Probe details US' dark history

Higher education institutions found to be deeply entangled in colonialism

The Colorado Historical Society's latest investigation into the inhumanities in indigenous residential schools has once again exposed the United States' dark history of racial genocide against Native Americans.

The investigation report said more than 1,000 children from dozens of tribes attended two major boarding schools from 1892 to 1909, during which at least 67 died. Inhumane treatment and physical abuse were widespread in both schools.

This probe followed the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report released by the Interior Department in May last year, which discovered over 500 deaths at 408 federally-run boarding schools.

Such institutions were intended for identity alteration, with goals of territorial dispossession and forced assimilation. Manual labor of children and tribal trust accounts were used to supplement federal funding to run those schools, the report said.

As the US society gives more attention to the deliberate destruction of Native Americans, more aging survivors and descendants of victims have spoken up about their sufferings, warning that the country has still a long way to go before true reparation is made.

"I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred," Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier told The Associated Press, as she recalled being locked in a basement at St Francis Indian Mission School in South Dakota for weeks as punishment for breaking the school's strict rules.

Soldier was sent there when she was 4, where her hair braids, a symbol of indigenous girl status, were cut off, and her native language was depicted as "the devil's language".

"The only thing they didn't do was to put us in (an oven) and gas us," she said, comparing the treatment of Native Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II.

The US did not recognize the citizenship rights of Native Americans despite its independence in the 18th century. Instead, it implemented bloody killings, violent expulsion and resource looting against them for more than a century.

Since the US Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act in 1819, a series of laws and policies have been formulated to promote the establishment of indigenous boarding schools across the country, in an attempt to kill, annihilate or assimilate indigenous people and eradicate their cultures.

Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania in 1879 as the first off-reservation Indian boarding school, was well-known for his credo "Kill the Indian, and Save the Man", meaning to eradicate any signs of Native life and practices, including cutting the hair and braids of children, banning indigenous languages or customs, forcing them into Christianity and following Christian dogma and practices, even forbidding hugging among siblings.

Beatings, hard labor

Many children in the schools suffered beatings, malnutrition, hard labor and other forms of neglect and abuse. Some never returned to their families. The federal report said more than 50 schools were found to have marked or unmarked graves, and over 500 Indian children died, with the number expected to reach thousands or even tens of thousands as the investigation continues.

The intention was "to assimilate them (the Indian children) and steal everything Indian out of them except their blood, make them despise who they are, their culture, and forget their language", said Lacey Kinnart, who works for the Minnesota-based National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

The decadeslong boarding school system, a particularly ugly chapter of US history, was a form of genocide which complies with the UN's definition of genocide, said Barbara Landis, who had worked for decades as Carlisle Indian School's biographer for the Cumberland County Historical Society in Pennsylvania.

"I don't think there's any way to whitewash that," said Landis, who has maintained a website to forward names of former Carlisle Indian School students to their respective nations since 1993.

The US boasts some of the world's most prestigious universities, but until recently little had been known about its origins — its higher education was largely founded on the seizure of indigenous land and eradication of indigenous people.

Land grabbing

In 1862, the US federal government passed the Morrill Act, granting federal land to the states for the development of higher education, with land often taken from American Indians through unequal settlements, extortion or slaughter.

As a result, 10.7 million acres, or 43,300 square kilometers, an area nearly twice the size of New Jersey, of land belonging to about 250 indigenous tribes were forcibly bought or seized at low prices.

Fifty-two universities nationwide became beneficiaries of the law, such as Cornell University, the University of California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Many small — now mostly liberal arts — colleges dotting the Northeastern, mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states, as well as the towns and farms around them, were placed on dispossessed Native lands, as revealed by the High Country News magazine in its report series published in 2020.

"There would be no higher education as we know it in the US without the original and ongoing colonization of indigenous peoples and lands, just like there would be no US," Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of education at the University of British Columbia in Canada, said."There is no moment or time or place or institution that is not deeply entangled with the violence of colonialism."

Historical records and media reports showed that since its founding, the US has systematically deprived Native Americans of their rights to life and basic political, economic and cultural rights through killings, displacements and forced assimilation to physically and culturally eradicate this group. Such existential crisis endures till today.

The genocide has led to a precipitous drop in the population of indigenous communities, deterioration of their living conditions, lack of social security, low economic status, threats to their safety, and plummeted political influence.

Before the arrival of white settlers in 1492, there were 5 million indigenous people. Yet by 1800, the number dropped to 600,000, and by 1900 to only 237,000, the lowest in history. More than a dozen tribes, such as the Pequot, Mohegan and Massachusett, were by then completely extinct.

Xinhua