Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Taken By Force

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

As the idea that the best way to handle the “Indian Problem” in America was to civilize their youth took hold in the late 19th century, the amount of boarding schools grew rapidly. But the government couldn’t rely on Native tribes to send their children to schools willingly, so they had to accomplish it another way: by force. Attendance became mandatory, and children were rounded up and sent to live at boarding schools, sometimes hundreds of miles away. They were cut off from their homes, families, and culture… and forced assimilation began. 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

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. Hello friends, welcome. Welcome to Episode 3 of Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. Prior to 1879, most of the church-run schools that educated Native American children were located near either the ancestral homeland of the tribe or near a reservation where they currently resided. The children would attend school during the day and return home in the evening, or sometimes they would stay at the school during the week and go home on the weekends. It was this return home that boarding school officials saw as the most problematic.

John B. Riley, an Indian school superintendent, noted in 1886 that, however excellent the day school may be, whatever the qualifications of the teacher, or however superior the facilities, or however superior the facilities. It is, to a great extent, offset by the habits, scenes, and surroundings at home. Only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated. Can he be satisfactorily educated? What the U.S. government needed was an official policy that would force families to hand over their children.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. We spoke in a previous episode about the role some U.S. presidents played in setting federal policy when it came to Native nations. George Washington began diplomatic relations with tribal sovereigns. Andrew Jackson personally sought at the eradication and removal of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from the Southeast. And what Jackson started, his successor, Martin Van Buren, continued. And the problem of Native Americans didn't disappear when they had been dispossessed of their ancestral land and moved west of the Mississippi to Indian country. President Ulysses S. Grant had a long and significant relationship with the Native American man Ely S. Parker, and this undoubtedly shaped his view on what place in American society indigenous people should occupy

and what citizenship in the United States should look like. At Grant's inaugural address, he called for a new vision of U.S. citizenship. He said that American Indians were the, quote, original occupants of the land, and that he would pursue their ultimate citizenship. He appointed Ely S. Parker, a Seneca man, as his Commissioner of Indian Affairs. One evening, a few months into her pregnancy, Ely Parker's mother, Elizabeth, had a dream. She dreamed of a rainbow arching through the swirls of snow that fell from the sky. As she watched, the rainbow broke in two. She took her vision to a nearby dream guesser who interpreted the dream of the fractured rainbow piercing the

clouded sky, Elizabeth, the dream interpreter said, would give birth to a son. A boy who would grow into a wise and important man. A man who would straddle two worlds. Right from the start, Hassan Oande's entry into the world was a turbulent one. Literally, Elizabeth went into labor while she was away from home. She and her husband, William, raced some 30 miles back with Elizabeth laboring the whole way. with Elizabeth laboring the whole way. Hasinawande was her sixth child, and they returned in time for her to give birth in their home on the Seneca's Reservation in western New York. She later baptized her new son and gave him the Christian name of Samuel Parker. Samuel was raised within the Six Nations community, or Iroquois Confederacy, and learned their traditions, but he also attended a Baptist mission school on the Tonawanda Reservation. The school taught the

very basics of the English language, and it was where Hasunewande, or Samuel Parker, adopted the name we know him by today, Ili. White-settled communities pressed in around the Six Nations, whose territory originally extended throughout the Northeast U.S. and into Canada. By the 19th century, the relationship between the Iroquois and the white population was strained, but pretty omnipresent. Ely would have grown up interacting with white people on a regular basis. By the time he was a teenager, Ely became the only indigenous student to enroll at Yates Academy, about 20 miles from his home, where he studied English, Latin, and Greek. As he mastered English, he began to step in as an interpreter for the Seneca elders

when they met with Indian agents about treaty negotiations in Albany and Washington, D.C. Agents who were pushing for the tribe to move off their land and make the trek into Kansas. The tribe's leaders needed Ely to bridge the language and cultures as they worked to negotiate to keep their land. In the 1850s, Ely Parker got a job as an engineer for the U.S. Treasury Department, and he traveled to Galena, Illinois, to supervise construction of the U.S. Customs Building on the banks of the Mississippi River. This customs house, finished in 1859, was considered a very impressive building and cemented Ely's reputation as an engineer. and cemented Ely's reputation as an engineer. While in Galena, Ely struck up a friendship with a shy, unassuming kind of guy, a white man who was a clerk at his father's leather goods store. This man's name was Ulysses S. Grant. Ely met Ulysses when he was arguably at the lowest point in his life. Grant had been a heavy drinker

