'Going back to the blanket'

"As I lay on the blanket I thought about my school days and all I had learned.

I could talk like a gentleman, read, write, and cipher. I could name all the states of the Union, with the capitals, repeat the names of all the books of the Bible, one hundred verses of Scripture, sing more than two dozen hymns, debate, shout football yells, swing my partners, and tell dirty stories by the hour. It was important that I had learned how to get along with the white man.

But my experience had taught me that I had a Hopi Spirit Guide, whom I must follow if I wish to live and I want to become a real Hopi again, to sing the old songs and to feel free to make love without the fear of sin or rawhide."

Sun Chief, Hopi

American policy to assimilate Native Americans included removing the young from their family and tribal influences and placing them in special schools, where they were not allowed to speak their own language on fear of punishment.

"When Indian children drop out of school, stumble in learning English or withdraw into themselves, teachers call it 'going back to the blanket'."*

Not just in the USA; Canada too

On his blog, a young Canadian Inuit man writes about what he learnt of the Residential school system in Canada which operated between 1892 and 1996. He says, "some things I heard at that meeting made me want to tear my skin off with my bare hands."

Speaking any native languages was severely punished, sometimes by children having their tongues stuck to frozen fences, getting strapped, locked in a closet and/or ridiculed.

The method was complete separation from the family and culture for up to ten years or more, thus ensuring that the children would not know their own people, culture, languages and law.

He concludes:

"We are human beings; we have the fundamental right to justice. The truth must be known."

Sources:
*Our Brother's Keeper: The Indian in White America, Edgar S Cahn, Editor.
Assimilation Through Education: Indian Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest.
Education and the American Indian.

Image © 2006 R deCinabre