Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Pratt's Devastating Experiment

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

Welcome to our new series, Taken: Native Boarding Schools in America where we dive into the complex history of the United States Government's intervention of Indigenous tribes and culture. We’re going to go beyond the Trail of Tears and into the federally mandated programs that took Native children from their homes and placed them in boarding schools. It’s a history of erasure, dominance, violence, and trauma–some of it so concealed that the Department of the Interior is still investigating it today. 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

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the first episode in our new series, Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. In the series, we are exploring the 150-year history of Native American children being forcibly removed from their families and tribes and sent to residential boarding schools. Boarding schools where the intention was to eliminate whatever made the children indigenous, their manner of dress, their language, their religion, their culture, and replace it with what Europeans believed made someone, quote unquote, civilized. Europeans believed made someone, quote-unquote, civilized. The history is tragic, but it's important to know,

because if we want to learn from our mistakes, we need to know the truth of what they were. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In 1880, a slight 10-year-old boy arrived at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. His name was Kakuni, and in the first decade of his life, he had known countless moments of suffering and grief. His father and five siblings had all been killed when the U.S. military battled his tribe, the Nez Perce, in an effort to force them off their ancestral lands. He and his mother were exiled from the home they had known. His mother sent him to the Carlisle School. History doesn't tell us exactly why, but chances are good she wanted to spare him death from malaria. Their tribe had been made to live in camps in Oklahoma,

where the death tolls were high, and it's possible his mother thought attending school on the East Coast would give him a chance at an education, a chance at survival. a chance at an education, a chance at survival. When Kakuni arrived, his hair was cut off. His name was taken away and replaced with a Christian name, Jesse Paul. Eight children from the Nez Perce tribe arrived over the next several years, and before they graduated, three of them had died and are still buried at Carlisle. Jesse Paul's granddaughter, Roberta, has documented her family's history, including her grandfather's story. She said, Jesse had to have spiritual strength to survive. You've probably heard the popular expression that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And accounts from the white teachers and missionaries who worked in boarding schools indicate that they believed that they were doing God's will by Christianizing and Americanizing Native American children. But the indoctrination of their own faith onto children who already had their own beliefs and removing the children's own culture and replacing it with that of Europeans can't be dismissed or minimized by thinking that their intentions were good or their hearts were in the right place. What happened to children isn't diminished because some people thought they meant well. Tied up with the idea of Christianizing and Americanizing Native children was the belief that Native Americans actually needed civilizing. That who they were, their traditions, their

beliefs, their very existence was intrinsically at odds with the culture of European settled America, and that the way to peacefully coexist was to, quote, kill the Indian inside. That's an actual quote that was used by officials that ran boarding schools. How did the United States decide, as its official federal policy, that Native children must be removed from their own families? To understand that, we need to know more about one man, Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt was the oldest boy born into the Pratt family in Rushford, New York, during the winter of 1840. during the winter of 1840. Six years later, the Pratts left New York for Indiana,

right around the same time the state was finishing the removal of Native Americans, making land more accessible to white settlers. A few years later, Richard's father left home, traveling to California with the hope to strike it rich in the gold rush. But instead, he was robbed and murdered by another prospector, which meant that Richard, who was then 13, was left to be the family's provider. As a teen, he worked at what was called a printer's devil, a young printing apprentice who did all the grunt work and often took odd jobs to make extra money. It was the Civil War that offered him an opportunity for a career with more stability and better pay. At its start, he entered as a private in the Union

military, and by the end, he had risen to the rank of captain. If you listen to our series, Secrets of the Civil War, you may recall that initially, enlistments lasted a mere 90 days. As soon as the conflict began, Pratt enlisted as a private, and when his 90 days were up, he re-enlisted. This came with a promotion to sergeant. On the home front, he married a woman named Anna. They went on to have four children, and on the battleground, he fought and survived. At the end of the Civil War, Pratt, by now a captain, mustered out or left the military. By 1865, married and with a growing family, Pratt tried life outside the military in Indiana, settling on running a hardware store. But it didn't stick.

