Page 7
March 1992
Smoke Signals
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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The American Experience
by Kathy Gerhardt
In The White Man's Image, premiering Monday,
February 17 at 9 p.m. as the last episode in the fourth
season of THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE on PBS,
followed Captain Richard Pratt's mission to "civilize"
the American Indian - in his words, "to kill the Indian
and save the man" - and his founding of the Carlisle
School for Indian Children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Featuring interviews with Native Americans, historians,
and writers; historical drawings, and remarkable before-and-after
photographs of the school children, In the
White Man's Image tells the ,
story of a humanist experi
ment gone bad and its conse
quences for generations of
native people.
In 1875, army lieutenant
Richard Pratt volunteered to
take charge of 72 Indian
warriors suspected of killing
white settlers, and deliver
them to Fort Marion in St.
Augustine, Florida.
Pratt, a Civil War veteran
and leader of Indian scouts on
the frontier, was one of the
Most of the prisoners, however, returned to their homes
and families in Indian territory.
Fort Marion was only the beginning. A year later, Pratt
challenged Congress: "Give me 300 young Indians and
a school in one of our best communities and I will show
you how to solve the Indian problem," he said.
In 1879, Pratt travelled to Dakota Territory to recruit
children for his Indian school, a thousand miles away in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When they arrived at the aban
doned army post that would be their home, 169 children
few officers who viewed the
Indians as human beings.
"Much can and should be
dbne to reform these men i
under banishment," he wrote.
In The White Man's Image journeys to Florida to
explore the ancient Spanish fort where the warriors were
taken and taught to read and write and learn the white
man's ways.
"It was quite natural then for Pratt to begin to change
them physically," says Professor Henrietta Mann,
historian and member of the Cheyenne tribe in the film.
"To take off the kind of outer identity by placing them in
military uniforms, by cutting their hair, to make them
into the image of white men. And it must have been
horrifying, because to us, cutting one's hair is a sign of
mourning - of death."
After three years in exile, the government freed the
prisoners. For some, the conversion was complete one
man became a Deacon in the Episcopal Church, another
expressed a desire to live in a white man's wood house,
"t will be easier to be good if I live in a wood house."
"Give me 300 young Indians and a school in one of our best communities and I will
show you how to solve the Indian problem."
-Richard Pratt
Founder of the Carlisle School
"In his mind, I'm sure that Pratt was absolutely convinced that he could take an
Indian man and make him a white man. Through a simple process of changing ap
pearances, changing values. ...Give him a uniform, cut his hair, teach him Englishh.
Above ally forbid him from speaking his native tongue, remove him as far as possible
from the center of his religion, his spiritual existence, put him in a strange place, a
place where he has no advatages and he will become what you want him to become.
You can draw a picture and let him look at it and slowly he will transform himself
into the image he can see there. Well, it doesn't work that way. It's not that simple."
-N. Scott Momaday r, ,
Native American Writer
became the first subjects in a National educational
experiment designed to re-make them in the white
man's image.
They were dressed in military uniforms, forbidden to
speak their native languages, baptised as Christians and
expected to adopt the value system of industrial
America. They learned competition, individuality, and to
live by the clock. Some did their best to conform. Others
were depressed and homesick. Hundred died at school
from epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, and influenza.
After graduation, students found that the outside world
still saw them as "redskins." Unable to find jobs, they
returned to their homes on reservations.
The film features the story of Plenty Horses an
extreme example of the failure of Pratt's experiment.
"Plenty Horses found on the reservation what so many
Carlisle returnees did," says historian Robert Utley in
the film. "He was not a white person now nobody
would hire him as a white person. But he was no longer
an Indian and he had lost the acceptance of his own
people as an Indian, and he ended up existing in a
shadow world, neither Indian nor white."
In 1890, Plenty Horses murdered an army officer at
Wounded Knee to prove that he was still Indian. "Five
years I attended Carlisle and was educated in the ways
of the white man," he said. "I was lonely, I shot the
Lieutenant so I might make a place for myself among
my people. Now I am one of them. I shall be hung and
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm the Indians will bury me as a
warrior...I am satisfied."
By 1902, Congress had
established 25 off-reservation
boarding schools in 13 states.
Thousands of Indian children
travelled far from home to
learn the white man's way.
But when school was over,
they returned to poverty and
a sense of loss. By the 1930s,
it was obvious that assimila
tion was not working. Many
off-reservation boarding
schools closed. Indians were
urged to take back their
cultures, their traditions, and
their pride.
In the film, Sid Byrd recalls
returning home to South
Dakota after attending the Genoa Indian School in
Nebraska. "My grandparents had been informed and
they were standing waiting at the train station," he says.
"I practically leaped from the train, tears of joy stream
ing down my cheeks, and I ran to my grandmother and
she embraced me, and she said, 'Tachojah, tachojah,
ciant angalesco - My grandchild, my grandchild, you
come from a long ways.' And she embraced me. Tears
were streaming down her cheeks. I suddenly discovered
that the people that I loved and longed to be with, I
could no longer communicate with them. My own
language had been beaten out of me. And I wept bitterly
and I vowed that I would relearn my own language."
Editor's Note: The premiere of In the White Man's
Image is February 17 at 9p.m., however PBS will re-air the
program at any given time depending on their program
schedule. You may call your local PBS station to find out
when the next airing will be.
7T 7r f
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W Mi Y
Pratt took a series of before and
after photos of his students to
counter the critics of his school.
Pictured are students from the
Pueblo tribe: (beforeleft and
afterright); Mary Perry, John
Chaves and Ben Thomas.
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