> Date sent: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 12:58:53 -0800
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: James Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: query: "Indian" schools
> I heard a report this morning on (US) NPR about the abuses that many
> Canadian Indians had been subject to in boarding schools sponsored and run
> by the Canadian government and the United Church of Canada. Independent of
> the sexual and physical abuse that was the centerpiece of the story (which
> was about a lawsuit), does anyone know about this program? were Indian
> children forcibly taken from their parents and/or communities? I know they
> were forced to stop speaking their original languages and prevented from
> practicing their cultural rituals. But how were they separated from their
> parents?
>
> Further, how different is the case of the US, which the NPR story never
> mentioned? The fact that my wife's friends in the Indian community hate the
> idea of "Indian" schools and the fact-based fictional children's movie
> called "The Education of Little Tree" that I saw a while back suggests that
> the similarities between the US and Canadian systems of aggressive
> acculturation are more important than their differences.
>
> (I wish I could talk to my wife's friends about this, but she moved on to a
> new job so we see them much more rarely.)
>
>
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] &
> http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
> "There's nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine... Been here 4
> 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000.
> And we've only engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years
> vs. 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a
> threat? The planet isn't going away. We are."
> -- George Carlin.
>
Response: The reasons and means for taking Indian children varied:
1) Some of the children were products of "liasons" between married
white men and Indian women and the children were wanted in neither
world so they were farmed out for adoption (the lighter skinned the
better);
2) Indian parents were promised a future for their children that the
parents had no hope of providing;
3) Indian families were split apart by early deaths, abandonment etc
and the children were sent to boarding schools so that the women
would have some chance of finding another mate;
4) The missionaries tricked Indians into believing that free
education was being provided and in the course of signing many
papers, the parents wound up signing away--for adoption--their
children through tricky language;
5) Children were placed in religious schools with the promise of
being trained to work for religious orders (like Nuns and Priests);
6) children were actually physically kidnapped with parents being
told that their children were dead or about to die from serious
diseases;
7) Tribes were given token sums to identify children without strong
family support and those children were taken through false promises
or just taken after being abandoned;
8) Children, often sent to be with relatives in urban areas--away
from the reservations--were especially vulnerable to being isolated
and taken without support from the Tribes on the reservations;
9) Many Indian children were born from midwives on the Reservation
with no birth certificates issued so that true parentage and custody
could be easily disputed;
10) The Mormons have this thing about Indians as "The lost Tribes of
Israel" and for theological reasons were heavily involved in taking,
adopting out and training Indian children;
These are some of the common stories.
Jim Craven
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