and his military career had suffered for it. He was a grown man with a wife and kids, but he had no luck with his civilian ventures and eventually resorted to working for his father at the family business. Ely didn't care about that. He and Grant bonded because they both gave each other something they were missing in their lives. Respect. Publicly, the pair were reserved and stoic, but they forged a very real and close friendship at a point in their lives when they were both unsure of their next steps. The Civil War decided for them. At its outbreak, Ely tried to raise a regiment of Iroquois volunteers to fight for the Union, but he was turned down by New York's governor. As Grant rose in the ranks through the military, he eventually called Ely to his side, and Ely served as his military secretary

for the duration of the war. Ely's writing skills were so top-notch that he copied out the final version of the surrender agreement at Appomattox Courthouse and personally handed Confederate General Robert E. Lee his copy of the surrender to sign. When General Lee realized that Ely was indigenous, he shook his hand, commenting, I'm glad to see one real American here. Ely responded, We are all Americans. Over his two years at war, Ely had the opportunity to meet with President Lincoln a few times when the president visited battlefields and conferred with Grant. In fact, Ely was one of the last people to see Lincoln

alive. He was at the White House in the afternoon before Lincoln headed to Ford's Theater, where John Wilkes Booth was waiting for him. On April 13, 1869, after Grant was elected president, Ely was appointed as the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the first indigenous person to hold that position and the first indigenous person to hold such a high government office. In this new role, Ely established a peace policy and sought fulfillment of treaties. There was a large drop in the military actions taken in the western frontier after some of his reforms took effect. The recently inaugurated President Grant blamed white settlers for a number of the problems that were usually blamed on Native Americans, saying, the Indians require as much protection from the

whites as the white does from the Indians. My own experience has been that little trouble would have ever been had from them but for the encroachment and influence of bad whites. Together, Ely Parker and Ulysses Grant developed a plan to humanize, civilize, and Christianize Indigenous people that involved large, well-protected reservations. You can see how this plan, even if Ely Parker believed in his own good intentions, would make Native American groups feel as if they had been betrayed by one of their own. The churches who were tasked with Christianizing the Native Americans were happy to cooperate. In 1872, 73 Indian agencies were allotted to a variety of Christian denominations, with Methodists and Presbyterians leading the way. By 1891, with Ulysses Grant and Ely Parker long gone from office, Commissioner of Indian Affairs

Thomas Jefferson Morgan introduced a plan for the Indian school system that he called a settled Indian policy. If, as Thomas Jefferson Morgan said, schools were one of the chief factors of great transformation, why not establish enough to encompass all Native American young people? If they could all be gathered up, he reasoned, and kept at the schools for a period of ten years, the work of civilizing, Americanizing, and Christianizing Native Americans would be substantially accomplished. Not only would the next generation of Indians all speak English, they would all be accustomed to the European settler lifestyle Morgan reasoned. To accomplish this goal, to gather up nearly all the native children in the United States,

would be a considerable effort, and it could only be accomplished one way, by force. It was the only way Morgan thought to bring the young Indians into a right relationship with the age in which they live and put into their hands the tools by which they may gain for themselves food and clothing and build for themselves homes. Morgan thought that some families would willingly surrender their children, but he warned of what would happen should they not. They would be swept aside or crushed by the irresistible tide of civilization, which has no place for drones, no sympathy with idleness, and no rations for the improvident. The progress of civilization was imperative, and Morgan thought that Native people had no right to deny their children this progress. He said that Native parents had no right to forcibly keep their children out of school to grow up a race of barbarians and semi-savages. And yes, that is a direct quote. Morgan said, we owe it to these

children to prevent, forcibly if need be, so great and appalling a calamity from befalling them. so great and appalling a calamity from befalling them. John Williamson, part of the Dakota agency that enforced the law that required children to attend boarding schools, wrote, Compulsion through the police is often necessary, and should this be required during the coming year, it will be heroically resorted to regardless of the results. The treaty with the Indians gives the children to the government for school purposes, nine months in the year, but the punishment therein provided in case they fail to comply is hardly humane or just. If taking ration tickets only meted out merited punishment to the heads of families who are alone guilty, it would be a wise provision, but the children have to go hungry and suffer the disobedience of the parents.

