#1614 Native Americans and the Assimilation Movement

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay Jenkinson converses with historian Larry Skogen about his new book, To Educate American Indians. Skogen’s book examines US policy of assimilating Native Americans into European-derived white America, including the nightmare of the Indian Boarding Schools, personified by Carlisle Indian School’s superintendent Richard Pratt’s racist mission statement: “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” One of the fascinations of this subject is that so many of the white people engaged in coercive assimilation were, at least in their own minds, “philanthropists,” who believed they were doing the right thing. Embedded in the assimilation movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was what is called “scientific racism,” the view that Anglo Saxon white people were the acme of world civilization and all others were lower on the scale of civilization, accomplishment, and even capacity. It’s an important and at times chilling subject, and Larry Skogen is one of the nation’s premier historians of these policies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast edition of
0:03.1	listening to America.
0:04.1	I had the extraordinary joy today of conducting an interview
0:07.8	with one of the people I most respect.
0:09.7	My friend Dr Larry Skogan,
0:11.6	Emeritus President of Bismarck State College, the author of a number of books,
0:17.2	two of them on Native Americans.
0:18.9	The first one was called Indian Depredation Claims about Commission set up by Congress to compensate white people who were
0:25.8	frontiersmen whose property or lives were damaged by Native American depredations as they were called.
0:31.6	And this new book to educate American Indians selected writings from the National Education Association's Department of Indian Education
0:37.0	1900 to 1904. It's a set of important documents about the assimilation movement is a really difficult problem.
0:45.2	One of the most intractable problems in the world because the bottom line on all of this
0:49.2	is that Euro-Americans were not going to turn back and go to Spain, Portugal, and England and say,
0:55.0	well, no, it's a new continent, but it's already have, it already has its own sovereign peoples.
1:01.0	Let's just trade with them or leave them alone, but it's not our continent.
1:05.0	Well, we know that's not going to happen.
1:06.6	We know that doesn't fit.
1:08.6	Well, then what should our relation be with Native peoples?
1:11.8	And this continues to be a conundrum to this day.
1:15.0	Things are better now, but the United States as a country born with an idealistic
1:20.0	mission, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and Constitution, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787,
1:26.5	which called for treating natives with the utmost good faith and never dispossessing them without
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