Two years later, he re-entered the U.S. Army, this time at the rank of a second lieutenant. He joined the 10th United States Cavalry at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. The 10th Cavalry was an all-Black regiment of Buffalo soldiers. Although Buffalo soldiers were highly effective, many white officers refused to work with them. Pratt didn't have those same misgivings and was part of the 10th Cavalry for eight years before the government declared that the Indian Wars were over. They weren't actually over, by the way. The military definitely continued to campaign to remove Native tribes from their homelands. The name Buffalo Soldiers originates from the indigenous people of the American plains.

Some people said that the black soldier's dark curly hair resembled that of a buffalo, and their fierce style of battle so impressed the tribes that it was compared to buffalo when fighting. The soldiers understood that the buffalo was a highly revered animal in indigenous cultures and took the name as a sign of great respect. The 10th Cavalry even incorporated a buffalo into their crest. Buffalo soldiers faced prejudice from white soldiers and officers like George Armstrong Custer, who flat out refused to command black troops. They were sent to serve west of

the Mississippi because white communities, particularly in the South, didn't want armed Black people in their neighborhoods. The Buffalo Soldiers established forts, guarded the U.S. mail routes, and built infrastructure like roads and trails. This work made them essential in the expansion of the country's land settlements. Later, Buffalo Soldiers would become some of America's first national park rangers, and they protected South Dakota reservations after the massacre at Wounded Knee. And here's a fact you may have never heard before. a group of 20 or so Buffalo soldiers, the 25th Infantry, embarked on an almost 2,000 mile journey to test the potential benefits of using bicycles as military vehicles. That's right. The infantry spent 41 days traversing the West by bike from Montana to Missouri. They rode through wind, snow,

and dust storms. And we're not talking about, you know, tricked out top of the line bicycles here. These were one speed bikes, which when packed with supplies weighed over 80 pounds. The infantry was successful with their ride, but in the end, military advancements changed too quickly for bicycles to catch on as a way to move troops from one place to another. Despite their mandate to defend white settlers from attacks by Native Americans, Buffalo soldiers did at times provide protection for indigenous people, sometimes from the advances of warring tribes, like when they rescued the Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek villages from Kiowa raids, and even from encroaching white

settlers or militia, like when they protected a Kiowa village from Texas Rangers. In 1873, Frances M. A. Rowe, an officer's wife living at Camp Supply in Indian Territory, provided the earliest documented use of the term Buffalo Soldier. She said, These Buffalo Soldiers are active, intelligent, and resolute men and appear to me to be rather superior to the average white men recruited in times of peace. One standout group of Buffalo soldiers was nicknamed the Faithful Fifty. They were Black men who had escaped enslavement and then co-mingled with the Seminole people in Florida, usually living separately from the Seminoles but adopting similar foods, housing, and clothing that they then combined with their own African and Christian

cultures and practices. The Buffalo emblem was worn proudly by Black soldiers in the trenches of France during World War I and again during World War II. Buffalo soldiers served until 1948 when President Truman desegregated the military. It's strange to think that at the very same time that President Andrew Johnson was ordering military troops like the Buffalo Soldiers to fight against indigenous people on the western frontier, he was also orchestrating peace talks. Andrew Johnson was Lincoln's vice president, who assumed the presidency after Lincoln's assassination, and then he became the very first president in U.S. history to be impeached by Congress. So he's not a super popular president with historians for many reasons.

If you listen to our Civil War series, you may remember that many indigenous people fought in the Civil War, and a surprising number of them fought for the Confederacy. Eight tribes even signed defensive treaties with the Confederacy because they had no reason to trust or align themselves with the federal government, which was the Union, who kept pressuring them to sign treaties to give away their land. But when the Civil War ended and the United States remained united, the country was eager to expand. Except indigenous people weren't really down with that plan.

They weren't all clamoring to move off their ancestral lands just because a government, one who didn't even consider them citizens, wanted them to. Richard Henry Pratt fought in the Plains Wars and was eventually assigned to accompany 72 Native American prisoners of war to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. in St. Augustine, Florida. Fort Marion was originally called Castillo de San Marcos by the Spanish who built it in 1672. Its name was later changed to Fort St. Mark by the British, who then occupied it for about 20 years in the 1700s. Florida became U.S. territory in 1821, and it was again renamed, this time, after an American Revolutionary War hero. What Pratt and his prisoners found was that the 150-year-old

