Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Less Education, More Forced Labor

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

In 1880, Richard Pratt opened the Carlisle School’s Outing Program. Pratt framed the programs as an opportunity to give boarding school students real-world experience and cultivate practical skills they learned at school, but in reality, the Outing Programs were nothing more than indentured servitude. By the 1930s, most programs were so corrupt that they were discontinued. Were the programs nixed due to a sudden change of heart? No, it was the result of an independent research organization and their publication of the Meriam Report. Note: We would like to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of this episode may not be suitable for younger audiences. 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

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things. But most of all, the passion and care that goes into producing the local high quality milk

we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass. Dairy Farmers of Ontario, from our families to your table, everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. table. Everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. Hello, friends. Welcome to episode five of Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. I want to take a moment to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of it may not be suitable for younger audiences. When Richard Pratt dictated his memoir to his daughter toward the end of his life, he spent a lot of time talking about the Carlisle School and what he perceived to be its successes and occasionally its failures. He admitted that one of the school's

largest programs got off to a rocky start. He had arranged for about two dozen students to be placed on local farms to work over the summer, and almost all of them ran away or were sent back by their host families. But that was just the beginning, and soon the program was practiced all over the country. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. What General Pratt was speaking about was called the outing program, and its goal was to give boarding school students real-world practice to cultivate the skills they learned throughout the school year, which is a nice way to put it. In execution, students were assigned to white families and they were sent to live and work for them. Pratt's vision was that students would be treated like a

part of the family and the experience would serve as a hands-on education about American Christian culture. In 1895, he wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs saying, this brings the Indian youth directly in contact with good, wholesome, civilized life, and they absorb it rapidly, and it absorbs them, and they become a part of it. But Pratt wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of boarding Native Americans with white families for servitude. White households had been using Native Americans as laborers, domestic servants, and even slaves since colonial times. Pratt just updated the language, claiming that the outing program would aid with Native assimilation. Carlisle's outing program started in 1880, the year after the

school opened, and even though the first attempt was a pretty big disaster, Pratt chose to expand it the next year. Carlisle sent 109 children into white homes to become immersed into American communities. Only six host families returned their assigned children to the school this time, meaning that most of them kept the children to labor on their homesteads. By 1903, 947 students were participating in the Carlisle outing program. Of course, the word participating is loaded because it's not like children were choosing to participate. It was school staff, government agents, and local families who made program arrangements, not the students. And the students didn't work solely for host families for very long.

Pratt began to contract out students to work in factories, too. At the turn of the 20th century, there was little oversight of the nation's education system as a whole, and even less of the Native American boarding schools. When the outing program started at Carlisle spread to boarding schools across the country, the amount of actual education students received suffered greatly. In California, some schools only required Indigenous students to attend class eight days of the school year, which meant that for the rest of the year, those students were laboring eight days. Hundreds of boys from the Sherman Institute in California were sent to ranches and citrus groves throughout Southern California to work 80-plus hours a week as farmhands. They were forced to sleep in run-down housing, crammed into overcrowded quarters with other migrant workers. Many of them grew sick from the unhygienic conditions.

The Carlisle students were paid a low wage that the school claimed they saved for them until they graduated. But the records show that many students were never given their savings. The Sherman Institute told employers to send their outing students' salaries directly to the school, all $12 a month of it. The students themselves never saw any of the money they earned. In fact, most of the schools earned thousands of dollars off the work of their students. At the Teller Indian School in Colorado, students were sent to large farms and orchards to work, and they didn't stay with host families. They slept together in bunkhouses near the fields. In 1890, a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent discovered that the Teller School superintendent was taking the money paid for student work and putting it right into his own bank account.

When desperate students and their parents spoke up about the mistreatment within the outing programs, most school administrators didn't bat an eye. Superintendent George Patrick, who ran the Round Valley Boarding School in California, said it was impossible to protect young and half-grown girls when they did domestic work. What he meant was that when they sent girls out into white communities, the school was not responsible for what happened to them. They were vulnerable to neglect and abuse, including sexual abuse. The Bureau of Indian Affairs assigned agents called outing matrons to oversee the placement of girls. These women often acted a bit like sales reps because they courted wealthy families or service businesses and tried to convince them to pay the school to take on students, some as young as 10,

who would serve as nannies, seamstresses, housekeepers, laundresses, or cooks. Matrons were supposed to serve as supervisors, weeding out placements that had poor living and working conditions, or following up when the girls spoke up about mistreatment. But they were often overloaded with charges and rarely reported abuse and neglect. In fact, many of them purposely looked the other way while they sent girls into homes or businesses where they were vulnerable to sexual or physical abuse. The outing families were people with influence, with money. If they denied them placement, the school's finances