It is better, in my opinion, to compel attendance through the police than the taking of ration tickets for non-attendance. And what would happen if this experiment of forced removal was unsuccessful? Morgan said that if, after this reasonable preparation, they are unable or unwilling to sustain themselves, they must go to the wall. It will be survival of the fittest. The mandatory boarding schools were the entire foundation of the federal government's plan to completely eradicate whatever made Native Americans indigenous and reservations and assimilated into the U.S. political and economic system so that someday they would be fit to become the citizens that Ulysses S. Grant and E. Lee Parker had once envisioned. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. 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! 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. The day school programs previously established gave way to off-reservation boarding schools. The day schools often had student populations of 30 students, mostly from the same tribe, while the off-reservation boarding schools sometimes had as many as 1,700. When Richard Henry Pratt convinced Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to fund an off-reservation boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Schurz enthusiastically adopted the

idea. Boarding schools are required, Schurz said, because it is just as necessary to teach Indian children how to live as how to read and write. And of course, by live, he meant live as white Americans live. Once the dam broke and boarding schools began rushing over the American landscape with the force of a mighty river, the plan created by Pratt was implemented to varying degrees in hundreds of schools around the country. Students remained at the schools on average for 10 months a year. They lived under harsh schedules designed to mimic military discipline, including barracks, uniforms, and drills. Not only were students given new names, in some places like Oklahoma they were given new birthdays. Anything they brought from home was collected and destroyed.

Children were segregated by gender, and the education held to strict gender norms to prepare children for life outside of the boarding school. Here's Native American boarding school researcher Kay Ciannina Lomawema describing life for students. From late 1800s through the 1930s, girls led a much more strictly confined and constrained life within the boarding school parameters. All the children in that time were subject to a military style discipline. I mean, they were organized in companies, dressed in government issue uniforms, marched in double file from dining room to classrooms to work details. But the girls were really under tremendously more intense surveillance down to matrons tracking their blue bags. In other words, their bags of menstrual rags, to make sure that girls were on an even schedule and trying to discern where perhaps someone might be pregnant.

Locked into their dormitories at night, that included locking down the fire escapes in the dormitories. Very rigid, very strict control and surveillance by the matrons. Now, the boys were under the same military discipline, but they were granted relatively more freedom. Chilocco, for example, was an agricultural campus and the boys worked on 8,000 plus acres. So they were out working in the environment on Saturdays. The girls under a matron might be allowed to play in the yard outside the dormitory. The boys had free run of that campus on Saturdays. And that's the kind of environment where their gangs really ruled. And they could come up with all kinds of mischief,

pranks, sabotage, arson sometimes. The girls, it was a lot tougher. So I think it's really inspiring in a way to see the ways in which the girls subverted that surveillance and control, smuggling bean sandwiches from the kitchen up to their dorm rooms, because kids were always hungry. There are even Ponca girls that managed to smuggle in peyote of all things and hold ceremonies of the Native American church. I find that absolutely astonishing. So day-to-day experience was quite different for the boys and girls. And I would have to say, having grown up with my dad and hearing his stories, it was a revelation to me interviewing women alums because their experiences were so different. I hadn't quite understood that or anticipated that.

