Native American Children’s Historic Forced Assimilation
Native American Children’s Historic Forced Assimilation
![Children arrived at school at different points in the assimilation process. Many still openly embraced their traditional cultures, including some of these Lakota children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The order of the children is not known, but pictured here are: Thomas New, Alice Slow Fly, Harry With Horns, Standing Little Tail, and Jesse Foot.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-01-BR61-285-1024x733.jpg)
![Some of the Lakota children from the previous photo appear in this image after they entered the Lower Cut Meat Creek Indian Day School. At the beginning of each school year, students’ familial clothes were replaced with uniforms, the boys’ hair was cut, and pupils were issued Anglicized names. Note the hand of policeman Lee Wood firmly on the shoulder of student Eddie Foot.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-02-BR61-281-1024x689.jpg)
![Many Native American boarding schools imposed a militaristic system featuring regimented schedules, adherence to order, and technical training. Children were dressed in crisp uniforms and lined up like soldiers for this photo at the Cantonment Boarding School in Oklahoma, which was previously a U.S. Army barracks.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-03-BR61-378-1024x602.jpg)
![native american boarding schools - Native American girls were trained to be productive, subservient homemakers in the mold of Victorian norms. In this photo, Bratley’s wife, Della, teaches dressmaking to Lakota students Gracie Good-Bird, Emma Elk Looks Back, Nellie Foot, and Bessie Elk Looks Back (left to right). Native American schools were often staffed with husband-and-wife teachers who acted as surrogate parents, enticing children away from their biological families and toward a model of Anglo-American domesticity.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-04-BR61-284-1024x825.jpg)
![Boys were schooled in farming, carpentry, and metalworking. This industrial training was geared less toward vocational achievements and more toward inculcating gender norms, social roles, and even food preferences. In this photo, schoolboys at Lower Cut Meat Creek Indian Day School show off the watermelons they grew.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-05-BR61-180-1024x589.jpg)
![Living conditions at the schools were stark. Children lay three to a bed at the Cantonment Boarding School on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation. Bratley noted that “we had not enough clothing for the boys. … Some of the boys have not received a suit since the school was first begun at this place.”](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-06-BR61-373-1024x609.jpg)
![For some families, the transformation to mainstream American society was complete—at least outwardly. Bratley’s photograph of Benjamin Brave’s family shows the transformative effects of Native American boarding school education. Brave attended the Hampton Institute, a school in Virginia for Native Americans and African Americans.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-07-BR61-301-753x1024.jpg)
![At the Cantonment Boarding School, children erected play tipis that allowed them some measure of staying connected to their Plains cultures. Meanwhile, many of their parents erected full-size tipis and camped around the school, refusing to allow the system to separate them from their children.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-08-BR61-377-1024x570.jpg)
![While teaching on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, Bratley likely posed this image of his student Ruth Honavi having her hair made up in the butterfly style. Hopi culture likens women to gentle, life-giving butterflies, and this tradition continues today for girls participating in ceremonies. Bratley once wrote that long hair was “a part of [Indigenous peoples’] very being and religion,” yet he encouraged cutting boys’ hair.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-09-BR61-233-1024x700.jpg)
![Many Native Americans strongly resisted the schools’ psychological and cultural war on their communities. When Lakota Chief Turning Eagle learned the Bratleys were going to cut his daughter’s hair, he burst into the classroom to attack Jesse Bratley. The confrontation was depicted in this cartoon drawing by a reporter named Mr. Zesiler. In other incidents, a girl’s grandmother tried to knife Bratley, and a student pulled him down a flight of stairs.](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-10-AC.11680-1024x421.jpg)
![native american boarding schools - Despite the U.S. government’s efforts, Native American children endured with many of their traditional practices intact. In this photo, Bratley’s son, Homer, stands in stark contrast to the Lakota children his father taught on the Rosebud Reservation. As current Rosebud tribal member Cathleen High Pipe told us, “We carry on everything that we were taught that was handed down to us by our parents and from what their parents gave them.”](https://www.sapiens.org/app/uploads/2020/03/Figure-11-BR61-181-1024x761.jpg)
In May 2018, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the government would begin to separate children from their families who had crossed from Mexico into the United States. More than 5,000 children were torn from their relatives. Tragically, this is not the first time the U.S. government has systematically and forcibly removed children from their loved ones.
In 1890, the U.S. government ended open warfare against Native American tribes, which had begun in the 17th century and intensified through the 19th century. The population of Native peoples—once in the millions—had plummeted to around 250,000. Many of these politically and militarily defeated communities were confined to reservations that occupied a fraction of their traditional homelands. What to do with these newly confined peoples?
The goal became assimilation: to transform Native Americans into “good Christian citizens.” As one school founder said at the time, “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This was attempted by breaking up reservations and outlawing religious practices. However, many felt that Native adults would likely never change. Real change could only come by focusing efforts on their children.
In the most extreme cases, law enforcement took children at gunpoint.
Schools had been started for Native students since the founding of the United States. However, the role of schools in assimilating children now took on new urgency. By 1900, 307 boarding schools and day schools had opened across the country, educating more than 26,000 Native students.
While some parents embraced the opportunity for their children to learn English and other skills, many more saw that these institutions were not really schools at all. Children were forced to cut their hair, wear uniforms, speak English, perform manual labor, suffer corporal punishment, and offer Christian prayers. At boarding schools, children had to endure a new life without any family support.
Parents who resisted sending their children to these schools were often severely punished. Government officials withheld food rations that families depended on. Fathers were sent to prison. In the most extreme cases, law enforcement took children at gunpoint.
To implement this assimilationist policy, the U.S. government needed teachers to cut children’s hair and issue uniforms, try to force them to forget their languages, and instruct boys in farming and girls in sewing. Jesse H. Bratley was one such teacher.
Between 1893 and 1903, Bratley worked in schools on five reservations. He also documented Native people and places through almost 500 photographs. Bratley and his images defy easy categorization. He admitted that, as a boy, he “despised” Native Americans. As a teacher, it was his job to help annihilate Indigenous peoples’ cultural identities. Yet he became enthralled by these cultures, observing ceremonies and encouraging some traditional practices. He cherished his time living among Native people and formed real friendships. Yet he had numerous conflicts with his students and their families, and there is no evidence that he advocated for Native peoples’ rights or even acknowledged the validity of their ways of life.
In our new book titled Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, we have interpreted and analyzed Bratley’s photographs, offering an unprecedented glimpse into what the U.S. policy of separation and education wrought more than a century ago. In this photo essay, we offer a small selection of images that capture the cruelty of the U.S. government’s education system for Native Americans. They demonstrate one man’s attempt to make sense of his place in that historical moment and his new life amid Native peoples.
Even more, they show how Native peoples both persisted through and resisted the U.S. government’s commitment to erase their cultures. This is a story of loss, but it is also a story of survival.