took a hit. So instead, both matrons and the schools put the responsibility on the girls themselves, telling them to control their behaviors and desires, to keep themselves pure, and to not fraternize with boys. But of course, predators will always exploit power dynamics, and it was no different in the outing program. It wasn't unheard of for the girls to return to the schools pregnant. The girls were then sent home to their parents. Like Quechan tribe member Eve Arveaz, who was made pregnant by a man who lived in her outing household, she was required to pay her own fare home, which cost her nearly $20 and a 10-hour train ride. Eve's family demanded that the father of the baby pay her $25 a month for the first year of the child's life, but

most times there was simply no consequences for the rapists. One teen girl at the Sherman Indian School rebelled by refusing to return to the outing household where she faced abuse. But instead of following up on her report of the abuse, the school's superintendent, Harwood Hall, brushed it under the rug. She was not required to return, but she was required to stay quiet about her experiences. To the family, Harwood Hall simply wrote, she will not work out this year. For some reason, she objects very strongly to being sent out. The abuse to girls within the outing program wasn't always physical or sexual. Often it came from the women of the household who abused the program by working the girls as hard as they could. Many

students were domestic servants and expected to tend to young children while cooking meals, cleaning homes, tending vegetable gardens, and keeping up with the home's laundry. It's no surprise that there are countless stories of children who ran away from their outing jobs. Some schools offered bounties on the runaway students if they were returned to the school in good condition. And one of the solutions was to simply send the students farther away for their outing experiences, making it nearly impossible for them to reach home again. And home was where they wanted to go. Abuse was as common inside the schools as it was in the outing jobs. Students were often punished for small offenses or for not working fast enough.

There are reports of children being whipped, slapped, sent to solitary confinement, and even deprived of meals. For some boys who participated in the outing program, there was a silver lining. They were overworked on farms and in orchards, but they were able to find little ways to honor their culture. Being outdoors meant that they were closer to opportunities to fish, hunt, or light bonfires and practice spiritual traditions. A former student and Hopi tribe member had complicated feelings about his experiences, saying, I could talk like a gentleman, read, write, and cipher. I could name all the states in the union with their capitals, repeat the names of all the books in the Bible,

quote a hundred verses of scripture, sing more than two dozen Christian hymns and patriotic songs, debate, shout football yells, swing my partners in square dances, bake bread so well enough to make a pair of trousers. But I wanted to become a real Hopi again. Outing programs were nothing more than indentured servitude, and by the 1930s, most were so corrupt that they were discontinued. But it wasn't school administration that had a change of heart and nixed the programming. It was the result of an independent research organization and their publication of the Merriam Report. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new.

Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. 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 is my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink.

You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. In 1926, the Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work, commissioned the Institute for Government Research, which despite its name was privately funded and not a government agency, to create a report on conditions of Native Americans in the United States. Nearly three years later, the Institute for Government Research submitted the almost 850-page Merriam Report to Secretary Work. The report's official name was the Problem of Indian Administration, but it was called the Merriam Report after its director,

Louis Merriam. Louis Merriam had the right resume. He was a lawyer who held two degrees from Harvard, a law degree from George Washington University, and a PhD from the Brookings Institution. And while he didn't specifically have a ton of highly visible political positions, he did statistics work for a variety of government bureaus, including the Census Bureau. He was a reliable, data-driven kind of guy who studied how to improve government operations and programs. So it's no surprise that Louis Merriam took great care when he chose team members to study and gather information for the report. His due diligence with his team is likely why the outcome was so effective. This was not a bunch of white guys with political clout or fancy

connections. These were people, women and Native Americans included, who were well-respected in their areas of study. Like educator Henry Rowe Cloud, a member of the Ho-Chunk tribe, who was the first Native American to attend Yale. He spent his career advocating for better educational systems and opportunities for Native Americans. And Emma Duke, who worked for the American Health Association. She was put in charge of studying Native migrants into urban areas, or Mary Louise Mark, a social statistics professor who was recruited from Ohio State University. The team of 10 spent seven months in the field observing, often alone, so they could cover more ground. In that time period, they were able to visit 95 different locations in 23 different states. They paid visits to reservations, homes, health clinics,

and schools. Once they had conducted all of their interviews and collected their data, they spent another year or so compiling their findings into their final report. The report was arranged into eight different sections and revealed their conclusions on a general policy for Indian affairs, health, education, general economic conditions, family and community life, and the activities of women, the migrated Indians, the legal aspects of the Indian problem, and the missionary activities among the Indians. The report was pretty scathing. In short, it proved that federal policies regarding Native relations had been a complete and utter failure from the get-go. It criticized the Dawes Act of 1887, the act that had regulated lands in an allotment style, meaning that it took away lands for communal living from Native tribes

