Lone Wolf's Reflection on Forced Acculturation & Assimilation

"School wasn't for me when I was a kid.  I tried three of them and they were all bad.  The first time was when I was about 8 years old.  The soldiers came and rounded up as many of the Blackfeet children as they could.  The government had decided we were to get White Man's education for force.  

It was very cold that day when we were loaded into the wagons.  None of us wanted to go and our parents didn't want to let us go.  Oh, we cried for this was the first time we were going to be separated from our parents.  I remember looking back at Na-tah-ki and she was crying too.  Nobody waved as the wagons, escorted by the soldiers, took us toward the school at Fort Shaw.  Once there our belongings were taken from us, even the little medicine bags our mothers had given us to protect us from harm.  Everything was placed in a heap and set afire.  

Next was the long hair, the pride of all the Indians.  The boys, one by one, would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor.  All of the traditional clothes had to go and we had to put on the clothes of the White Man.  

If we thought that the days were bad, the nights were much worse.  This was the time when real loneliness set in, for it was then we knew that we were all alone.  Many boys ran away from the school because the treatment was so bad but most of them were caught and brought back by the police.  We were told never to talk Indian and if we were caught, we got a strapping with a leather belt.

I remember one evening when we were all lined up in a room and one of the boys said something in Indian to another boy.  The man in charge of us pounced on the boy, caught him by the shirt, and threw him across the room.  Later we found out that his collar-bone was broken.  The boy's father, an old warrior, came to the school.  He told the instructor that among his people, children were never punished by striking them.  That was no way to teach children; kind words and good examples were much better.  Then he added, "Had I been here when that fellow hit my son, I would have killed him."  Before the instructor could stop the old warrior he took his boy and left.  The family then beat it to Canada and never came back." 

Nabokov, P (Ed.) (1991 [1978].  Native American testimony:  A chronicle of Indian-White relations from prophecy to the present, 1492-1992.  NY: Penguin.  Pp. 220-221.

A story a truth