I recently toured the Stewart Indian School in Carson City, Nevada. Like its many counterparts around the United States, it was founded in the last decades of the 19th century. Like them, it was created to save Native Americans by forcing them to assimilate to the predominant culture, like it or not. Early on, children were often forcibly abducted and “disappeared” into the school, often separated for years from their friends and families.
The school featured a brutal regimen early on, and it didn’t get a lot better until the middle of the 20th century. There was military-like discipline. Use of native language was severely punished. Native culture was suppressed. Even given names were taken away from children, replaced by more “appropriate” ones.
Oddly, those in charge of these activities for decades thought they were doing their wards a favor. Governed by the prevailing social theories and dynamics of Social Darwinism, groups like the “Friends of the American Indian” (which had no Native American members) and powerful individuals like William Graham Sumner and Captain Richard Pratt, who founded the first “Indian School” in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thought that assimilation to the ascendant Anglo-American society was the only hope for Native Americans. In their own minds, they were doing the right thing for all concerned. “Kill the Indian in him and save the man” was their watchword.
Monstrosities ensued.
On my return home, I stumbled across a story about the Makah tribe – a small group of costal-dwelling Native Americans living in a remote and gorgeous corner of Washington state – receiving the go-ahead from a federal judge to resume hunting Eastern North Pacific gray whales. And was immediately struck by the parallels with the Stewart School.
The Makah have finally received permission to take up to 20 Eastern gray whales – not their cousins, the Western Pacific grays, which are endangered – over ten years. This is a resumption of a practice shut down by the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the late 1990s; it is a practice which has profound cultural and spiritual meaning for the Makah, and one they have been trying in courts to resume for twenty years.
And it is a practice vehemently opposed by the Sea Sheppard Conservation Society and the Animal Welfare Institute, both of which are planning to drag the Makah back to court to stop the hunt.
The chief similarities between the two cases are the affected parties – Native American, both – and those with a burning desire to force the Native Americans to change their ways. Or else. A perusal of the SSCS and AWI boards showed no evidence of Native American representation and statements, particularly by the SSCS, seem to boil down to “We don’t give a damn about your cultural traditions. The whales are more important than you are.”
Or perhaps, “Kill the Indian in them and save the whales.” It’s more succinct.
So, while we are rightly indignant about the wrongs “Indian Schools” like Stewart perpetrated in the name of widely accepted social theories in the late 19th century, we shouldn’t be smug about our own enlightened status. Just ask the Makahs, who have been taking whales off the Washington coast since before Pericles ruled in Athens, and who lived comfortable lives in balance with the natural world – of which they see themselves as an integral part.
Once again white elites, better educated and self-congratulatory about their superior wisdom and morality, are telling Native Americans that they know better than those who have hunted a whale or two a year for millennia. And the latter folk must knuckle under and obey. Because.
Oh, well done. I’ll wait here for the revulsion over the latest iteration of “The Great White Father Knows Best” to manifest itself.
