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TED MOTTO: My name is Ted Motto. I'm 67 years old. I'm a retired teacher and a Native American From the Red Lake Band of Chippewa in Northern Minnesota. When I was seven, my father killed my mother, so I got sent to government boarding schools operated just for Indian children. My brothers and sisters went too. The boarding schools were in Pipestone, Minnesota, and Flandreau, South Dakota, far from my home.

It's not a well-known part of American history but the government set up an extensive system of boarding schools to bleach the red out of Indian children, to make us into white people. Nearly half a million Native American children went to those schools. Indian people are forever changed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: Learning, the White People Way, a documentary essay on the history of federal Indian boarding schools written by Stephen Smith and Ted Motto.

TED MOTTO: At my childhood home in Northern Minnesota, people were always speaking Anishinaabe, our Chippewa language. We had relatives who spoke Dakota and most of us spoke English as well. There were always discussions on how to tan a deer hide, how to make a bow out of antler, or how to cook a muskrat. But the federal boarding schools wanted me to forget all that.

The Pipestone Indian Training School where I got sent first was located in the southwestern corner of Minnesota. It opened in 1893 and closed 60 years later. I went back to visit Pipestone recently, but there's not much of the school left. A curator at the County Historical Museum showed me some old papers and photos from the place.

SPEAKER: Do you know them?

TED MOTTO: Yes, I know both of them. Here's Harry Buckanaga. My God, this is-- [MOANS] don't lose this. Winnie For-- [CHUCKLES]

Kids ran away almost every day, almost every day. And the farmers, especially North of here, North of Pipestone, all of them looked out for runaways because they got $5 for every one they brought back. Those pictures were nostalgic to look at but life at the Pipestone Indian School was pretty harsh. Each morning, the boys' advisor would bark at us to wake up. He carried a large bottle of ice water with him to dump on us if we were too drowsy.

We marched to meals, marched to school. I think the matrons treated girls a bit better. But when boys misbehaved, we got a whipping.

[ENGINE WHIRRING]

I drove around what's left of the Pipestone Indian School with a couple of companions. Old memories visited me like the memory of my fifth grade teacher. I used to sing in her class. The last hour in the day was singing and I would get up and start up real loud. I'm a loud bugger, and she loved it. So when I got into seventh grade, she sent word up to the teacher that she wanted me still to come down and sing for her.

What no one knew was that once a week when we sang-- it was on Friday, last day-- she would always give me two candy bars and I had to eat them at her desk standing next to her while she played with me. [CHUCKLES]

And then I thought she loved me. So the next year, you know, they're sending all eighth graders to Flandreau, new program. So I got to go to Flandreau, all the eighth graders. And one time, we walked from Flandreau over here to see my-- I wanted to see my brother and sisters. And I remember walking in front of the school building and I saw her. And I thought she loved me. See, I ran up behind her and I put my hands over her eyes thinking, oh, she'd be so glad to have her lover back, you know?

Boy, she slapped me, told me never to touch her again. Blew me away for a couple of weeks, at least.

[TRIBAL SINGING]

TED MOTTO: In the early 1900s, the federal government sponsored a project to capture traditional Indian music on wax cylinders. At the same time, government boarding schools were busy trying to erase that culture from Indian memory. In fact, schooling the savages, as we Indians were called, had been going on for hundreds of years. Jesuit missionaries established the first European-style schools in Florida around 1568.

Churches spread the work and the US government eventually joined in. in 1819, Congress directed the Federal Indian service-- a branch of the war department-- to teach native children how to be European-style farmers.

[RHYTHMIC MUSIC]

The US made war on Indians to get at tribal land. As compensation, Washington offered treaties, including a promise of education for Indian children. The first men to head the Indian service made it clear in their annual reports that boarding schools made a most effective weapon.

SPEAKER: These establishments go further, in my opinion, toward securing our borders from bloodshed and keeping peace among the Indians themselves and attaching them to us than would the physical force of our army.

SPEAKER: The dark clouds of ignorance and superstition in which these people have so long been enveloped seem to be breaking away and the light of Christianity and general knowledge to be dawning upon their moral and intellectual darkness.

