as he was called, protected 230 million acres of natural land, and conservation efforts that gave him the nickname as the father of our national parks. But he also didn't seem to care that the lands were already occupied, and that in his determination to protect them from development, he did the opposite to the native people who lived on those lands. Tribe members were forcibly removed from over 86 million acres of land that was then transferred to the national park system. Their children were shipped off to boarding schools. Teddy Roosevelt might conjure up images of a rugged, mustachioed guy who liked adventure and hunting, but that's not the entire story.

His mother and first wife both died on February 14, 1884, as in on the same day, in the same year, and in the same house from two different illnesses. In his grief, Teddy retreated to his ranch in the Badlands of North Dakota, leaving behind a newborn daughter with his sister. In the wilderness of North Dakota, he hunted and ranched and wrote books about his experiences. Even then, as a young rancher and a fledgling politician, he had firm beliefs about race, specifically about the superiority of white European men. Of the tribe members he came into contact with in the Badlands, he wrote, I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian,

but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. One of his biographers put it this way, Roosevelt admired individual achievements above all things. And so while he tended to generalize about races he felt were inferior to his own, he did believe in the power of a motivated individual to rise above that inferiority. When he entered the office of governor of New York, Roosevelt developed a four-point plan for the assimilation of indigenous Americans. He wanted, one, missionary work inside reservations, two, mandatory day school, which later became mandatory attendance at boarding

schools, three, non-communal individualized ownership of land via an allotment system, and for eventual full citizenship. Under his governorship, the smartest Native students in the New York boarding schools were transferred into the best boarding school at the time, the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The Carlisle Band even played at his inauguration parade in 1905. On their way to Washington, D.C., six men representing Native nations visited Carlisle, including Geronimo, Quanah Parker, and other important individuals. They dressed in their regalia, and they addressed the students at the school with Geronimo saying the following, my friends, I'm going to talk to you a few minutes and listen well to what I say. You are all just the same as my children to me, just the same as if my children are going to school when I look at you all here.

You are here to study, to learn the ways of white men, to do it well. You have a father here and a mother also. Your father is here. Do as he tells you. Obey him as you would your own father, although he is not your father. He is a father to you now. The Lord made my heart good. I feel good wherever I go. I feel very good now as I stand before you. Obey all orders. Do as you are told all the time and you won't get hungry. He who owns you holds you in his hands like that, and he carries you around like a baby. That is all I have to say to you. At TR's inauguration, Geronimo and the five other tribal chiefs wore headdresses and painted faces. The fanfare and display was meant to show the nation that the tribes and the federal government were

united in peace. But it's important to note that Geronimo had been living under army guard for almost 30 years at that point. He was literally a prisoner of war, riding in a parade for the entertainment of onlookers. As president, Teddy Roosevelt continued to promote policies that were aimed at assimilating indigenous people into the dominant European American culture. It was a philosophy that he shared with Richard Pratt, who spent his entire career advocating for the Americanization of Native communities. Pratt was a part of the Friends of the Indian movement and spoke out about his belief that Native populations had the capacity to assimilate if, of course, they were educated to do so. And even though there were many people who felt the way he did, there were also those,

especially in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who thought the answer to the nation's quote-unquote Indian problem was forced segregation. They thought that the reservation system was preferable, with indigenous people forced onto specific pockets of land and removed from white-dominated American society altogether. American society altogether. The farther into his career he got, the more forceful Pratt became in his belief that segregation was not a viable solution to the nation's issues with race relations. But his superiors began referring to him as an honest lunatic every time he gave a speech and grew weary of his pontificating. And we know his most famous quote by now, kill the Indian to save the man.

That was only part of his original statement, which continues, when we recognize fully that he is capable in all respects as we are, and that he only needs the opportunities and privileges which we possess to enable him to assert his humanity and manhood. When we cease to fetter him to conditions which keep him in bondage, surrounded by retrogressive influences, when we allow him the freedom of association and the developing influences of social contact, then the Indian will quickly demonstrate that he can truly be civilized, and he himself will solve the question of what to do with the Indian. Pratt was dismissed as the superintendent of Carlisle School for Insubordination on June 30,

1904, after he had denounced the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the reservation system, calling them hindrances to the progress of Native American people. The Bureau didn't like that. The Carlisle School continued to operate for over a decade after Pratt's forced retirement, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs officially closed the school in 1918 when the Army needed the facilities as a hospital following World War I. In the last decade of his life, Pratt dictated his memoirs and his beliefs to his daughter, Nana Pratt Hawkins. He said, now, after more than 54 years of widest experience, I cannot see otherwise than all the gross injustices which have followed and become indurated policies are primarily the result of national neglect to give the opportunities and enforce the safeguards of our Declaration and Constitution.

Richard Pratt died in the spring of 1924, and he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Every single one of his pallbearers were graduates of the Carlisle Indian School, proving that he left behind a very complicated legacy. Even though he truly believed that his life's work was to help Native Americans thrive by assimilating them, he did so at grave cost. The boarding school system he fought so hard for stripped them of their culture and identities and exposed them to illness, abuse, and even death. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you then. I'll see you then. Thank you to our guest scholar, Kate Cianina Lomawema, and to composer R. Carlos Nakai, a Native American musician who provided some of the music you heard in today's episode.

Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And this episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, we would love to have you leave us a rating or review or to share on social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon. Hey Torontonians, recycling is more than a routine. It's a vital responsibility. By

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