and replaced it with a more European style of forcing people to have individual farming plots. The report said, And it gave real numbers to back up its statements. The report found that 96% of all Native Americans made under $200 a year, well below the poverty line, even as the country moved into the Great Depression. When it came to education, the report exposed the abuses, the starvation, and the overcrowding in boarding schools across the country. It also exposed the fact that the money made from outing programs and student labor was basically the only thing that kept the schools running. Government funds sent

to schools barely made a dent in their operation costs. The report stated that the most fundamental need in Indian education is a change in point of view. The survey staff finds itself obligated to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate. It went on to say, the time children spend on such tasks, mowing, milking cows, whitewashing walls, splitting wood, etc., is in no sense educational since the operations are large-scale and bear little relation to either home or individual life outside. The report concluded the education portion with the following, the Indian educational enterprise is peculiarly in need of the kind of approach that is less concerned with a conventional school system and more with the

understanding of human beings. Indian tribes and individual Indians within the tribes vary so greatly that a standard content and method of education, no matter how carefully they might be prepared, would be worse than futile. Newspapers across the country published stories about the report, and many women's clubs hosted lectures about it, giving talks about its findings to the general public. The conversation began to shift as people learned more about life on reservations and in boarding schools. The Des Moines Register wrote in October of 1928, the death rate among these original Americans is still more than twice that among whites. All this, of course, is only part of the century-old picture of mistreatment of the Indian. We violated our

treaties with him, took his land, and suppressed his opportunities. Here's what Dr. Lomawema has to say about what happened after the report was published. There were some reforms instituted in the schools after the Merriam report, which really heavily criticized a number of the characteristics of these schools, the amount of student labor, the military discipline, the poor nutrition, and so on. So my dad actually lived through some of those so-called reforms, which was kind of a funny story from his perspective as a young kind of preteen boy. All of a sudden, the girls and boys were sitting together at the dining room tables, and he thought that was terrifying.

No idea how to interact with girls, for heaven's sakes. But there were more opportunities and things like Saturday night dances that you see more opportunity for communication. Acting on the recommendations of the report, President Hoover asked Congress for funds to send to boarding schools where students needed access to more food and clean clothing. His administration increased spending to improve not just the diet of students, but also to create new positions in health and education, and to build more day schools and service buildings to combat overcrowding. But by the time FDR entered office, the Great Depression was in full swing. Americans everywhere

were suffering, and that went doubly so for Native American families on the reservations. doubly so for Native American families on the reservations. Over 50% of Native Americans were out of work during the 1930s. So President Roosevelt appointed the sociologist John Collier to run the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier was a well-known social reformer and was a founding member of the American Indian Defense Association, which fought against the government's policies of assimilation and allotment. He felt that the government had unfairly been stifling Native American rights to freedom of religion and self-governance. He also felt that education reform was a high priority. His solution to the failure of the federal boarding school system was to shut down boarding schools altogether and begin students' transition to community day schools and public schools.

He wanted government-supported schools to alter their curriculum and teach the importance of preserving Indian culture. He felt it should be balanced with developing more vocational training in schools to give Native students the opportunity to get better paying jobs when they entered the workforce. But what he wanted to do through the Bureau and what Congress was willing to pass didn't always align. The federal government was not ready to completely eradicate the boarding school system. Still, Collier relentlessly pushed to use the findings of the Merriam Report to reverse the Native American assimilation policies, and it became the basis for his implementation of the Wheeler-Howard Act, more commonly known as the Indian

Reorganization Act of 1934. The Indian Reorganization Act outlined the need to eliminate some federal controls and to boost indigenous self-governance. It incorporated recommendations from the Merriam Report and encouraged tribes to write their own constitutions and establish their own voting bodies. Essentially, the act meant that indigenous people could be members of tribes and U.S. citizens, which had not been the case in the past. The act also started to funnel more federal funds onto reservations for health care and education, but allowed the newly established tribal governments to decide how those funds would be used and distributed. It rewrote the rules around tribal land ownership,

throwing away the allotment doctrine, and making it simpler for tribes to buy back land that had been sold off. Most of the reforms that happened in the 1930s were centered around the new John Collier-supported idea that Native culture did have a place in 20th century America, that erasure was more harmful than helpful. It wasn't perfect, and this ideology would change course again by the 1950s, but it did help to fuel small changes. After the Merriam Report and the Indian Reorganization Act, boarding schools allowed the students to speak their native languages outside of the classroom, and most of the outing

programs and forced labor was discontinued. School curriculum took a slight shift back towards education. Many of the schools redeveloped their extracurricular programming, and those programs like art, music, and sports left a more positive, although still complex, impact on Native children. I'm not sure if it's unexpected or unintended consequences that some of the things that happened in these schools became very, very important in Native communities. And certainly football, basketball, huge, huge still in many communities today,

