A silly season foolish apology for America’s Indian Boarding School system with pricey financial implications
From Anthropologist Hymie Rubenstein
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“A fool and his money is soon parted” is a 1587 English-language aphorism that still resonates today.
A good recent example with lots of implied monetary implications just took place in the last stages of America’s presidential election campaign.
Yes, the silly season of expensive political promises is in overdrive among our southern neighbours who will be going to the polls on November 5 to choose which one of two deeply flawed candidates will be their next president.
Meanwhile, the feebleminded current incumbent was in Arizona on Friday, October 25, where he made a knuckleheaded apology for a noble historical effort to bring Western education and civilization to his country’s stone-age indigenous children, as recently noted in this newsletter by its editor James Pew.
U.S. President Joe Biden actually called his nation’s 159-year Indian Boarding School system – a project that formed the model for Canada’s federally-funding of Indian Residential Schools – a “sin in our soul.”
“I formally apologize as president of the United States of America for what we did,” Biden said in a visit to the Gila River Indian Community on the outskirts of Phoenix.
Arizona is a battleground state where Native American voters form a crucial voting bloc and Biden can make all the apologies he likes because he won’t be around much longer to fund their fallout. In this case it could be billions in reparation demands that will now erupt demanding compensations for the government’s role in supporting the Indian Boarding Schools.
If truth be told, Biden knew little or nothing about these schools despite his blatantly political apology delivered with Election Day a little over a week away and polls showing a tight race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump.
The story of these Indian Boarding Schools began in 1819 when the American Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act whose purpose was “providing against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes, adjoining the frontier settlements of the United States, and for introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization.” The Act was officially struck down by the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.
“Providing against further decline and final extinction” was no silly rationale for promoting integration, a process with many positive and negative features that has characterized the human condition around the globe for millennia.
Before Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492, what became the United States had an estimated population of three million people; by 1819, it had nosedived by 90 percent to 300,000.
As in Canada, native Americans suffered high fatality rates from contact with European diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis that were new to them and to which they had not yet acquired immunity. They also faced starvation across the West as the bison and other fur-bearing animals they depended on for subsistence and trade were decimated by indigenous and non-indigenous overhunting.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched an investigation into the boarding school system shortly after she became the first Native American to lead the agency, and she joined Biden during his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president.
Like the six-volume 2015 final report by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the two-volume Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (see here and here) that Haaland sponsored damned the American boarding schools for “forcing” children to attend institutions where they were allegedly physically, emotionally, and sexually abused, stripped of their indigenous cultures, and where more than 950 died.
These assertions and the misinterpretation of the motives for building the schools – to allow indigenous children to adapt to the challenges of a rapidly changing society – have even less credibility than their clownishly-biased Canadian counterparts.
Canada’s indigenous population in 1881, two years before the first Indian Residential School opened, was 108,547, or one-third of its American counterpart. Approximately 150,000 Canadian aboriginal children, representing no more than one-third of eligible students, attended these schools for an average of 4.5 years over their 114-year existence, 1883-1997. The 18,000 or so American Indians who attended more than 500 boarding schools over its 159-year history likely represented less than one-tenth of all eligible children. This figure could not possibly have led to massive school-induced cultural genocide.
Biden also used the event to tout his administration’s investments in Indian Country. According to the White House, tribal nations received $32 billion from the American Rescue Plan, $13 billion in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build high-speed Internet, roads, bridges, public transit, and clean water-sanitation infrastructure. This spending shows how eager America’s indigenous people have been since first contact to absorb the wonders of Western civilization, thereby also challenging the “cultural genocide” libel.
One Montana boarding school testifier said, “Before the Indian boarding schools, we took wagonloads of laundry down to the river, and all my aunts would wash their clothes in the river on the rocks; and we would hang them over the willow trees that would grow in there, while we fished. We lived off wildlife. I never knew you bought meat from a market. We lived off the deer, the rabbits, pheasants, prairie dogs.”
How many indigenous people would like to resurrect that hand-to-mouth lifestyle?
As for the average death rate of six children a year at over 500 schools, a tragedy to be sure, this is not unexpected given the lack of resistance to the aforementioned foreign diseases. Meanwhile, there is no proof these school death rates were as high as the corresponding death rates on their reservations during the same period.
As in the case of Canada’s residential schools, the testimonies of former students who reported physical, emotional, and sexual abuse were never subjected to impartial investigation or corroboration during their so-called listening sessions based on the asinine premise that indigenous people never exaggerate let alone lie.
Similarly, nothing in the two volumes of the report shows that children were forced or coerced to attend these boarding schools.
Nor is there any acknowledgement of the generosity of the American government in funding these institutions: a whopping $23.3 billion in fiscal year 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 for the Federal Indian boarding school system and similar institutions and associated integration policies.
The alternative, as in the case of countless other extinct indigenous ethnic groups around the world, was to allow them to slowly but surely die out by their gradual absorption into the dominant cultural group.
It’s unclear what action, if any, will follow Friday’s apology. The Interior Department is still working with tribal nations to repatriate the remains of children on federal lands. Past precedent, however, suggests that the Americans may be far less willing to satisfy the enormous financial demands readily acceded to by their foolish Canadian counterparts.
Yes, foolish politicians are more than happy to spend the people’s money on foolish projects. But the citizenry may well rebel when they find out how costly the American Indian Board School virtue signaling turns out to be.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The peddling of Canada’s Indigenous mass grave and genocide libels
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The Canadian Press in their little radio news snippets stated Biden's "apology" was prompted by the "mass grave of 215 children found at Kamloops residential school in 2021." I recorded the announcement. That's what it said. Canada's media -- big on division; short on facts.
The Americans owe their Indians an apology, but it is not because they tried to give them an education. Indian wars were bloody, unlike Canada’s comparatively honourable history with our indigenous people, and definitely merit apologies. However, as in Canada, those apologies, accompanied with massive social spending have been made for a century. It’s time that today’s indigenous people stop focussing on their grandparents, and start focusing on their children