They were in the same classrooms, but at least until the early 1930s, the classroom itself was boys on one side, girls on the other. Same with the dining hall, girls at one end, boys at the other end. Very limited opportunities for communication of any kind, which was hard when brothers and sisters came into the school together. Because of the gender segregation, they could barely speak to one another. Certainly a very Victorian sense of morality. A sense that tied directly to the assumptions made about what characterized Native societies,

often completely incorrect, even mythological assumptions. But I mean as early as Columbus and some of the early explorers, this notion of barbarians, of savages having no morality, having no sense of sexual control, of being amoral and licentious, those ideas persist over time in very strong ways. So that certainly played into it. I think part of it was just the whole context or culture of control in an institutional setting. How you control human beings in an institutional setting. You strip them of identity, you regiment everything. They're not allowed to wear their own clothing, their hair is all cut in similar styles,

that extreme homogenization and regimentation. And in this instance then, segregation of the genders, certainly the Victorian morality, the sense of Native people as licentious and amoral, but then just how do you control young people? And of course the fear then that there's going to be some kind of relationships between boys and girls and we absolutely must shut that down. And that certainly in the early 20th century was playing out on reservations as well. So you do see this concern with Native reproduction and a very eugenicist ideology of we don't want that happening. One student who attended the Ponca Boarding School in Oklahoma

recounted that the most profound aspect of my sojourn at the Indian School is the specter of discipline. Discipline in its most rigid, non-yielding, almost brutal, shocking, and galling state. Non-Indian was the order of the day. Boarding schools were crippled by a lack of resources. At Rainy Mountain, one teacher was in charge of 110 students ages 6 to 18. was in charge of 110 students ages 6 to 18. There is no chance that these kinds of conditions would have been tolerated in white schools. When we hear about what life was like for Native students, we might be inclined to think that this was all being done in secret,

when often that was not the case. Photographers widely publicized photographs that were commissioned to show off to the American public at large what a wonderful job they were doing, civilizing the students. Families were invited to attend events at the school, and music and athletic programs helped bolster the image that the boarding schools were really up to extraordinary things. really up to extraordinary things. If families could make it to the boarding school, which was certainly not always feasible given that children were taken hundreds or even thousands of miles away, they would see their children in a military type uniform. They might marvel at the English their children were learning. And in some cases, parents saw this education, this English immersion as one of the only opportunities available to their child. They might see their boys operating farm equipment or their girls ironing.

They might watch a basketball or a baseball game or listen to children play a musical instrument. Jim Thorpe was born on May 22, 1887, on the Sac and Fox Reservation in Oklahoma. His birth name was Wathohuk, meaning bright path or path lit by lightning. But he was christened in the Catholic Church as Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe. Jim had a twin brother who died of typhoid when they were nine years old, and a few years later, Jim was sent to a federally run Indian boarding school, Haskell Institute, in Lawrence, Kansas. At the Haskell Institute, Jim was introduced to the game of football. The students made a team and fashioned a ball out of wool yarn. Jim enjoyed playing the game with the other kids, but it wasn't enough.

He wasn't happy at Haskell, and he periodically ran away from the school. Jim's father made arrangements for him to be sent to a different school, one so far away that he wouldn't be able to run all the way back home to their reservation. By the time Jim arrived at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania, his mother had died in childbirth, and his father had died from a wound during a hunting accident. Jim was completely on his own. The story of how he was recruited into sports at Carlisle has become the stuff of legend. While walking across campus one day in his overalls and work shirt, Jim saw some upperclassmen practicing the high jump and asked if he could give it a try. The bar was set at 5'9", an inch

higher than Jim's 5'8 frame. He cleared the bar easily on his first try and in his heavy overalls. Word spread quickly, and Jim was called into the coach's office the next morning. He was worried that he had done something wrong, but Coach Warner just wanted to tell him that he had broken the school's high jump record. Coach Warner and the athletics department at Carlisle recognized Jim's natural athleticism. He was lithe and graceful, sturdy on his feet and fast as lightning. Jim went on to compete in literally every type of sport you can think of. Football, baseball, track, lacrosse, hockey, handball, tennis, boxing, and ballroom dancing. Jim played football for Carlisle and Coach Warner for five years, and Carlisle had a very competitive team. They played high-ranking

teams like Harvard and the Army. In fact, future president Dwight D. Eisenhower literally injured his knee trying to tackle Jim Thorpe when Carlisle played the army. By 1912, Jim Thorpe competed at the Stockholm Olympics. In the decathlon, Jim finished nearly 700 points ahead of his closest competitor. He ran the 1500 meter race in 4 minutes, 40.1 seconds, which was a record that would not be broken until 1972, 60 years later. Remarkably, Jim's shoes went missing before his event. They were either misplaced or stolen, and he had to improvise, tying on mismatched shoes at the last minute. As he received his gold medals from King Gustav V of Sweden, the king declared him the world's greatest athlete. Jim's only response was a quiet,

