In the past several months i have told you about the concerns i have with the direction our current education system is headed.
The removal of statues, revisionist history, cancel culture and just last week dr. Marvin Schulteis and I shared our research on the latest movement to remove certain books from our schools.
What would you say if I told you that this same situation has happened in the past?
Nazi Germany? The Soviet Union? Communist China?
Nope. All of those guesses would be wrong.
The answer is it was carried out by our own federal government in an effort to completely eliminate the thoughts and culture of people living here in the United States.
This federal program specifically targeted a group of people who opposed the policies of our federal government.
Does this sound familiar?
The people targeted were the American Indians.
The federal government had tried for years to forcibly make the Indians bow to the will of the federal government. Troops were sent in, forts were built, and thousands of people died.
All to no avail. The Indians were fierce fighters, excellent tacticians, and utilized guerilla warfare to their great advantage.
In 1874 an American expedition under col. George Armstrong Custer, entered the Sioux country in the black hills, and discovered gold.
Americans now demanded the Sioux land and American troops were sent in to protect miners who now flooded the region.
Red Cloud told his warriors it was hopeless to fight and pushed for peace.
But the young warriors including Red Cloud’s son joined the camps of Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa holy man, and Crazy Horse, the leading Oglala Sioux war leader.
Custer now headed for these camps along the river which the Sioux called greasy grass and the whites called the Little Big Horn (Montana).
Custer attacked with a force of 600 calvary.
About 2000 Indians were waiting for him.
Custer and all his men were killed.
The Sioux could win battles but not wars. The Indians always proved more than a match for the soldiers.
What did the Indians in was that they had little time between battles to hunt for food, dry meat, and prepare hides.
The army now chased the Sioux throughout the winter, guided by Pawnees and Crows who were bitter enemies of the Sioux.
Pawnees and Crows could find the Sioux when the whites could not.
The war ended in the winter of 1876 –1877 , not through a great battle but by simply wearing the Sioux out, who now surrendered with their families.
Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse took the remainder of their followers to Canada, but even they eventually returned
Crazy Horse wound up on a reservation and did not take well to that way of life. Constantly at odds with the authorities, Crazy Horse was killed by bayonet wound from a soldier in a guardhouse scuffle on sept. 5, 1877.
Sitting Bull would die years later shot down by Indian police, sent out to arrest him for his support of the ghost dance movement.
Ghost dance movement- religious movement led by Paiute holy man named Wovoka. Said there would be a day that Indians would raise from the dead and all white men would disappear and that the buffalo would return.
The religion said you must not hurt or harm anyone, and you must not fight. Indians were to dance in a large circle calling to the spirits of their ancestors.
If their faith was strong enough, the old world of their fathers would return, the whites would vanish, and the buffalo would return. This was called the ghost dance.
The murder of Crazy Horse led to a long string of battles that came to an end with the slaughter of the remaining Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee South Dakota.
By 1876, only the Apaches stood in the way of complete American control of the west.
In the late 1860’s and early 1870’s most of the Apaches had settled on the reservations.
Victorio of the Mimbre Apaches and Geronimo of the Chiricahuas Apaches were the last to resist being put on a reservation.
Victorio escaped from the reservation in 1879 and conducted raids in both the U.S. and Mexico before he was finally cornered and killed by Mexican soldiers in 1880.
Geronimo as well escaped the reservation in 1885 and led a reign of terror until he was captured on September 4, 1886.
Once captured, he and his people were moved first to a reservation in Florida, then Alabama, and finally to a reservation in Ft. Sill Oklahoma in1894.
Geronimo now became a popular attraction for parades and expositions (1904 worlds fair) My grandmother saw him there.
Even with these US military victories over the Indians, above all else, the Indians were strong willed and refused to be broken.
From the beginning of the Indian Wars, it became apparent that the military simply could not eradicate the entire Indian problem in the west.
So, what could be done?
During the 1850’s and 1860’s the eastern protestant churches pushed for an end to the atrocities being committed on the Indian people.
Bishop Henry Whipple, (not Mr. Whipple of Charmin TP fame)of the episcopal church was one of the first reformers to dominate American Indian policy after the civil war.
He was convinced that the only way the Indians could survive would be their rapid adoption of Christianity and Anglo-American culture.
Whipple told Congress that Indian administration must be reformed.
Whipple’s followers called themselves friends of the Indians and argued that Indians were inferior to whites not because of their capacity to learn, but because they were like children-they were still advancing up the ladder of civilization.
Therefore, reformers believed that for Indians to survive, they had to shed everything that made them Indian.
If the Indians refused, reformers would have to force them to do so for their own good.
Indian culture was to be destroyed in order to save the Indian people.
Reformers sincerely believed this was a policy of kindness, honesty, and justice.
So folks, let’s stop right there for a second. The federal government agreed with the reformers that the best way to handle the Indians was to destroy their culture.
The saying was, “Kill the Indian, Save the man”.
I must ask the question. Is what we are seeing today a policy of “Kill the Conservative, save the man?” Am I too far out there?
Let’s go back to our story and you decide.
The federal govt backed this policy and turned over the management of most Indian reservations to the churches.
President Grant in 1870, now invited the churches to nominate people to run the reservations and Congress created a board of Indian commissioners to oversee the administration of Indian affairs.