even baseball, the impact of some of the musical programs, the marching bands that often accompanied sports events and other celebrations and holidays and so on. Native people enjoyed that music, and it became very popular. And we see in the early 20th century, really an explosion on the stage, in lyceum programs, Native performers, singers, dancers, orators became extremely popular in the U.S. And a lot of that training began in boarding schools. And it was very important to Native people. It meant a lot to them. Also, some of the artistic training programs had a tremendous impact, and Native

people felt very positive about those things. And that's where I think we can see the moments and the opportunities where strong and creative Native people made something out of what was present in those schools that made it more positive than they might otherwise have been. We've talked about Jim Thorpe, who began his lifelong sports career at Carlisle Indian School. There were others, too, who found solace in sports. At the Fort Shaw Indian School in Montana, the superintendent was super enthusiastic about the benefits of sports for students. Their athletics program included basketball, and the game was played by both the girls and the boys. The girls' team, the Dusky Bells, were so good that they often played and won against college teams. They also competed in exhibition games

where spectators, usually white families, paid to watch them play and do tricks with basketballs. These entertaining games funded the team's trip to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where they won all of their games and were declared the undisputed world champions. At the World's Fair, they also participated in the Model Indian School, an exhibit where fairgoers could watch Native children perform Americanized tasks to show how well the schools worked at assimilating Indigenous students. The girls sat demurely in European-style dresses and hairstyles and sewed or practiced their cooking skills. Because when it came down to it, sports, art,

music, they weren't part of the curriculum just to give the students creative outlets and opportunities, but to reinforce the ultimate goal, to show exactly how well the schools could turn children into civilized Americans. Many schools banned Native cultural practices and replaced them with their Western counterparts, like music. Music has long been a significant part of many Native American cultures. It's an oral ritual, and in some instances, an important part of daily life. But at boarding schools, students were banned from playing or singing traditional songs and were instead given patriotic music to learn. A good example of this came in 1909 when around 85 students at the Carlyle School gave a performance of an opera called The Captain of Plymouth. Maybe you can tell by its name that the plot centered around the arrival of European settlers in America,

its name that the plot centered around the arrival of European settlers in America, which meant that Native American children were literally playing the parts of colonizers in front of a white audience. Students were also taught to play instruments, everything from piano to trumpets and woodwinds. Those who had played hand drums or water drums on reservations were given snare drums and re-taught to play in a military style. Like with sports, the boarding schools used music as propaganda to promote the successes of the programs. The Carlisle Indian School Band played at all sorts of high-profile national events to show off their skills. I mentioned Teddy Roosevelt's inauguration parade, the Chicago World's Fair, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, and more. The New York Tribune said of their parade marching, the one that caught the crowd was the Indian band that headed the

delegation from Carlisle. With the smoothest harmony and the most perfect time, this band of 40 or 50 pieces played a marching anthem as it swept past the reviewing stand. Both the melody and the spectacle were so unusual that the people rose to their feet and cheered again and again. The spectacle of the Carlisle Marching Band ended when the school closed in 1918. But hundreds of other boarding schools continued to grow and accept new students through the 1920s and 30s and beyond, even as John Collier led the reform movement. The Phoenix Indian School, for example, evolved to try to stay relevant. Its focus on military discipline was scrapped, and the student band, which had played marches to lead students around campus, was

disbanded in 1930. The school curriculum began to focus on vocational training, and by the time World War II began, they sent students right from the school into all branches of the military. When the United States entered World War II, thousands of young Native men enlisted. We're talking 44,000, which was close to 13% of the Native American population at the time. Many of them excelled in the military, which makes sense when we consider the fact that the majority of them had grown up in the militaristic boarding school system. One former Navajo code talker said, we had to march to school, march to chow, march everywhere, to church. So when we went in the service, everything just came naturally, physically and morally and everything.

The Navajo code talkers saved countless lives during their service in World War II. The Navajo language was literally the only code that the Japanese never broke. But their work was classified and kept a secret for decades. So after the war, they went back to civilian life, and almost no one knew of the work they had done. At the close of World War II, a groundswell movement gained momentum to begin addressing some of the wrongs of the boarding schools. A number of Navajo ex-servicemen advocated in Washington for programs that would honor old treaty provisions. for programs that would honor old treaty provisions. Specifically, they felt the government should uphold their end of the bargain when it came to education and literacy. At the Phoenix Indian School, the special Navajo program began in 1947, and it put young Navajo

students through five years of schooling so they would graduate with an eighth grade education. of schooling so they would graduate with an eighth grade education. So well into the 1930s and 40s, when the United States was just beginning to reflect on their past mistakes when it came to the treatment of Native American tribes, boarding schools were evolving. Evolving, but not closing, Devolving, but not closing, which is a very important distinction that we'll return to in another episode. Next time, however, I want to move away from the United States mainland because the children of Indigenous and First Nations people in Hawaii, Alaska, and Canada were also forced into assimilation education programs. And their experiences were just as traumatic. We'll learn more next time.

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.