Taken By Force

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Government, History, Storytelling, Education

4.9 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

As the idea that the best way to handle the “Indian Problem” in America was to civilize their youth took hold in the late 19th century, the amount of boarding schools grew rapidly. But the government couldn’t rely on Native tribes to send their children to schools willingly, so they had to accomplish it another way: by force. Attendance became mandatory, and children were rounded up and sent to live at boarding schools, sometimes hundreds of miles away. They were cut off from their homes, families, and culture… and forced assimilation began.

Hosted by: Sharon McMahon

Executive Producer: Heather Jackson

Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder

Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton

Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello friends, welcome, welcome to episode 3 of Taken, Native boarding schools in America.
0:12.6	Prior to 1879, most of the church run schools that educated Native American children were
0:18.4	located near either the ancestral homeland of the tribe or near a reservation where they
0:24.0	currently resided. The children would attend school during the day and return home in the
0:29.4	evening or sometimes they would stay at the school during the week and go home on the weekends.
0:34.3	It was this return home that boarding school officials saw as the most problematic.
0:42.4	John B. Riley, an Indian school superintendent, noted in 1886 that, however excellent the day
0:51.7	school may be, whatever the qualifications of the teacher or however superior the facilities.
0:59.4	It is to a great extent offset by the habits, scenes and surroundings at home. Only by complete
1:10.3	isolation of the Indian child from his savage and a seat and can he be satisfactorily educated.
1:20.6	With the US government needed was an official policy that would force families to hand over their children.
1:29.3	I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting. We spoke in a previous episode about the
1:39.3	role some US presidents played in setting federal policy when it came to Native nations. George
1:45.6	Washington began diplomatic relations with tribal sovereigns. Andrew Jackson personally sought
1:51.6	at the eradication and removal of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from the southeast and what
1:57.8	Jackson started his successor, Martin Van Buren, continued. And the problem of Native Americans didn't
2:06.0	disappear when they had been dispossessed of their ancestral land and moved west of the Mississippi
2:12.4	to Indian country. President Elysees as a grant had a long and significant relationship with the
2:19.8	Native American and E. Lee S. Parker and this undoubtedly shaped his view on what place in American
2:26.9	society indigenous people should occupy and what citizenship in the United States should look like.
2:33.7	At grandson, Noggerol address, he called for a new vision of US citizenship. He said that American
2:40.9	Indians were the quote, original occupants of the land and that he would pursue their ultimate citizenship.
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