SPEAKER: It is indispensably necessary that Indians be placed in positions where they can be controlled and finally compelled by Stern necessity to resort to agricultural labor or starve.

TED MOTTO: The Bureau of Indian Affairs began building its own system of boarding schools in the 1870s. Every state in the Northwest and many states elsewhere in the country had at least one school. Clara Sue Kidwell is a professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Kidwell says that from the start boarding schools maintained a stern military tone.

CLARA SUE KIDWELL: Richard Pratt, for instance, who established Carlisle, the first off reservation school, was a military man. And he had fought on the plains and he ended up being-- I guess, working with prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida. And that's where he felt strongly that the only way to really save these Indians as people was to take the Indians out of them. And he set up Carlisle specifically as that kind of training ground.

TED MOTTO: Richard Pratt embraced an idea called outing. My father and other Indian students at Carlisle were kept with white Christian families during holidays in the summer. Historian Leonard Brewer of the University of South Dakota says Indian children could do little to retain their native ways. They didn't have family to rely on. They were so far away from home, they couldn't run away. And so they were really prisoners. And Pratt always thought that the best way to get the savageness out of a savage was: to turn him into a farmer.

[TRIBAL SINGING]

TED MOTTO: In training these would-be farmers, the US government's first target was language. Language is really the heart of any culture. Hundreds of Native languages and dialects were to be replaced by English. Children were whipped or had their mouth washed with soap for speaking Indian. Cornelia Eller, a Dakota, and Josephine Robinson, an Ojibwe, went to Pipestone at the turn of the century. They were interviewed by historians in the 1960s.

CORNELIA ELLER: Learn to be the White people way. We're not supposed to be Indians all the time. That was always thrown up to us at the government school. And as I got older, you know, 14, 15, 16 right around there, I was all mixed up. I was puzzled. Why can't I be an Indian? Why can't I do the things I want to do? Why can't I talk the way I want to? And yet, I was always a little bit shy and afraid of the White people. I don't know what. I had that feeling they looked down on us.

JOSEPHINE ROBINSON: I couldn't talk a word of English. All I talked was the Ojibwe language. And when we went to the kindergarten, I couldn't understand why that teacher always made me sit in a corner in a little chair.

CORNELIA ELLER: Mm.

JOSEPHINE ROBINSON: I never knew when she was talking to me because I couldn't understand her. And I wasn't doing anything. I was just sitting there, trying to listen, you know?

CORNELIA ELLER: Mm-hmm.

JOSEPHINE ROBINSON: She thought I was stubborn, I guess, because I never answered her. But I couldn't understand what she was saying.

TED MOTTO: Historians say that many Indian families became eager for their children to get a boarding school education, but other families refused. In the early years, government agents withheld rations of food and clothing to hungry families, forcing their cooperation. In other places, Indian children were taken from reluctant families at gunpoint. Parents were thrown in jail. Charles Dagworth Horns a Cheyenne River Sioux, was born in 1902.

CHARLES DAGWORTH HORNS: When the school began policemen coming around every home for the Sioux children. Then they picked them up and then they hauled us over there, the police.

TED MOTTO: Most missionaries and government school teachers thought they were doing good Christian service. Boarding schools far away from the reservation were considered most effective at indoctrinating young Indians. Father Benno Watrin worked with Indians in Northern Minnesota for many decades. He said sending children off to boarding school was like pulling teeth. Father Benno was interviewed in 1968.

FATHER BENNO WATRIN: You know, when an Indian can't speak anything but Chippewa, he can't hardly hold a job either.

SPEAKER: That's right. That's right.

CHARLES DAGWORTH HORNS: And then in their government schools, they learn to wash dishes and such stuff. They learn to handle themselves.

SPEAKER: How old are the kids when they got back from the government schools? Did you work enough with the children to have some idea of the effect that the schools had on them?

CHARLES DAGWORTH HORNS: There was a terrible tendency from the government and also from our Catholic Indian schools that when they got home, they dropped back to their old Indian ways a good deal. And that was a-- there was a terrible letdown after a year or two from what they learned in the government schools, except for those who went out and got a job, of course.

