Yes, death by "civilization." Thousands of children were killed. They died of diseases, neglect, brutal punishments and abuse, the profound spirit-crushing broken-heartedness of being separated from family and culture, and on and on. We all need to know this history and finally, FINALLY!, act to fully own what happened, understand how this traumatic history continues to be perpetrated through policies and treatment of Native Americans today, and bring about full restitution and reversal of all that perpetuates this horrifying trauma. There can be no healing until we do. Meanwhile, this inter-generational trauma lives on and permeates Indigenous Peoples and the Earth and ― given our deep inner-connectedness ― all of us. We must care and be courageous enough to ACT, here, now, today. ― Molly
IMAGES COURTESY OF BAD RIVER HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICE AND MARY ANNETTE PEMBER
My mother died while surviving civilization. Although she outlived a traumatic childhood immersed in its teachings, she carried the pain of those lessons for her entire life. Like most Native American peoples, our family’s story is touched by the legacy of boarding schools, institutions created to destroy and vilify Native culture, language, family, and spirituality. My mother, Bernice, was a survivor of Saint Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School on the Ojibwe reservation in Odanah, Wisconsin. She called it the “Sister School,” a world ruled by nuns clad in long black robes.
Two hundred years ago, on March 3, 1819, the Civilization Fund Act ushered in an era of assimilationist policies, leading to the Indian boarding-school era, which lasted from 1860 to 1978. The act directly spurred the creation of the schools by putting forward the notion that Native culture and language were to blame for what was deemed the country’s “Indian problem.”
Native families were coerced by the federal government and Catholic Church officials into sending their children to live and attend classes at boarding schools. (About one-third of the 357 known Indian boarding schools were managed by various Christian denominations.) According to the Act’s text, Christian missionaries and other “persons of good moral character” were charged with introducing Native children to “the habits and arts of civilization” while encouraging them to abandon their traditional languages, cultures, and practices.
Unidentified St. Mary’s students, circa 1935 (courtesy of Bad River Tribal Historic Preservations Office)
This is what achieving civilization looked like in practice: Students were stripped of all things associated with Native life. Their long hair, a source of pride for many Native peoples, was cut short, usually into identical bowl haircuts. They exchanged traditional clothing for uniforms, and embarked on a life influenced by strict military-style regimentation. Students were physically punished for speaking their Native languages. Contact with family and community members was discouraged or forbidden altogether. Survivors have described a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the schools. Food and medical attention were often scarce; many students died. Their parents sometimes learned of their death only after they had been buried in school cemeteries, some of which were unmarked.
When my mother was alive, I would often interrogate her about her life at the Sister School. Annoyed, she would demand, “Why do you always have to go poking?” And so I’ve spent much of my personal life and professional work as a journalist trying to uncover and investigate all that happened to her and thousands of others at Indian boarding schools.
For reasons I still don’t completely understand, I am consumed by the need to validate and prove, intellectually and emotionally, her experiences at the Sister School. I crave confirmation because I believe it will somehow reinforce my mother’s stories in the face of generations of federal and Church denials of their role in the boarding schools’ brutality. It will say to me: You’re not making this up. This really did happen.
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As this country marks the bicentennial of the Civilization Fund Act, I think of the traumatic impact of my mother’s time at Saint Mary’s and, in turn, the effect that her dysfunctional survival strategies had on our family.
Although she died in 2011, I can still see her trying to outrun her invisible demons. She would walk across the floor of our house, sometimes for hours, desperately shaking her head from side to side to keep the persistent awful memories from entering. She would flap and wring her hands over and over again, as though to rid them of a clinging presence.
She was lost to our family during these times. We guarded her with our tensed stomach muscles, trying to help her battle the unknown demons. Eventually she would wind herself down. Sometimes, even laughing a bit in relief, she’d mutter, “Settle down, you crazy old chicken,” before collapsing on her bed.
Hypervigilance, defensiveness, resentment, and a hair-trigger temper had been her only allies against the Sister School messages of racial inferiority, daily reminders that Natives were primitive beings unlikely to rise above the role of servants in a white man’s world. She raged against the nuns’ label “dirty Indian,” haunted by the fear that the nuns were right, even as she scrubbed miles of floors and performed hours of heavy manual labor.
All of those awful Sister School doings cut her mind. I think she believed that she would break into 1 million pieces if she recalled the traumatic events that held her hostage, forever burned into her amygdala.
I remember a summer day, one of many, when I made my mother toast and brought her aspirin in her dark bedroom, where she was bedridden with a migraine. I placed my offerings on the little table next to her bed, and retreated back to my hiding place under the kitchen table.
After a while, she called to me. I found her lying in the dark, with one arm thrown over her eyes; the other arm was open for me. Silently, I climbed onto the bed, fitting myself into her armpit and gazing at the tiny blue Virgin Mary medal pinned to her brassiere, a hidden remnant of her boarding-school days. I remember the bedspread, stiff from its time drying outside on the clothesline and fragrant with fresh air and my mother’s scent. She would spend hours washing the laundry “white, white” like the Sisters had taught her, rushing up and down the cellar steps with baskets of heavy, wet sheets. “We may be Indian, but by God we ain’t dirty,” she’d say while hanging laundry on the line.
Bernice Pember and her brother Donald Rabideaux in 1983, on the Bad River Reservation (Photo by Mary Annette Pember)
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