1. Let Jesus save you.
2. Come out of your blanket, cut your hair, and dress like a white man.
3. Have a Christian family with one wife for life only.
4. Live in a house like your white brother. Work hard and wash often.
5. Learn the value of a hard-earned dollar. Do not waste your money on giveaways. Be punctual.
6. Believe that property and wealth are signs of divine approval.
7. Keep away from salons and strong spirits.
8. Speak the language of your white brother. Send your children to school to do likewise.
9. Go to church often and regularly.
10. Do Not go to Indian dances or to the medicine man.
This list was found by Native American Mary Brave Bird from her grandfather. It was a poster that was given to the Native Americans by the Christian missionaries to be tacked up on their wall. These excerpts are from an essay entitled Civilize Them With a Stick by Mary Brave Bird (Crow Dog) with Richard Erdoes. In this article she describes what it was like growing up in an old Indian boarding school,
It is almost impossible to explain to a sympathetic white person what a typical old Indian boarding school was like; how it affected the Indian child suddenly dumped into it like a small creature from another world, helpless, defenseless, bewildered, trying desperately and instinctively to survive and sometimes not surviving at all. I think such children were like the victims of Nazi concentration camps trying to tell average, middle-class Americans what their experience had been like.
I was taken to the old-fashioned mission schools at St. Francis, run by the nuns and the Catholic fathers, built sometime around the turn of the century and not improved a bit when I arrived, not improved as far as the buildings, the food, the teachers, or their methods were concerned.
Oddly enough, we owed our unspeakable boarding schools to the do-gooders, the white Indian-lovers. The schools were intended as an alternative to the outright extermination seriously advocated by Generals Sherman and Sheridan, as well as by most settlers and prospectors overrunning our land. "You don't have to kill those poor benighted heathen," the do-gooders said, "in order to solve the Indian Problem. Just give us a chance to turn them into useful farmhands, laborers, and chambermaids who will break their backs for you at low wages." In that way the boarding schools were born. The kids were taken away from their villages and pueblos, in their blankets and moccasins, kept completely isolated from their families - sometimes for as long as ten years - suddenly coming back, their short hair slick with pomade, their necks raw from stiff, high collars, their thick jackets always short in the sleeves and pinching under the arms, their tight patent leather shoes giving them corns, the girls in starched white blouses and clumsy, high-buttoned boots - caricatures of white people. When they found out - and they found out quickly - that they were neither wanted by whites nor by Indians, they got good and drunk, many of them staying drunk for the rest of their lives.
Reading this essay makes my own life experience of religious indoctrination seem laughable in comparison. I think of times I didn't want to go to church and was required to, but I was never beat with a whip. I didn't really want to sing in the choir but felt the pressure to as I began middle school. These requirements were natural to me at the time because it was all I knew. The brutality the Native Americans experienced was horrific. Not just the out right genocide of a race of people by white European settlers but the destruction of their entire way of life. Their culture was decimated by the white man and its religion. A few years back I visited the Catholic mission at San Juan Capistrano in California. It's a mission founded in 1776 by Spanish Catholics of the Franciscan Order. While on the tour, I learned all about the clash between the Catholic missionaries and the Native American ways of life. This is what it looks like to conquer a race of people. You move in, kill off the ones that fight back. The ones that don't, you "convert" to your way of life, which is all filtered through the religion. Catholics did this well. So did Protestants. Christianity as a whole took over the New World, by force.
I recall Christopher Hitchens once posing a question to his debating opponent, "Is it not the case that the spread of Christianity, attributing it to the innate truth of the Bible story, was spread by that means, or because emperor Constantine decided to make Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire?" It's a legit question. Christianity spread by force in its early years and then spread by force through the Americas later. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently asked Morgan Freeman on Startalk Radio why he didn't think that aliens would come take over our planet. Morgan Freeman bluntly responded, "why should we assume that aliens behave like white Europeans?"
