May 11, 1875 he was further ordered to transport the prisoners to the old Spanish fortress of Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida.12
It was at Fort Marion that Pratt became more of a teacher than a jailer. He decided that he would rehabilitate his prisoners and received permission to teach his captives vocational skills that would hopefully lead them to become useful citizens. He cleaned them up and gave them military uniforms to wear. The Indians were instructed on pressing their trousers and shining their boots. He instituted daily inspections in which every Indian would stand at attention at their freshly made beds. They received haircuts. For exercise they would drill in army maneuvers and participate in parade marches.13
They would also learn to work like white men, especially doing hard labor like stacking lumber or packing crates. Do-gooder matrons from St. Augustine served as volunteer schoolteachers, teaching English and Christian doctrine at the same time. All in all, Fort Marion was turned into a basic training camp that was part school and vocational center, with a catechism curriculum thrown in. The Fort Marion experience was later transferred to the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where 22 prisoners were sent for more schooling.14 The Fort Marion and Hampton Institute experiences convinced Pratt that he had finally found a solution to the “Indian problem,” and his program of eradicating “Indianness” could be permanently installed at Carlisle. In 1879 the secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz, gave Pratt his school. And from Carlisle Pratt’s martial philosophy would diffuse outward to other reservation and off-reservation schools.
The first concern was one of physical appearance. Holding true to the gender stereotypes of the age, girls were dressed in heavy Victorian-style dresses, while the boys were issued wool military uniforms. Haircuts for the boys would follow; an activity that was especially traumatic for Apache groups.The federal government produced images of the “before and after” of the children to convince the general public of the good work being done to transform the Indian from a savage to a civilized person (see Figure 2.6). Physical bearing, a new haircut, western clothing—all meant a transformation from the brutal state of a savage to that of a civilized, American Christian. The forces of social evolution would be realized by an educational system that would produce proper-looking students who were a boon to local communities (as well as a source of cheap labor). The photo collections were not only a public relations campaign, but a successful marketing device. In selling the “before and after” images to outsiders, the school was selling itself as well.15
Figure 2.6 Before and After. Tom Torlino (Navajo) arrived at Carlisle Indian School October 21, 1882, at the age of 22 years. After his term was disrupted in 1884, he returned to Carlisle in 1885.
Credit: Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA.
Part of the transformation included segregating the children by age and gender into companies for marching in close-order drill every morning. Music programs took the form of marching bands that accompanied the students as they drilled and marched in parades. School plays dramatized stories of the saga of Hiawatha or George Washington and the cherry tree in order to instill within them the new American mythology. Native dances were allowed, as long as they were performed on patriotic holidays or celebratory occasions—such as the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.16
One poster at Carlisle encouraged male students to participate in sports, seemingly for purposes of exercise but more likely to instill military discipline. The sign urged them to “become a football player or boxer,” and “learn to play a sport and become controlled and civilized.” Appealing to the machismo of teen-agers, the poster instructed them to “develop manly aggressiveness so that you can win a trophy.” Being macho meant that you can “learn to be strong and not to cry or show emotion.” Finally, and this was the clincher, “learn to obey a stern fatherly authority—your coach!”17
All of these teaching techniques were codified in 1901 with the publication by the superintendent of Indian schools the Uniform Course of Study for the Indian Schools of the United States, a treatise that assumed Indian children were “too dull” to excel intellectually and could only be trained to be shoemakers or sewers of domestic clothing. The goal of the federal government was to create a docile, regimented group of Indians who would follow orders.18
Repression came in a variety of ways. If a student spoke his native tongue, or refused to adopt “civilized” English names, he or she would have their mouth washed out with “a bar of yellow soap” or get a “kerosene shampoo” and receive corporal punishment.19 Homesick children would often become “runaways,” either attempting to go home, or more often, finding solitude in the empty spaces that could be found within the educational compound. Some girls even held peyote meetings in their dorm rooms. Again, if discovered these students would be hand delivered to the Guardhouse for punishment, or if a boy, would have to run the “belt line.” Sadistic dorm advisers would misuse their authority and inflict cruel punishment on their charges.20
As in many other darker phases of life in the American West, rape and sexual abuse at the off-reservation boarding school was a common event. Students were intimidated by sexual predators. One student said that “After a nine-year-old girl was raped in her dormitory bed during the night, we girls would be so scared that we would jump into each other’s bed as soon as the lights went out.” She continued to note that “When we were older, we girls anguished each time we entered the classroom of a certain male teacher who stalked and molested girls.”21
When the youngsters were given work assignments outside of the campus it was very likely that they would often have to confront unwanted sexual advances and molestation.22 While they might learn a useful vocational trade, they would also be a form of cheap labor and sexual and non-sexual entertainment for outsiders.
Another type of repression came from the missionaries and the Indian agents, as well as the teachers at the schools. This was the suppression of native religion and its replacement with Protestant, and sometimes Catholic, creeds. The reservations and schools were aided in this by the Indian Offenses Act of 1883. This bill forbade the practice of traditional rites such as praying with the pipe, as well as ceremonies such as vision quests, sweat lodge rituals, and the sun dance. Intended to civilize the Indians, the act compelled the Indians “to desist from the savage and barbarous practices that are calculated to bring them in savagery.”23 In other words, the assimilation policy of the United States as practiced in the boarding schools was to replace “paganism” with Christian civilization—the solution to the Indian problem.
But the ultimate form of repression was contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis, trachoma, measles, and influenza. The crowded conditions at the boarding schools without disinfectants and where hand towels, drinking cups, schoolbooks, and musical instrument mouthpieces passed freely among school children presented particular problems. As the Commissioner of Indian Affairs noted in 1916, after observing the brutal fact that Indian children in the boarding schools were being ravaged by disease, “We can not solve the Indian problem without Indians.”24 Cemeteries at Carlisle and elsewhere testified to the sorrowful outcomes for many at the boarding schools. As Lawrence Webster, a Suquamish student at Tulalip Indian School in Puget Sound said in 1908, “Death was the only way you could get home … . It had to be a sickness or death before they’d let you out of there very long.”25
In the final analysis assimilation at best was incomplete. Some scholars would prefer the word “integration” to “assimilation” in that, certain cultural traits of the majority culture, e.g., English language or the sport of football, were added to the traditional characteristics of the minority or Indian culture.26 In seeking out their “private” spaces, many students spoke their