thanks, king. In late 1912, the International Olympic Committee stripped Jim of his Olympic medals and records because they learned that he had previously played on a professional baseball team, for which he was paid a very small amount, like $2 a game. The Olympic rules at the time said that only amateurs were allowed to compete, but it was a double standard because it was extremely common for college-aged athletes to play for professional teams over the summer months. And Jim Thorpe did nothing his white teammates weren't also doing. The only difference was that they knew to play using aliases so they could market themselves to Olympic teams as amateurs. And Jim didn't. And though he was pretty unfairly stripped of his medals and labeled as a professional athlete,

it did open him up to a whole new level of sports competition. In 1913, Jim signed with the National Baseball League to play for the New York Giants. He played both major and minor league baseball for nine years. At the same time that he was playing professional baseball, Jim Thorpe also played professional football. He started with the Canton Bulldogs and was paid $250. A game is staggering amount at the time. It's like $7,500 a game now, which of course is nothing compared to Tom Brady money, but it was a lot of money at the time. And he didn't just play pro football in between his pro baseball games. He coached the Canton Bulldogs too, eventually becoming the first president of the American Professional Football Association, which would

later evolve into the NFL. You're going to think I'm making this up, but I swear it's true. Jim Thorpe was also a pro basketball player for two years with a team called the World Famous Indians. Jim summed up his career as an athlete pretty succinctly when he said, I never was content unless I was trying my skill or testing my endurance. After he retired from his sports career, Jim went to Hollywood and became a stuntman and a character actor, and he was often cast in bit roles as tribal members or chiefs. Jim Thorpe died of heart failure in 1953 at age 65, and in 1982, decades after his death, the International Olympic Committee finally cracked to public pressure and created replicas

of Jim's 1912 medals. But even though they delivered the medals to Thorpe's family, they refused to reinstate his Olympic times and records to their rightful place. While the story of Jim Thorpe seems like an incredible underdog story of orphaned Native American boy takes the sports world by storm, and it was, the reality of life for the overwhelming majority of Native children was nothing like Jimms. In reality, the children were learning very little academically, as more than half the day was devoted to things like menial labor. And I do mean menial. One Winnebago boy said he worked for two years at a washing machine to reduce the operating expenses for running the school. He said, it didn't take me

long to learn how to run a washing machine. The rest of the years, I nursed a growing hatred for that washing machine. While the government often claimed they were preparing Native children for the future, it's very difficult to make the case that forcing an adolescent boy to stand and use a washing machine for years was preparing him for a great career. Boarding school experiences were full of complexity for every student who crossed their thresholds. Adam Nordwall was born on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota. His mother was a member of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and his father was a Swedish immigrant. Adam later gave himself the name Adam Fortunate Eagle. When Adam was only five years old, his father died, leaving Adam's mother alone to care for eight children. It's

unclear what role Adam's mother played in the decision to send her six oldest children to Pipestone Indian Training School 300 miles away from their home. On the reservations at the time, children were considered wards of the state. So she wasn't necessarily able to control what happened to her own children. I think most modern Americans today would be absolutely shocked and appalled to understand that relationship. As a ward, you have no rights. And as a guardian, the federal government had almost unlimited power over Native peoples, including the right to take their children by police force when necessary.

Adam spent the next 10 years at Pipestone and has since written books and made documentaries about his life. He says he was told at five years old that Mr. and Mrs. Burns, the caretakers of the school, were his new parents and that he cried a lot in those first days, but he began to love the school. Adam said, those 10 years at Pipestone, it was the best thing that ever happened to us kids. At Pipestone, students had complete access to the school library, and the shelves were stocked with books about indigenous people. Adam reported that he hadn't even known that there were other indigenous tribes until he got to the school. Kids at Pipestone were allowed to speak their home languages, and in general, as Adam said, it was okay to be Indian there.

