Steven Newcomb: Don't downplay boarding school abuse

Thursday, April 21, 2011  

"Some years ago, I came across the book Massacre: A Survey of Today’s American Indian published in 1931. Written by Robert Gessner, the book is an exposé. It provides what one Indian writer recently called “contextual and perspective research” of Indian boarding schools that helps us get “a total picture.”

In chapter ten, “Flogging Children,” Gessner explains “in the thousands of miles I have traveled I have heard one great plea: We are starving—yes, we are being robbed and oppressed—yes, but first save our children.” Gessner’s research “confirmed these verbal statements.” “I learned,” he wrote, “of children as young as six years of age being taken forcibly from their mothers’ arms and sent to distant boarding schools until they were eighteen years old, without seeing their parents during that period.” Gessner learned how Indian children in those schools “were underfed to point of starvation, roughly treated, even beaten, and all the time made to work half a day at hard industrial labor in their fields, in the bakery, or in the laundry—child labor.”

Gessner said he had seen the jails Indian children were “thrown into after being flogged for infringement of minor rules.” He detailed eye-witness accounts: Indian boys chained to beds at night; thrown in cellars under the building, which the superintendent called a jail; shoes taken away and children made to walk through the snow to help milk the cows; children whipped with a hemp rope, and a water hose; children forced to do work for employees and superintendents without compensation under the guise of industrial employment and education. The source? “Hearings Before a Subcommittee on Indian Affairs pursuant to S. Res. 341, p. 30.” "

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: Indian Boarding Schools in Context (Indian Country Today 4/20)