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2. Native Views: “A New Road for All the Indians” As he watched the Great Plains of the Southwest being staked out, Kicking Bird, the Kiowa chief, was afraid for his people. He wanted peace and “had given his hand to the white people, and had taken a firm hold of theirs,” but he was fearful the Kiowa could never adapt to the new life demanded of them.1 In a letter to Washington he explained: “The Commissioner has required a hard thing insisting the Indians stay on the reservation, which was not in the road our fathers traveled. It is a new road for us. . . . It is a new road for all the Indians in this country .” And he confessed to his overwhelming sense of doom. “The white man is strong, but he cannot destroy us all in one year, it will take him two or three, maybe four years and then the world will turn to water or burn up. It cannot live when the Indians are all dead.”2 The dramatic shift in the balance of power on the Plains after the Civil War placed all Indians who lived there in a desperate situation. With armed resistance progressively less possible, they were forced onto reservations where strong measures were taken to ensure that their children enrolled in white-run schools. Hundreds of Indian communities were subjected to the same process. They did not represent a single monolithic culture and the responses of different individuals and societies to the new situation varied enormously. Yet, for the first time, a unified government program of educational instruction was being enforced on all their children and the reactions it elicited from Indian people fell into identifiable patterns. Open defiance was a fading possibility , yet passive compliance with white demands and acceptance of cultural suicide was equally out of the question. In the vast terrain between the polar opposites of these responses, Indian leaders and their people worked to protect and reshape worlds they recognized as their own. In their struggle to do this, they often resisted white schooling or 49 grudgingly accommodated its demands, but sometimes they were able to claim and adapt for their own purposes the new skills and perceptions taught in the schools. In the early days, although forced to sign treaties with strict educational clauses, many tribes held out resolutely against any proposal that their children should be sent to white schools. Speaking through an interpreter at the Council of Medicine Lodge, the Kiowa chief Satanta (White Bear) doggedly informed white negotiators, “I don’t want any of the medicine lodges within this country. I want the children raised as I was.”3 The medicine lodges he referred to were the schools and churches written into the terms of the Treaty of Medicine Lodge. For Satanta and many others at the council, including Satank (Sitting Bear), E-si-sim-ers (Lone Wolf), Woman’s Heart, and Isa-tah (White Horse), these white institutions, specifically devised for education and worship, were extraneous and offensive to a people well able to care for and instruct their own children. Edward Red Hand, the Cheyenne Keeper of the Sacred Arrows, shared their opinion and some years later recalled: “We did not want our children to learn the White Man’s ways. We had our own ways and we liked them better. It was still our country and we did not want anyone to tell us what to do.”4 While Indians retained their economic and political independence, the majority felt no incentive to relinquish their own cultural practices, particularly the education of their children. Native Patterns of Education As with all peoples, the training of Indian children reflected individual cultures and histories. Each tribe had developed clearly defined ways to ensure the survival of its own beliefs into the next generation. It is not within the scope of this study to begin to offer a full account of these many patterns of traditional native education. Instead it supplies a backdrop against which the reeducation program attempted in white schools can be more accurately assessed. Despite many cultural differences, some fundamental assumptions shared by tribes were reflected in their child-rearing practices. For example , in no native community was education a discrete endeavor conducted in a separate institution. It was always woven into everyday patterns of living and took place informally in daily interactions between Native Views [18.119.107.161] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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