TED MOTTO: For Indian children at the turn of the century, boarding schools were often a scary new world. By sacred custom, most Native people lived in communities based on the circle. Our wigwams and tepees were circular. Villages were pitched in circles. It all reflected the hoop of life. But federal schools were designed along rigid right angles. The rooms and hallways and windows were all rectangles. Strict Victorian discipline at the schools also shocked many Indian children. Rosemary Christiansen is director of Indian Education for the Minneapolis Public Schools.

ROSEMARY CHRISTIANSEN: I don't believe that we can talk too harshly about what we have suffered, we Indian people have suffered from that particular point in our history. I call it the Nagasaki and the Hiroshima of Indian Education because it basically destroyed the fiber of our family life.

TED MOTTO: Virtually every Indian family has boarding school stories to tell. Yvonne Leith is a 52-year-old Dakota. She lives in Saint Paul.

YVONNE LEITH: Probably my mother and her brothers and sisters were the first in our family, probably, to go to boarding school. And I think it was either Pipestone or Wahpeton. And the stories she told were horrendous. There were beatings. There were a very young classmate-- I don't know how old they were, probably preschool or grade school-- who lost a hand in having to clean this machine that baked bread or cut dough or something and having to kneel for hours on cold basement floors as punishment.

TED MOTTO: Leith runs a shelter for battered Indian women. She believes the violence and isolation in boarding schools crushed her mother's traditional maternal instincts.

YVONNE LEITH: My mother lived with a rage all her life. And I think the fact that they were taken away so young was part of this rage and how the fallout was on us as a family. I think our cousins and all of us endured beatings and there wasn't that family love or caring. Affection that was something we never knew.

TED MOTTO: University of Minnesota historian Roger Buffalohead says most tribal people did not traditionally use physical punishment to discipline their children.

ROGER BUFFALOHEAD: Yet you find by the 30s and 40s in most Native communities, where large numbers of young people had in the previous years attended boarding schools, an increasing number of parents who utilized corporal punishment in the raising of their children. So that, although I don't think you can prove a direct connection, I think you can certainly see that boarding school experiences where corporal punishment was the name of the game had its impact on the next generations of Native people.

YVONNE LEITH: As hard as I tried to get away from that environment, I recreated it.

TED MOTTO: Again, Yvonne Leith.

YVONNE LEITH: I could hear my mother's voice. I could see my mother act with the way I treated my children. I try to be totally nonviolent now, but I was very-- I used to, you know, not beat my children but I think the yelling, the screaming, the things that my mother used to say to us came out in my voice. And I apologize to my children today. I said, things don't have to be always be that way, that you can make it different for the coming generations.

TED MOTTO: Not all of us Indian elders are bitter about the federal boarding schools. Not everything the schools did was bad. One day, recently, I talked over old times with Beulah Robertson, a Sioux woman I in Minneapolis. Back in the seconds, Buelah and I went to the same schools. She disagrees with me on how cruel it was to send Indian children so far from home.

BEULAH ROBERTSON: Don't you think that was, for the kids, only good? Because I I know in my time, we went hungry a lot of times. We didn't have no shoes to wear. And when my dad took me to the Indian school, we got three meals a day. We got good education. We got clothes, like I said, because our parents didn't have any money to buy us anything. And I'm glad that my dad took me there. Otherwise, where would I be?

TED MOTTO: Um, Probably 99%, 98% of the Indian people had no jobs on their reservations in the 10s, 20s and 30s. And this was a neat way to solve a problem from a white man's standpoint, what are we going to do with these Indians? We can't kill them, but we can take them and put them in Indian schools and teach them how to be better Americans.

BEULAH ROBERTSON: I know that when I went to school at Pipestone, in the fall, the busses, they'd go out to different reservations and bring the kids into school. And then in the spring, they took them home for the summer. And though we didn't have no place to go, so we stayed right at the school. And then we got paid like $1 a day for working either in the kitchen or the boys worked in the gardens. And that's only money we ever seen, you know? To me, it was a good deal that I could go to school, get something to eat.