After I had graduated high school and wasted two years of my life at Bible College, I came home to think things through. I was having a mild crisis of faith. I wasn't seeing eye to eye with anyone except some of my closest friends. The people at my church, my family all seemed so "out of touch" with the real world, even though I actually had no idea what the "real world" really was. I just had a small taste of it after I dropped out of Bible College. I moved in with a few friends that were from a different Bible College (an Assemblies of God one to be specific). These friends were all in a punk band together. Mind you, it was Christian punk music but nonetheless it was more progressive than the ultra-strict Baptist College I had attended. I began to have relationships and friendships with people that were not Christian at all. This was the biggest new experience to me. As I sit here typing this I honestly cannot recall a name of a person I knew growing up that was not a Christian. Our family absolutely surrounded itself in like-minded people in regards to our religion.
Eventually I moved back home and got an apartment with my brother and a life long friend of mine who went to the same Christian grade school - middle school - high school. We formed an alternative rock band and through this we met a lot of non-Christians. This is were my shell really began to crack. I still labeled myself a Christian but didn't think too much about it. Of course during this time, I began distancing myself from my families values. I was still a relatively good person, but I did not like the idea of not watching R-rated movies, or censoring my vocabulary (no cussing allowed); I despised not being able to have sex, drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes. I began the often-treaded path of being that Christian who smokes cigarettes and drinks beer on occasion. The "back-slidden" Christian. I thought I was so cool. I justified my actions with the Bible (as all Christians do - just find a verse and make it work for you. It's simple. Every Christian does it!). *by the way try this experiment with Harry Potter or 50 Shades of Grey or Life of Pi. Just pick a passage from any book and see how it can relate to your life. It's so simple! Everything is about you!
Fast forward 5-10 years in my life and I have become mild alcoholic. I refused to accept that I drank too much (a common symptom of any addiction). I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for about 7-8 years. I partied nearly every night. At this point in my life (less then 2 years ago) I was an agnostic/atheist so religion was gone in my life, but not the addiction to these substances. The thing you tend to do when you are young and dumb is reject EVERYTHING your parents teach you. You lump it all in to one chunk of "parental guidance" that you discard completely. I know this, having completely stopped drinking alcohol for almost 9 months now, and having stopped smoking for at least 3 years. We unite everything our parents taught us in together in our haste and reject it all. To this day I can't express how grateful I am that my parents taught me correctly about substance abuse. They were very anti-drinking and anti-smoking and I should have listened to them from the beginning.
There is a problem that we are all guilty of. We characterize, categorize, then reject or except based on these decisions. Look at the major news media on cable, for example. Fox News demonizes liberals. MSNBC demonizes conservatives. When in reality, most people have different opinions on different issues that make them hard to fit in the binary that is forced upon us for essentially maximizing profits. It's more lucrative for Fox News or MSNBC to hone in on their target markets. Diversity is not good in the corporate business model of cable news. There are multiple examples in race, gender, class, or sexuality of society forcing binary systems on human beings. I was wrong to lump in my hatred of my parents religious culture with their advice regarding the highly addictive, drugs of alcohol and tobacco. *I want to add here that I do not recall my parents warning me about marijuana. I would assume its because of the lack of their understanding of the drug, but marijuana is absolutely harmless compared to the legal drugs of alcohol and tobacco.
People drink to excess for many different reasons. Just as the Native Americans that were forced to be like white people and become "civilized" only to return to a cold rejection by whites and Native Americans. If any people could have had the right to drown their sorrows the Native Americans do. It's an understatement to say it's sad to see what alcohol did to the Native Americans. My ancestors (the part of me that isn't Cherokee) are responsible for systematically destroying an entire race of people. A beautiful natural race of human beings that valued the earth. A race that predates what we now call conservation, environmentally consciousness, and sustainability. Before Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was ever written, these ideas weren't something to strive for in the Native American culture. They were their way of life. We almost deify the Native Americans now as we look back, thinking of the Indian with the single tear as trash thrown out of the car window hits his feet. They were wise beyond their years. We are just now catching up, scrambling trying to correct our mistakes that are destroying this planet.