fort was dilapidated and in need of heavy repairs. The wall around the fort was made from crushed shells, and the whole thing faced the ocean. For warriors who were used to living in forests or on the open plains, the vast, seemingly endless body of water was disconcerting. Records indicate that the prisoners were frightened, lethargic, and suicidal. They had been taken from their homes and lands, and their fate was entirely in the hands of their captors. Pratt's response was twofold. First and most interestingly, he gave them ledgers, or blank notebooks, and and colored pencils and encouraged them to draw. Many of these drawings were eventually sold, but some today are held in museum collections. His second plan was the more predictable response from a military guy. He began to

train the imprisoned men, conducting drills as if they were military recruits who understood what he was doing and why. It was an effort to bring schedule and stability to the imprisoned men. This two-pronged plan, a rudimentary education coupled with physical exercise and labor, would go on to become a standard model for Native American boarding school education. Many schools adopted the curriculum of half a day of education and half a day of labor and military-like drills. Pratt required the Fort Marion prisoners to make bows and arrows, polish seashells and alligator teeth, and create drawings, items that he then sold. Sometimes they were allowed to send home their earnings.

He brought in teachers to educate them, and he gave them duties around the fort. They farmed and cooked and took guard duty shifts. Pratt looked around Fort Marion and felt proud of himself. He felt proud of his work. He could see the evidence of the prisoners becoming, quote, more civilized. The seed of a new thought was planted in Pratt's mind and began to take root. He believed that he could replicate these results, the results of civilizing Native Americans, and he believed he could replicate it more easily and with less resistance if he could work with children and not just adults.

He began to develop his pedagogy, borrowing a lot of his theories and teachings from the Puritans and set to work assimilating Native Americans into the dominant white Christian culture. His most famous quote, one you may have heard, was, Kill the Indian to save the man. Before we delve into the development of boarding schools for Native children, I think it would be appropriate to give a fuller account of what happened to the prisoners at Fort Marion. It's important to highlight the fact that these were warriors from different tribes who didn't get along with each other. Many were enemies from the Plains Wars, and they were thrown together and imprisoned for fighting to defend their families and land. The whites in charge had little to no understanding

of intertribal allegiances and conflicts. So Greybeard, about whom I will tell you in a minute, was chained on the train to Fort Marion next to someone of a tribe who was not friendly with his own. And that's just one example. While Pratt may have looked around Fort Marion and felt pleased with himself, it's clear the prisoners did not. One of them leapt from a train that was headed to Fort Marion, and soldiers followed him and shot him. Another one died in a hospital. Another refused food and water until he died of starvation. Others died of contagious illness. One of them died from paralysis due to an old injury, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Those who lived

were indoctrinated in the ways of leaving what Pratt referred to as the crooked path, which meant their own cultural traditions, especially their spirituality. And they were taught to become American. In order to do so, they had to first convert to Christianity. They were required to study the Christian Bible. They could speak freely, but they were not allowed to use sign language or their native tongue. They were only allowed to use English. One prisoner named Bears Heart, whose many Fort Marion drawings are in museums today, said this to one of his teachers at the fort. There were 10 Indian boys baptized with me. We all are brothers now, for we have the same Father God. I'm trying to do as I see white people do.

I want to go to heaven when I die. I want to see and talk to Jesus. And maybe I shall go if I am good and go the good way. I pray to Jesus every Sunday. I think he will help me be good. And of course, being good in this context meant becoming a Christian American. Captain Pratt allowed his prisoners to perform makeshift tribal ceremonies using chicken instead of eagle feathers for the benefit of paying tourists. The men's once-sacred ceremonies were

used as entertainment for paying white audiences, reducing them to little more than circus performers for gawkers. What happened to the imprisoned Indigenous people who served time at Fort Marion? Some of them died there. Not all of their names were recorded, and they were buried in the cemetery at the fort. Some of them returned home to their tribes, which had been moved from where they were originally. And Pratt took 22 of them to the Hampton Institute, which was a school established in Virginia to educate African Americans. not to drop native students off at a school like Hampton, but to start a school himself, one that he would oversee and mold from the very beginning.

