Children and War: A Historical Anthology

17. Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians: The Removal of Indigenous Children as a Weapon of War in the United States and Australia, 1870–1940

Chapter Seventeen Stolen Generations and Vanishing Indians The Removal of Indigenous Children as a Weapon of War in the United States and Australia, 1870–1940 Victoria Haskins and Margaret D. Jacobs In 1906, a girl named Helen “awoke to find [her] camp surrounded by troops.” A government official, she later recalled, “called the men together, ordering the women and children to remain in their separate family groups.”“The government,” he said: had reached the limit of its patience and that the children would have to go to school. . . . All children of school age were lined up to be registered and taken away to school. Eighty-two children . . . were taken to the schoolhouse . . . with military escort.1 In about 1915, the police came for a girl named Margaret. “They said they wanted to take my children away,”Margaret’s mother Theresa remembered. “I said‘My children are well cared for.’”A policeman took Margaret, her sister , and her cousin from their local school, in the face of the weeping entreaties of her mother. Margaret wrote that the policeman patted a holster at his belt while telling her resistant mother that he would “have to use this if you do not let us take these children now.” Thinking that the policeman would shoot their mother, Margaret and her young relatives screamed, “We’ll go with him Mum, we’ll go.”2 The similarity of these two stories is remarkable. In each case, government authorities forcibly removed children from their families for the stated purposes of educating them or improving their lives. Yet the incidents took place in almost opposite corners of the world. Helen was Helen Sekaquaptewa, a Hopi girl who lived in northeastern Arizona in the United 227 States. Margaret was Margaret Tucker, or Lilardia, an Ulupna/Wiradjuri Aboriginal girl from the southeastern corner of the Australian continent.3 Despite being poles apart, Helen and Margaret, as well as their communities , shared a common experience at the hands of white governmental authorities . As a central component of the assimilation agenda in the United States and of absorption plans in Australia, child removal became a systematic government policy toward indigenous peoples in both countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using the rhetoric of protecting and saving indigenous children, reformers and government officials touted child removal as a means to “uplift” and “civilize” indigenous children. Modern-day historians, until very recently, have characterized child removal in similar ways: as a well-intentioned, though ultimately misguided, alternative to warfare and violence against indigenous peoples. If we turn our attention to the perspectives of the indigenous peoples who confronted this policy, a different view emerges. While outright violence against indigenous peoples in both the United States and Australia did virtually end in the late nineteenth century, efforts by colonizers to pacify and control indigenous populations and to confiscate their lands continued with the removal of indigenous children. Such a policy was hardly a departure from military methods of subjugation; rather, the systematic and forcible removal of their younger generations represented an ongoing assault upon indigenous communities. The removal of Indian children as a systematic state policy began in earnest in the United States in the 1880s. The idea to assimilate Indians through removing Indian children originated in 1875 with an“experiment” conducted upon Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne prisoners of war incarcerated at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, under the command of Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt decided to “rehabilitate” the prisoners by cutting their hair, replacing their native dress with military uniforms, and introducing military discipline and education to them. In 1879, with new authority from the government, Pratt opened Carlisle Institute, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on twenty-seven acres of land, complete with stables, officer’s quarters, and commodious barracks buildings, all donated by the U.S. War Department. As at Fort Marion, Pratt ran the school along military lines. He issued military uniforms to Indian boys, and required both boys and girls to form in companies, march, and drill each day before they carried out their assigned “details.” Pratt deemed dormitories “quarters” and implemented a strict military regime.4 228 v i c t o r i a h a s k i n s a n d m a r g a r e t d . j a c o b s Thus even from their inception, Indian boarding schools were intimately connected with the...