In opposition to this reform movement were those who wanted to give the army total control over Indian affairs.
Reformers staved off army control but the army continued to kill Indians.
By 1880 the majority of Indians in the American West had either been killed or put on reservations.
Most Indians on reservations now depended on government payments and rations for their survival. Again, sound familiar?
This dependency gave the government absolute control over the Indians.
Between 1881 and 1897 the bureau of Indian affairs doubled in size with nearly 4000 employees
The bureau now became centralized under the leadership of Carl Schurz, Sect. of the Interior under Pres Rutherford B. Hayes.
The Indian bureau now launched a direct assault on Indian culture by withholding rations, imprisonment, forcibly cutting men’s hair, seizing children for schools, physically breaking up religious ceremonies, and seizing religious objects
Reformers backed the prohibition of Indian religious practices and now turned their attention to the Indian children
The reformers believed that the key to civilizing the Indian nations was to educate the children.
They felt that if they could educate the children, the old religions and cultures of the Indians would eventually just die out as the kid grew up and took control of Indian society
Does any of this sound familiar folks?
The most famous of the Indian educators wasRichard Pratt
Pratt was an army officer in charge of Kiowa and Comanche prisoners sent to Florida after the red river wars in Northern Texas.
In 1879 based on his success in educating Indians, he convinced the government to establish the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania
At Carlisle, Pratt adopted the policy of isolating Indian children from their tribes, forcing them to speak English, and follow Anglo American customs
Reformers believed that until they eliminated existing Indian beliefs, they could not assimilate Indians into society.
It was Pratt who stated “the goal is to kill the Indian and save the man”
Needless to say, the boarding school system failed to achieve the results it desired
Some students returned to reservations without skills
Others returned with skills that couldn’t be used on a reservation
Many students now found themselves out of place in communities whose religions and beliefs they did not understand
Wait. What? The schools taught the kids lessons that isolated them from the culture of their parents?
Surely that couldn’t happen now. Or is it? Is this what cancel culture is striving to achieve?
Finally, the schools were expensive to maintain and were not providing the results Congress had hoped for.
The reformers now also pushed for a program which would take Indian lands and convert them to private property.
The reformers believed that as long as Indian lands were held as common property, Indians would continue with their tribal customs
Also, as Indian populations declined, the reformers felt that the Indians held too much land for them to function efficiently
Therefore, the reformers now pushed through programs which would take this “excess land” and sell it to white settlers.
This process was known as “severalty” (ie severe the land from the reservation)
The main severalty measure was the Dawes act
Dawes act – submitted by Senator Henry Dawes of Mass. in 1887.
Indian lands would be divided up and each Indian head of family was to get 160 acres which would be held in a trust by the government for 25 years.
The decision to divide up Indian lands rested with the President of the US, not the Indians.
If the president decided to divide up a reservation and sell off the excess, there was nothing the Indians could do about it.
In 1881 Indians held 155,623,312 acres.
In just 9 years, 1890, they held 104,314,349 (51 millionacres lost)
By 1900 the figure was 77,865,373 (half of all indian lands)
Between 1887 and 1934, the Indians lost another 66 percent of their allotted lands.
The only exception to the Dawes act was that of the 5 civilized tribes of Oklahoma who obtained an exemption from the act.
Settlers now wanted the Oklahoma territory and pushed for severalty of the 5 civilized tribe’s land holdings.
The problem was, these Indians had successfully set up a community in which every Indian had a home of his own, and there were no paupers in the nation
These Indians owed no one, had built a capitol, schools, and hospitals.
With no problems to point to, reformers now used the Indian’s success against them.
So, the Indians were damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Resist and the federal government would call in troops, comply and you were forced to give up your very identity including your beliefs, language, and culture.
Is that where we are today? Has the federal government given up on fighting those who resist far left policies and now see the success obtained in the past by focusing on the children in an effort to obtain compliance from the parents?
Are they just waiting for us old folks to die out and let the next generation of kids, indoctrinated in our colleges and universities, to take over?
I hate to burst their bubble, but if they would study their history, they would see that the whole Indian reform movement failed.
Why? You can indoctrinate the kids, tear down the statues, burn all the books, and censor those who speak out, but you will never be able to keep the people from privately speaking to their family, friends, and associates.
That is how the Indian culture survived. Behind closed doors, grandma and grandpa shared their beliefs, language, and culture with their kids and grandkids who then passed it on to the next generation.
Reformers contended that the Indians, while successful, had gone as far as they could go as a civilization.
In 1893, the Dawes Commission ruled in favor of severalty of the civilized tribe’s lands
When the Indians resisted, Congress passed the Curtis act of 1898 which unilaterally terminated all tribal governments in the united states.
In 1903 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had absolute power to regulate Indian affairs even when congressional actions violated existing treaty provisions
Indians were now seen as incompetent children for whom the government was responsible.
So folks, once again, I think history is repeating itself.
Is the goal of this new “Woke” society we hear so much about an effort to break the will and remove the culture of the conservative, patriotic, populace of the United States?
If it is, they are following a playbook that worked extremely well from the1860’s into the early 1900’s.
The American Indians have survived but look where they are today. Is that our future as well?