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 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 Lady 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. Richard Henry Pratt once gave a speech that said, and I'm going to warn you that this is beyond the pale. A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and the high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree

with that sentiment, but only in this, that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man. For this series, we spoke with an indigenous scholar, someone who has spent decades studying and writing about America's boarding schools. K. Sianina Lomawema's father attended a boarding school, K. Sianina Lomawema's father attended a boarding school, and she has spoken firsthand with other people who were forced to go. The most important takeaway is to understand that federal Indian boarding schools and the support of church schools, those schools were designed for a particular purpose,

erase and replace. And the idea was not only, for example, to erase the Choctaw erase and replace and the idea was not only for example to erase the Choctaw language and replace it with English but it was also to erase indigenous presence and replace that with settlers on this land and that has meant that what the federal government was setting out to do was to erase any acknowledgement of the inherent sovereignty of Native nations. These schools were about assimilation, which I think is a little misleading. That tends to apply welcoming, perhaps, folks into U.S. society on an equal playing field, and that was not the case for most of the tenure of these schools,

certainly for the really intensive years from the 1870s through the 1930s. It was about educating in subservience and to train people, Native people, as menial, manual labor and domestic workers to contribute to the U.S. economy, but very much as a subservient labor pool, certainly not for higher education or to move into professions. Carlisle holds significant historical importance for Native Americans in the United States and in other countries like Canada. It was a boarding school that embraced a specific philosophy and curriculum, one that was later emulated by hundreds more boarding schools.

The name Carlisle still carries significant meaning within many Native communities. Over a period of 39 years, more than 10,500 students from nearly every Native nation in the U.S., including Puerto Rico, attended Carlisle. The first students were intentionally recruited from tribes that the government considered to be militarily troublesome, such as the Lakota, Kiowa, and Cheyenne. Some leaders and parents believed that sending their children to Carlisle would provide them with a good education and benefit their people when negotiating with white settlers. However, other children had no choice and were sent to Carlisle as essentially prisoners of war. Richard Pratt aimed to recruit students from every Indian agency

to carry out his experiment to civilize and erase Native cultures. At Carlisle, students were intentionally placed with roommates from different native nations to force them to communicate in English. Initially, students were enrolled for three to five years, but many ended up staying much longer. Pratt's goal was to assimilate native children into mainstream white Anglo-Saxon culture. In a speech to Baptist ministers, he used the metaphor of baptism to explain his philosophy on transforming Native children. He said, In Indian civilization, I am a Baptist because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked.

The federal government's support for Carlisle marked its increased involvement in Indian education. Schools for Native American children had existed in the U.S. as far back as 1801, but they were run by missionary groups or churches, and Carlisle represented a shift in federal policy. As Native nations in the West faced military defeat and their lands were forcefully integrated into the United States, officials in Washington sought ways to sever the strong bonds between Native children and their communities, cultures, and homelands, replacing them with loyalty to America. How did Pratt get Congress to shift its federal policy about educating Native Americans? He wrote to the Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schertz, expressing his desire to begin a school specifically for Indians. In the letter, he wrote,

give me 300 young Indians and a place in one of our best communities and let me prove it is easy to give Indian youth the English language, education, and industries that it is imperative they have in preparation for citizenship. Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania has been abandoned for a number of years. It is in a fine agricultural county and the inhabitants are kindly disposed and long free from the universal border prejudice against Indians. Carl Schurz liked the idea and got the ball rolling. They transferred the Carlisle barracks out from under the Department of War

and placed it under the Department of the Interior, which oversaw Indian affairs. Schurz and his colleagues calculated that it would cost the government far less to educate Native Americans than to fight them. Fighting them required large amounts of time and money, and officially they concluded that it might, quote, cost a million dollars to kill an Indian in warfare, but only $1,200 to educate them for eight years. Given Pratt's lobbying efforts, the federal government's desire for land, and its desire to save money by educating the Indian out of children instead of killing them by fighting, Carlisle Indian School opened in 1879.

Carlisle had 82 students, all recruited by Pratt, including the children of multiple chiefs. This is important to note because of the implications, right? If the government has the children of Native American chiefs in their custody, then those leaders are more likely to be ready to make compromises. Often the children were viewed as bargaining chips, compromises. Often the children were viewed as bargaining chips, far from home and used as a way to keep their tribes under the thumb of the U.S. government. But make no mistake, this was not an endeavor that the United States government kept under wraps. Quite the opposite. They actively publicized it and wanted people to get excited about their plan of native boarding schools. So Pratt hired a photographer who would document the success of Carlisle. On the day students arrived, having made the long journey by train across the country, they were photographed in their traditional clothing.

