RIVERSIDE: Sherman, other boarding schools devastated Indian culture
Today, Riverside’s Sherman Indian High School celebrates Native American culture.
But it opened in 1902 as part of a government effort to, as the leader of a Pennsylvania Indian school put it, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Scholars from across the country recently gathered at Sherman and UC Riverside to share research and discuss the legacy of Sherman and other Indian boarding schools.
They were joined at the symposium by, among others, former students who recalled both the trauma of forced assimilation and the enrichment of going to school with kids from tribes across the West.
Lorene Sisquoc, curator of Sherman Indian Museum and one of the organizers of the event, said modern Native American life cannot be understood without studying the boarding schools.
Many students were forcibly taken from their parents and prohibited from expressing their cultural traditions once they arrived at the schools.
The institutions helped lead to the loss or diminution of cultural traditions among many tribes, Sisquoc said.
“So many tribes now are rebuilding their tribal communities after the impact of the boarding schools,” Sisquoc said. “Families were disrupted, and our languages, the ceremonies, the tribal social structure, our relationship with the plants and the land, the traditional knowledge we had – much of it was put on hold because of the boarding schools.”
Sisquoc said the symposium educated current Sherman students – some of whom attended portions of the conference – and gave voice to those whose stories had in some cases never been told publicly.
No one knows how many Native Americans went through the hundreds of boarding schools the federal government established in the late 1800s and early 1900s, said David Adams, professor emeritus of history at Cleveland State University and an expert on the schools.
But Adams estimated that in 1930, about 80 percent of Native American children attended boarding schools.
Their presence wasn’t always voluntary.
In his talk Thursday, Feb. 7, at UCR, Adams displayed a photo of U.S. Army troops converging on a Hopi village in the early 1900s to seize children from their parents to take them to boarding schools.
In other cases, agents manipulated parents into handing over their kids. Many parents voluntarily sent their kids to boarding schools, sometimes so the children could escape the hunger and poverty on reservations, and sometimes because parents thought the boarding schools would help Native Americans survive by navigating the white-dominated system, Adams said.
LOW EXPECTATIONS
Most of the boarding schools were on reservations. Sherman – until 1970 known as Sherman Institute – was one of 25 schools opened outside reservations, to be far from the influence of native culture. It is one of only four remaining boarding schools nationwide.
Little research was done on Indian boarding schools until the past 20 to 25 years, Adams said. UCR has become the national leader on the topic, he said.
For decades, most scholars focused on the wars between the U.S. government and settlers and Native Americans, Adams said.
But the boarding schools were a type of war, he said.
“Once they (Native Americans) were defeated militarily, the next question was, ‘How do we win them over culturally?’” Adams said. “The way to do that was to get the children. If you can reconstruct their identities, you’ve almost solved the quote-unquote Indian problem. The thought was the older Indians were a hopeless cause.”
Children were required to attend church, as part of Christianization efforts, said Cliff Trafzer, Rupert Costo chair in American Indian affairs at UC Riverside and an organizer of the symposium. Traditional religious ceremonies and visits to shamans were prohibited.
The children were punished for speaking in their native languages, Trafzer said. Ceremonial objects and traditional medicines were confiscated.
Students were taught masonry, cooking, carpentry and sewing.
“The idea was to make Indians useful laborers,” Trafzer said. “The belief was that native people were not smart enough to go on to college.”
CHEAP LABOR
Most students at Sherman worked during the summer, and sometimes during the school year, at Inland businesses, said Kevin Whalen, a UCR graduate student who is researching Sherman.
The work program was intended not only to assimilate the Indian children and prepare them for jobs, but also to keep them from “backsliding,” from being influenced by native culture if they returned to their reservations, Whalen said.
Many Sherman boys worked as laborers on Fontana Farms, a sprawling agricultural operation in what is now the city of Fontana. The farms paid Native American workers about half the wages of white workers, Whalen said.
The separation of children from their families was wrenching for the parents, said Jean Keller, an expert on Sherman who teaches at three San Diego County community colleges.
In some cases, children spent more than a decade away from their families. Off-reservation schools didn’t want the children to go home, to be immersed once again in native culture, and the train fare often was more than a family could afford.
“When the kid came home again, they weren’t home anymore,” Keller said. “They didn’t have their language. They didn’t go through the coming-of-age ceremonies.”
But many students tried to preserved their culture as best as they could.
Matthew Levas’ mother, who attended Sherman in the 1930s and before that an Arizona boarding school, told him of taking her culture underground after being scolded for speaking her Southern Paiute language and singing traditional Paiute songs.
“They used to sing the songs where no one could hear them,” Levas said.
His mother continued speaking Southern Paiute with monolingual family members after returning from Sherman. But she spoke only English to him, a legacy, Levas said, of the instruction in the boarding schools that English is a superior language.
By the time Levas attended Sherman in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the school was in transition. Students were no longer punished for speaking their languages or performing ceremonies, he said.
But it wasn’t actively encouraged. There were not yet the native culture and history classes, or the basket-weaving and beadwork lessons, that are an integral part of today’s Sherman.
Sisquoc said that, despite the cultural devastation that boarding schools caused, many students had mostly good memories of Sherman. Some saw it as a refuge from the poverty of the reservation and, in some cases, from a dysfunctional home life. Students met spouses, made lifelong friends, forged relationships with people from different tribes and learned trades that turned into long-term jobs.
Yet, no matter what the individual experiences, the boarding schools’ attempt to wipe out Indian culture has had an indelible effect on Native American life, she said.
“Any culture that has their children taken away for years at a time will see an impact on everything that happens after that,” she said.
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