16 July 21
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But this week brought a moment of historical redemption.
istory, and how to tell the truth about it, and why you shouldn’t hide it, or bury it, or lie about it, is all over the news right now. The removal of Confederate statues and the reconsideration of how Reconstruction was handled and, especially, how it ended, and the inevitable backlash through which Critical Race Theory has become the all-purpose storage bin for the parts of history that make white people nervous, all represent a newish and intense front in our idiotic culture wars. I have a certain interest because I am Irish American, and I know how easily the identity of a people and a culture can be destroyed by an occupying force. All of which makes the story of how some Indigenous Americans fought to bring home their dead children to their ancestral lands a crucial story this week. From the AP (via Indian Country Today):
The handoff at a graveyard on the grounds of the U.S. Army's Carlisle Barracks was part of the fourth set of transfers to take place since 2017. The remains of an Alaskan Aleut child were returned to her tribe earlier this summer.
“We want our children home no matter how long it takes,” said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who in June announced a nationwide investigation into the boarding schools that attempted to assimilate Indigenous children into white society.
Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said at the event that “forced assimilation practices" stripped away the children's clothing, their language and their culture. She said the government aims to locate the schools and burial sites and identify the names and tribal affiliations of children from the boarding schools around the country.
Have we mentioned what a profound difference having an indigenous woman as Secretary of the Interior has been?
The Carlisle school, founded by an Army officer, took drastic steps to separate Native American students from their culture, including cutting their braids, dressing them in military-style uniforms and punishing them for speaking their native languages. They were forced to adopt European names.
(This happened in Ireland, too, and the process was brilliantly lampooned by Flann O’Brien in his novel, An Beal Bocht—"The Poor Mouth." The novel’s hero, one Bonaparte O’Coonassa, is shipped off to school. The schoolmaster asks his name and, when Bonaparte runs down his lengthy Gaelic patronymic, the schoolmaster hits him in the head with an oar and screams, “Yer nam is Jams O’Donnell!” Bonaparte soon learns that every boy in the class is called Jams O’Donnell.)
Canada is currently embroiled in a huge story involving the discovery of the unmarked graves of thousands of Indigenous children who were shipped to that country’s residential schools, many of which were run by Catholic clergy. Late in the 19th century, this particular form of cultural (and actual) genocide was being practiced down here, too. General Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the school at Carlisle, made the goal of these institutions quite plain:
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Which makes the events of the past week all the more touching and beautiful.
Ione Quigley, the tribe’s historic preservation officer, recounted how she attended the disinterment earlier this week and used red ochre to prepare the remains in a traditional way. “We got everything done as respectfully and honorably as possible,” Quigley said. Russell Eagle Bear, a Rosebud Sioux tribal council representative, said a lodge was being prepared for a Friday ceremony at a Missouri River landing near Sioux City where children boarded a steamboat for the journey to the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School…
Tribal officials said that when the remains arrive in South Dakota, some will be buried in a veterans’ cemetery and others are destined for family graveyards. “We're here today and we are going to take our children home,” Eagle Bear said to about 100 attendees on Wednesday. “We have a big homecoming on the other end.”
To which we can only add, borrowing from another language and another culture that survived despite attempts to stamp it out: Cead mile failte. A hundred thousand welcomes home to you.
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