were photographed in their traditional clothing. There was, in fact, a terrific, huge federal investment in what you might call a public relations program. So these schools were very highly publicized from their beginnings as exemplars of federal benevolence and beneficence toward Native people. So the spin was a very positive one, right? We're civilizing these young people, we're uplifting them, we're introducing them and giving them the benefits of a Christian education, we're teaching them English, we're teaching them trades through which they can make

their way in the world economically, which was a stretch of the imagination. But like many public relations campaigns, it wasn't always entirely accurate, but it was robust. And there was, in fact, from the 1880s forward, a remarkable photographic archive that was very intentionally produced to display to the American public at world's fairs, at local fairs and expositions. In fact, the St. Louis World's Fair, the Chicago World's Fair had model schools. They had transported actual students and had actual ongoing classrooms to show the American public, this is what it looks like. And these are the kind of skills that these poor Indian children are learning in these schools. It was a very robust effort to disseminate and publicize to the American public the quote-unquote good work that the federal government was doing

to convince the public in the positive impacts these schools were having, and I don't know, maybe even to convince federal workers themselves. When the children arrived, a before photograph was taken, federal workers themselves. When the children arrived, a before photograph was taken, and they can be juxtaposed with an after picture that shows completely different students. Their original tribal clothing and shoes were replaced by European-style clothes, and their hair had been cut. Long hair, either braided or loose, is an important part of some tribes' cultural heritage, and many schools went beyond just cutting hair. They applied kerosene to students' scalps in what they claimed was a way to keep them clean and free of lice. I mean, imagine applying kerosene to a child's head.

Survivors later recalled how corrosive and scalding and dehumanizing the practice was. Taking away outward physical representations of the students' native heritage, like moccasins, handmade dresses and breeches, their long hair, explicitly sent them the message that they had to relinquish who they were in order to become who the U.S. government wanted them to be, and that this was necessary if they wanted to live. Over the years, he ran Carlisle. Pratt took advantage of every publicity opportunity that he could find. The Carlisle Band played at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. And as our guests mentioned, they were sent to live on display at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,

which went on for many, many months. We're not talking about like a weekend fair here. It went on for months, and participants lived at the fair. Within a decade, so by 1889, the fair. Within a decade, so by 1889, the Carlisle school model led to the development of nearly 20 boarding schools in the United States. Carlisle became a model for future schools because it appeared successful, well-staffed, and was run directly under Pratt. The school, which began in army barracks, remember, expanded in the 1880s to include a chapel for church services, a three-story dining hall, classroom buildings, a warehouse, a boiler house, a new girls' dormitory, a laundry, a hospital, a print shop, an art studio, and a cemetery. And eventually, a six-foot fence was built to enclose the entire campus. a six-foot fence was built to enclose the entire campus. This expansion was remarkable for a number of reasons, but the most significant one was that the students built it all.

Can you imagine your child's schoolwork including building dorms or erecting a six-foot fence around their own school? The back-breaking manual labor of children was directly benefiting the schools and administrators as they expanded. Because Carlisle and later other boarding schools relied so heavily on students' physical labor, summer was a challenge for them. The schools paid for students to travel to school, but they refused to pay for students to go home, which meant that individual families or tribes had to pay for the children to travel hundreds

or even thousands of miles back home. In practical terms, this meant that class determined whether or not one could visit home during school breaks. We discovered that one student was sent to a boarding school in Washington state when they were four, and she was not able to return home at all until she was 10. When Jesse Paul's mother sent him to Carlisle in 1880, she sent him with a small medicine bag as a way to remember who he was. He was a Nez Perce, no matter what his new education would teach him. Jesse learned English alongside the other Indigenous children, but he never truly gave up his language, using it in secret with other Nez Perce students at the school and into adulthood after he graduated at age 18. After Jesse Paul graduated from Carlisle, he married a Nez Perce

woman who had attended a different boarding school. Together, they raised nine children to adulthood on a ranch in Idaho, and seven of their children also went through the boarding school system. As the first of its kind, Carlisle was closely watched by Congress. But when Pratt's program took off exponentially, the schools that followed were not as scrutinized. The lack of oversight led to extreme suffering and the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of children was covered up for decades. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you then. Thank you to our guest, Kay Cianina Lomawaiwa.

And 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.

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