By the 1970s, Adam was teaching Native American studies at Cal State Hayward when he was asked to attend the International Conference of World Futures in Rome, Italy. He said, of course, and in his research for the trip, he realized that no one had ever discovered Italy. Adam recalled that his sense of logic and reason kicked in. He said, if an Italian, Christopher Columbus, can lay claim to the discovery of the Americas, with a native population estimated at 80 million in North, Central, and South America, then an American Indian should be able to discover a land called Italy. After contacting officials to ensure that he was not about to cause an international incident, Adam stepped off the plane in Italy wearing full regalia and carrying a ceremonial

spear. I proclaim this day the discovery of Italy, he said. What right did Columbus have to discover America when it had already been inhabited for thousands of years? The same right I now have to come to Italy and proclaim the discovery of your country. This bold statement was followed by a nearly 90-minute press conference where he established the Bureau of Italian Affairs and pledged to not force any changes on the Italian government. Needless to say, his stunts and statements attracted a lot of attention, and he was invited to meet the President of Italy and even the Pope. and he was invited to meet the President of Italy and even the Pope. When Adam was taken to meet Pope Paul VI, the Pope brought up his hand with the papal ring expectantly.

And if you don't know, it's tradition for the papal ring to be kissed when a person is introduced to the Pope. But Adam, he ignored the extended papal ring, and instead he raised his own hand, adorned with a turquoise and silver ring. Some people today might say, the audacity. But Pope Paul VI smiled and shook Adam's extended hand. and shook Adam's extended hand. In retirement, Adam and his wife moved to the Paiute Shoshone Reservation, where his wife was born in western Nevada. Adam passed the time by making traditional pipes and dance costumes, as well as totem poles and sculptures. And these are not just little hobby crafts. He sells them sometimes for thousands of dollars. And he credits his carving abilities to his time

at the Pipestone School in his youth. The school was built near a pipestone quarry, so students learned to carve stone in the ancient tradition of pipe making. Pipestone is considered a soft stone with about the same hardness as a fingernail. So it's been a part of traditional indigenous carving for many generations. It's a reddish color, and it's been said to symbolize the blood of the ancestors. Adam Fortunate Eagle had a mostly good experience attending Pipestone, and throughout the primary source documents, you can find examples of students who had some positive stories to tell. Things like access to the libraries and the sense of community that Adam enjoyed were not the norm, unfortunately.

How students recalled their boarding school experiences depended on so many factors. What their life was like before they attended, what they were told and what they believed about why they were going to the school, if they knew people or had siblings at the school, and how far they were from home. Students coped with the trauma in a variety of ways, some of it constructive, some of it destructive. Some, like Jim Thorpe, channeled their energy into sports. Others ran away or succumbed to substance abuse or depression. The website for the National Museum of the American Indian has a page that highlights this distinction. The schools were harsh and often unforgiving, but it says many of the

Indian students had some good memories of their school days and made friends for life. Some students were able to make connections with students from other Native nations that they never would have made otherwise. K.C. and Nina Lomaweiman notes this in her writing that, quote, student life was more richly textured than a simple opposition to non-Indian authority. Her book, they called it Prairie Light, discusses this, that many students and their families believed that the schools could provide shelter, food, clothing, job training, and isolation from disease in times of community need. History is complex. We want to distill it into black and white, into bad and good. And while I think we can all agree that forcibly removing children from their families falls into the bad camp, we cannot discount the variety of experiences students had in the schools

and the meaning they made from those experiences. You know, we have this multiplicity, diversity of experience and outcomes. And alums who said to me, Chalco is the best thing that ever happened to me. And it's so important to honor that experience and to remember that it in no way absolves the people responsible for what they set those schools up, what they designed those schools to do, and the agenda of Erase and Replace, the agenda of erasure of Indigenous peoples. The fact that some Native people survived it and made something good of it in no way absolves or exculpates the folks responsible,

be they federal, be they church, for what they tried to do. It's a testament to Native people. But it in no way means, oh yeah, those schools were a good thing. Absolutely not. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you then.

Thank you to our guest scholar, Kate Cianina Lomawemop, 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.