Mary Brave Bird writes,
The mission school at St. Francis was a curse for our family for generations. My grandmother went there, then my mother, then my sisters and I. At one time or other every one of us tried to run away. Grandmother told me once about the bad times she had experienced at St. Francis. In those days ... anybody who disobeyed the nuns was severely punished. The building in which my grandmother stayed had three floors, for girls only. Way up in the attic were little cells, about five by five by ten feet. One time she was in church and instead of praying she was playing jacks. As punishment they took her to one of those little cubicles where she stayed in darkness because the windows had been boarded up. They left her there for a whole week with only bread and water for nourishment. After she came out she promptly ran away, together with three other girls. They were found and brought back. The nuns stripped them naked and whipped them. They used a horse buggy whip on my grandmother. Then she was put back into the attic - for two weeks.
My mother had much the same experiences but never wanted to talk about them, and then there I was, in the same place. The school is now run by the BIA - the Bureau of Indian Affairs - but only since about fifteen years ago. When I was there, during the 1960s, it was still run by the Church. The Jesuit fathers ran the boys' wing and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart ran us - with the help of the strap. Nothing had changed since my grandmother's days. I have been told recently that even in the 70s they were still beating children at that school. All I got out of school was being taught how to pray. I learned quickly that I would be beaten if I failed in my devotions or, God forbid, prayed the the wrong way, especially in Indian to Wakan Tanka, The Indian Creator.
Barbara (my sister) was still in school when I arrived and during my first year or two she could still protect me a little bit. When Barb was a seventh-grader she ran away together with five other girls, early in the morning before sunrise. They brought them back in the evening. The girls had to wait for two hours in front of the mother superior's office. They were hungry and cold, frozen through. It was wintertime and they had been running the whole day without food, trying to make good their escape. The mother superior asked each girl, "Would you do this again?" She told them that as punishment they would not be allowed to visit home for a month and that she'd keep them busy on work details until the skin on their knees and elbows had worn off. At the end of her speech she told each girl, "Get up from this chair and lean over it." She then lifted the girls' skirts and pulled down their underpants. Not little girls either, but teenagers. She had a leather strap about a foot long and four inches wide fastened to a stick, and beat the girls, one after another, until they cried. Barb did not give her that satisfaction but just clenched her teeth. There was one girl, Barb told me, the nun kept on beating and beating until her arm got tired.
These disturbing stories of Native American torture at Catholic boarding schools is a common theme among American history. These are the stories you do not read growing up in a Christian home, singing praises to Jesus among the white faces. We dressed up as Pilgrims and Indians on Thanksgiving in school and sat together in harmony not aware of the full truth of what took place in these days of colonization and indoctrination. My relatives brought their diseases over here, my relatives participated in the genocide of the Native Americans and now here I am - a semi-priveleged white American male in the 20th century typing on a laptop (made by Chinese slave labor). This is my heritage. Pillage and plunder. Divide and conquer. Indoctrinate and destroy. We (and my fellow white Americans) are guilty of this past. What are we to do with this information? The twisted reality begins to take shape - I am alive today because my ancestors came to America and conquered it. If it wasn't for my ancestors coming here by force and stealing survival techniques from Native Americans I would not be alive today to be able to type this blog entry.
It's the same mind-fuck as realizing that without the Industrial Revolution and the rise of fossil fuels as a cheap, abundant energy source I would not be alive today to passionately promote ending our collective addiction to fossil fuels. The dirty energy that is warming the planet and causing climate change over the past 100 years is the very thing that has quite literally given me life. It's a complicated life we live in this modern era. We are able to ponder on these strange puzzles of history and circumstance in our minds. We are approaching a point of return. We are catching up to ancient Native American wisdom that tells us how to live sustainably and treat the earth as our mother (which it absolutely is if you know geology and biology - it's our life source) We are catching up to where we (white people) once were - conquering and controlling. We still are. There are some of us white people still left that do not want anything to do with the conquer and conquest of our past/present. I am one. I am repulsed to be associated with the do-gooders or the past Indian-lovers, but I am not so naive to realize out of this came my own existence.
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