“Kill The Indian, Save The Man”
As the story circulated on social media, raw emotions surfaced. Grandparents shared stories of how their hair had been cut in boarding schools decades ago.
“Having the seventh, eighth, tenth generation having to go through it again…I mean, it’s just a big eye opener because it’s being re-lived,” LeRoy said.
On March 3, 1819, nearly 201 years to the day before the children’s hair was cut, the United States signed the Civilization Fund Act. That ushered in an era from 1860 to 1978 when boarding schools nationwide, including in Nebraska, separated Native children from their families, punished them for speaking their language, and often cut their long hair.
“…All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Capt. Richard H. Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, famously said in 1892.
In 1884, Christian missionaries came to South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation and took eight-year-old Zitkála-Šá from her mother.
“I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly,” Zitkála-Šá wrote in 1900 of her hair cutting. “In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit…now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.”
On March 9 this year, Johnson, LeRoy and a procession of grandmothers drove to the Cody-Kilgore Unified Schools Board of Education meeting to tell these stories. Board members listened as the women read a letter, spoke, and asked for cultural sensitivity training, say the mothers. When they finished, Adam Naslund, school board president, thanked them for sharing, according to meeting minutes.
The mothers and the ACLU said the school has since declined to implement cultural sensitivity training. In its motion to dismiss, the school district says it never discriminated, took quick action to prevent future hair cuttings, and argued no further training is needed.
As for the fact it brings up memories of boarding schools, the motion reads “this could not be further from the truth.”
But Sandy White Hawk, an educator and advocate, says these events have a lot more to do with both past and present — touching on themes of assimilation and forced separation from Native culture — than school officials may want to admit.
In 1955, when White Hawk was an 18-month-old baby on the Rosebud reservation, a social worker or church member passed her through the window of a red pickup truck into the hands of her white, adopted family, who later told her the story. She grew up in Wisconsin disconnected from her culture, ceremonies and language. She returned to Rosebud for the first time in 1988 and met her birth family.
“I remember I used to watch their faces…and from time to time they would look away,” remembered White Hawk. “And I interpreted that as a sadness in their heart for what had happened. I never shared with them…how awful it was, the situation that I grew up in, because I could see they certainly had a history as well.”
In Nebraska, Native children are overrepresented in foster care by eight times their share of the population, according to a 2017 report. Nationally, native children commit suicide at 1.6 times the national rate, more than any other race, according to federal data. Native kids in foster care are at even greater risk of suicide.
The realities aren’t new. In one photo, LeRoy’s own great-grandfather, Jake Kills in Sight, leans toward President John F. Kennedy to talk about the treatment of the Lakota. But, to White Hawk, what happened in Kilgore shows little has changed, she said.
“The reason that they cut their hair is they knew that they could do it without being punished or disciplined,” she said.
Efforts to heal are occuring. At the Genoa U.S. Indian Industrial School near Columbus, researchers have spent years documenting the atrocities that took place, said Margaret Jacobs, project co-director and University of Nebraska-Lincoln history professor.
She’s also worked with journalist Kevin Abourezk, a Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation, on stories of tribal land reclamation in Nebraska. From the Kansas border to the fertile farmland on the edge of the Sandhills, white landowners have returned acreage to the tribes who originally roamed it, Jacobs said.
Healing is also taking place within tribes. White Hawk started attending pow wows and wrote a song to welcome fostered Native kids back into the community. That work led to a University of Minnesota study detailing the psychological impacts of foster care for Native people.
Advocates want to see this conversation go national, and hope that Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the U.S. Department of the Interior, will help lead it.
