INDIA'S EDUCATION ( A CULTURAL GENOCIDE)

Chapter 5 Stolen childhoods

The year is 1879 and the United States is looking at ways to eradicate the Native American population to gain more land. A man named Richard Henry Prat has in his custody some prisoners of war. Opened in 1879 in Pennsylvania, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first government-run boarding school for Native Americans. Civil War veteran Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt spearheaded the effort to create an off-reservation boarding school with the goal of forced assimilation. The Army transferred Carlisle Barracks, a military post not in regular use, to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for use as a boarding school.

Students were forced to cut their hair, change their names, stop speaking their Native languages, convert to Christianity, and endure harsh discipline including corporal punishment and solitary confinement. This approach was ultimately used by hundreds of other Native American boarding schools, some operated by the government and many more operated by churches.

Pratt, like many others at that time, believed that the only hope for Native American survival was to shed all native culture and customs and assimilate fully into white American culture. His common refrain was "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."

Yet initial student recruitment for the school was also about control of the tribes. The Department of War directed Pratt to travel to the Dakota Territory and recruit the first students from the Oglala Sioux and Brule Sioux. Government leaders essentially held hostage the children of tribal leaders to try to ensure the good behavior of the tribes.

The school was presented to the tribes as an opportunity for children to learn English and be better able to protect the tribe's interests in the future. Many parents and tribal leaders initially embraced the opportunity for their children to learn, while others remained skeptical of any efforts by the U.S. government.

What the US government did at that time was nothing short of genocide disguised as education. Children took miles away from home, stripped of their native clothing, and given new names along with being forbidden from speaking their native language. On top of that accounts of mental, physical, and sexual abuse, forced manual labor, starvation, and death due to neglect were also common. I will tell you why this was such in a bit.

It was clear that the government wanted the indoctrination of children to take away their indigenous identity. This is also why Prat spread propaganda by hiring photographers to show the government his idea was working. He was successful none the less and more than 350 boarding schools opened and assimilated Native American children. In 1900 there were 2000 Native American children in boarding schools and in 1925 there were 60000.

Parents faced imprisonment for not sending their children to schools and their food rations were held back. This is what Henry Prat said in his propaganda "they are being brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization"

When children were stripped of their native identities several policies infringed on their tribal lands and by 1940 their land was non-existent. The children could not communicate with their parents and were disconnected from their lands.

Same in New Zealand, Australia, Canada. All these countries have acknowledged and apologized whereas in the US it has been purposefully berried and not taught in history books.

Over 10000 children were indoctrinated, the white men destroyed their language and they destroyed the native songs, cutting them off from their native and cultural identities.

"They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement"

-President Andrew Jackson

"The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages...to leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness"

-chief justice john marshall.

So that was an intense paragraph I think we should take a breath to sort of wrap our heads around it. Once your headspace is clear, I want you to think of a loved one, it could be anybody, your child, your parent, your sibling, your crush even your girlfriend or boyfriend just any loved one. Now think of some man from a different country like Pakistan or China or any country you are skeptical of, imagine today if one man or woman from that country comes to your state and tries to physically harm your loved one. What would your response be? Think if someone is kidnapping your child in front of you, what would you do?

Do you feel like a hike in your blood, feel the rage? The agony? It's because it's normal to feel protective of someone you love. You would never want them to be harmed in any way and you would not back down from smashing a rock on someone's head who harms them. This is exactly what the natives of the American continent felt when their children were stolen from them. I want to shed light on something new, something I think has been unnoticed. Andrew Bell worked in a military regiment and Henry Prat was a Brigadier General moreover the school was an army barrack not in regular use, the Carlisle barracks.

See where I am going with this? These men were not educators, they were never meant to be, they were military personal who wanted to eradicate the native population hence the forced haircut and military uniform and prohibition on speaking the native language and getting new names. This was all part of an experiment to make the children as distant from their native selves as possible.

Now I would like to ask the present Indian generation whether they can read an article in their local language as easily as they can read English? Did your school have any rules like the Carlisle school? Did you ever think why they never made any sense?

The United Nations describes genocide as the following;

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Right to Education act 2010 had the following provisions;

· It provides for the appointment of appropriately trained teachers, i.e., teachers with the requisite entry and academic qualifications.

·It provides for the development of curriculum in consonance with the values enshrined in the Constitution, and which would ensure the all-round development of the child, building on the child's knowledge, potentiality, and talent and making the child free of fear, trauma, and anxiety through a system of child-friendly and child-centered learning.

· It prohibits

(a) physical punishment and mental harassment

(b) screening procedures for admission of children

(c) capitation fee

(d) private tuition by teachers and running of schools without recognition.