SPEAKER: OK, everybody down on their back. Pull your feet all the way over.

TED MOTTO: Over the years, the US government built hundreds of Indian schools. Most of the 31 remaining BIA-operated boarding schools are located on reservations. Only five off-reservation boarding schools still exist. One of them is the Flandreau Indian School near Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I graduated from Flandreau in 1941. Almost all of the old buildings have been replaced, except this gymnasium.

This is where the spectators stood during the basketball games. It would be packed. I met my first wife standing on a stage right there singing a song. And she was on the floor right in front of me. I saw this pretty little face, so I asked my brother, who is that? He said, do you to meet her? Yeah. We ended up getting married. That's kind of a good story, huh?

[CHUCKLING]

My visit to Flandreau showed how much the school has changed and how much it's still the same. Each year, Flandreau admits more than 600 students. By year's end, nearly half of them go back home to school or drop out altogether. A 1969 Senate investigation found that Flandreau and other government boarding schools had become dumping grounds for troubled Indian children.

Assistant principal Ron Gourneau says more of today's students are at Flandreau because of emotional or family problems. Gourneau urges visitors to see behind Flandreau's rather bleak statistics.

RON GOURNEAU: Flandreau Indian School got 600 kids, and 250 of them dropped out. My god, that's bad. That's horrible on paper. On paper, that's really terrible. But of those 250, 200 of them are back in school someplace. And the 50 that-- let's say just the 50 that actually dropped out, they'd have dropped out anywhere.

SPEAKER: Is the basement open? Do you know?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

TED MOTTO: Students at Flandreau live in drab brick and block buildings on a wide treeless yard. As in my era, their daily lives are still dictated by clocks and bells. But the students are no longer obliged to spend half their day doing manual labor. Many of the kids say they're glad to be at Flandreau. Patricia Peters is a senior from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

PATRICIA PETERS: Well, when I was in Pine Ridge going to school there at the eighth grade, they mentioned this place to me and said it would be better for me because, I guess, I was too smart for the school back home. I got straight A's, so I came here and it was a little more challenging.

TED MOTTO: But like many of Flandreau students, Patricia was also escaping self-destruction back on the res.

PATRICIA PETERS: I was always just drinking, you know, and didn't really care for school. I skipped a lot because it seemed like everybody my age, all they did was drink and do drugs. I don't know. It was all different when I came up here because it seemed like a lot of people cared up here. They paid attention to what you did.

TED MOTTO: The education these young people get at Flandreau is much different than in my time.

SPEAKER: The Ojibwe trickster, one of them anyway, is Wenebojo, and that's how it's pronounced. It looks like Wenebojo but it's pronounced Wenebojo.

TED MOTTO: This is a Native American literature class, a subject unheard of back in the '30s. It's a fairly recent addition to the curriculum.

[DRUMMING AND TRIBAL SINGING]

There's a traditional drum group on campus called Young Voice. There was no drum group in my days at Flandreau. Scott Dumas from Sisseton, South Dakota is student council president. He's also a singer in the group. Like many students, one of the things Scott likes best about Flandreau is being among so many American Indians.

SCOTT DUMAS: It's like you when you meet people from different tribes, they have, like, different religions and different stories and backgrounds. It gets kind of neat after a while to hear some of their old legends. And it's just fun, I guess.

TED MOTTO: But the spiritual and cultural power of the drum doesn't seem to play as big a role on campus as it could.

SCOTT DUMAS: Yeah, there's only some people that get into it. A lot of people are too cool, I guess, to be Indians, you know? I don't know if that's weak. They don't get into it. They walk around making fun of us. Like, we walk around singing our songs, you know? Like, we'll be just-- we'll think of a song we'll be humming it or something. And they'll be real buttholes and say something. But you know, no one really gives us too much crap about it because we're doing an Indian thing and they're Indians too. They can't hide the fact, they're always going to be Indian.

