September 1, 2011

Dear Members and Friends,

There is much that I do not know about the history of my country, but I have been saddened to read about our government’s “War on Children.” In 1877, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to end on-reservation schools and begin to build off-reservation boarding schools for Indian children, ages 7 to 18.

These children were taken from their families and taken to boarding schools far from the familiar reservations where they had been raised. Boarding schools were deliberately established far from the reservations, so that children could not make their ways home.

The government’s idea behind this scheme was to Americanize and Christianize these children so that they would become regular citizens, according to the white man’s ideas of civilization. At that time Indians were still called savages. And that word appears in the records of that period. The idea was to make Indian culture extinct.

The first insult to the children was to put them in uniforms, which meant nothing to them, but meant much to the white man’s culture. You can imagine what it does to the soul to anyone who is forced to wear a uniform. Not even the teachers at these schools sensed the cruelty of the system.

In addition to daily school work, where they were taught English and often given new names to replace their original Indian names, there was work to do after the hours of study; such as laundry, cleaning, tending to the farm animals, helping prepare the meals and washing up after.

The officials at the Bureau of Indian Affairs had not a clue to the evil they were perpetrating in deliberately trying to make a culture extinct. The church also was complicit in this. As one student said, “We had a God we worshipped who was always reliable; you gave us a dead man on a cross.” You can imagine how little the Bureau of Indian Affairs understood about the drama of salvation as invented by the early church, beginning in 325 A. D.

There is much in our history to make us weep. One can only hope that our treatment of other cultures has improved since the dark days of the 1870s and 1880s. The off-reservation boarding schools were not closed until 1928.

Let us hope that today, as our children return to school, we have the wisdom to teach that every human being is worthy of respect and dignity. I sincerely hope that this is what is happening now in 2011.

You may ask, “Where were the voices of dissent and warning?” There were intelligent and merciful people who understood the evil of the off-reservation boarding schools. But they were silenced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Love,