TED MOTTO: Federal boarding schools have long been criticized for providing substandard education. Most of the Indian staffers at Flandreau send their children to the local public school. Over the last 50 years, the government closed many of its boarding schools as public and tribal schools opened closer to reservations. Now about 90% of Indian children go to local public schools. Flandreau assistant principal Ron Gourneau insists that the five remaining off-reservation schools, including Flandreau, are needed now more than ever. Gourneau says they're the last chance for many Indian students to taste success.

RON GOURNEAU: Success to us is simply coming to school. A success to-- is completing the school year, passing a grade. That's success. Success is getting up at the appropriate time, making your beds, functioning over in the dormitories, functioning well, and coming over to class, and getting it done.

TED MOTTO: You can look at it this way, boarding schools like Flandreau are now struggling to repair the damage they did to Indian people generations ago. If our traditional families were still intact, Indian kids might not have the highest dropout rate in the nation. But not all Indian scholars agree.

CHANINA LOMAWAIMA: My name is Chanina Lomawaima and I'm an assistant professor in the anthropology department in American Indian Studies Center at University of Washington in Seattle. The thing that most people have talked about as a legacy of boarding school experience has been a new sense of pan tribal pan Indian identification and the forging of ties across tribes, across very different groups of people, and that that has been a powerful force in sort of mobilizing Indian political strength.

TED MOTTO: Indian activism, the evolution of teaching methods, and an aggressive attempt by the BIA to get out of the education business forced government boarding schools to change. Clara Sue Kidwell at the University of California suggests that for Indian people, boarding schools were not entirely evil.

CLARA SUE KIDWELL: Because if you look at the networks of people who made their initial contacts with each other during boarding schools who then went on, like my parents, to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to carve out professional careers, to get college degrees, and to go back to work for Indian Communities, you see that they're using the mechanisms of the boarding schools as ways of really furthering their own ends and the ends of their communities.

TED MOTTO: While many other ethnic minorities. Now see school as the road to a better life, Mike Hirth of South High School in Minneapolis observes that it's not so true for his own Indian people. Hirth taught at Flandreau for eight years. The school he's at now-- South High-- has one of the largest urban Indian student populations in the country.

MIKE HIRTH: Education has been the enemy. It's been the means of destruction rather than the means of getting up and out. And I think we suffer from that today in that there's still a feeling of kind of antagonism toward education, even though most of us, when you really get down to it, know that education is very important to success.

ROSEMARY CHRISTIANSEN: Indian parents are still sending their children to boarding schools because that is the only choice. And that is what I consider to be a real tragedy.

TED MOTTO: Again, Rosemary Christensen of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

ROSEMARY CHRISTIANSEN: And in the '60s, the reports that were done out of these schools were part of what was called a tragedy. And that tragedy continues. It's become, however, commonplace now. It's just taken for granted. These kind of horrible statistics about our children are just, hmm, shrugged. So that's the way it is. That's what I think is incredibly uncivilized about you Americans.

TED MOTTO: When I left Flandreau Indian School in 1941, I wanted to be a pilot. But I found out my boarding school education wasn't good enough. So I started life in the White world as a welder, a trade I had learned in this shop at Flandreau. My boarding school teachers did little to inspire me. The most important teacher to me was my second grade teacher in the public school I went to before I got sent away.

She taught me to love reading, a gift I never would have gotten at the boarding school. Eventually, I made it to college then taught in public schools for 40 years. I vowed never to send any of my six children away to government school. Perhaps some day, boarding schools will outlive their current purpose because Indian children will be able to survive and succeed in their schools at home.

Until that day, let's hope those young Indians at Flandreau and at the other boarding schools sing with all the breath they've got and pound that drum till someone hears. This is Ted motto.

[DRUMMING AND TRIBAL SINGING]

SPEAKER: Learning, The White People Way, was written by Stephen Smith and Ted Motto. Reporting and production by Stephen Smith and Chris Julian. Technical director, John Sheriff. Historic recordings provided by the Institute of American Indian Studies at the University of South Dakota and the Library of Congress. Support for this program was provided by the Northwest Area Foundation.

[SINGING CONTINUES]