Immigration as Cultural Imperialism: An Indian Boarding School Experience or The Peer Gynt Suite and the Seventh Cavalry Cafe

There is a hefty memorial stone among the US Cavalry graves at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Worn from the Montana weather and sternly archaic in its typography and very discourse, the epitaph must be one of the earliest official markers to still grace this site:

to the officers and soldiers
killed,
or who died of wounds received
in action
in the territory of montana,
while clearing the district of
the yellowstone
of hostile indians.¹

The place is no longer officially called the Custer Battlefield National Monument, and there are now headstones scattered along the hillsides of the site marking several fallen Lakota warriors. However, the many neat rows of cavalrymen’s white headstones in the main cemetery are the park’s most salient feature and the first and main attraction greeting the visitor upon entrance. The rest of the venue largely remains the relatively desolate rolling dry-grass prairie that it was at the time of the famous battle—or “massacre”—of 1876.

And so visitors to the site are still confronted with this tribute in stone, which continues to erase the crimes of colonial aggression and land theft by way of the final damning epithet, “hostile Indians.” But now, wouldn’t you have been hostile, too, given the situation? I’m reminded of seeing the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin on one of his tv episodes, jabbing at a poisonous snake with a stick and jawing in his rich Aussie accent: “When you poke them with a stick, they tend to get irritable and aggressive” (that is—hostile). Even my seven-year-old daughter had the sense to exclaim, as we watched that episode together: “Well, stop poking it, then!”

Fig 1.

Memorial stone and inscription, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

(Photo by the author.)

After the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee—a real massacre, involving women and children—Black Elk, still one of the Oglala Lakota “hostiles,” was involved in a skirmish near Drexel Mission “about four miles north of Pine Ridge Agency.” Raymond J. DeMallie glosses this as (the later) “Holy Rosary” Mission, where I went to school—as we will see—in the third and fourth grades. Black Elk says, pretty much in passing, but with a certain degree of pride: “there are many bullets in the Mission yet.”² The metaphorical readings thereof are rampant indeed; it’s as multivalent as a trope. For one, this essay is intended to put a few more bullet holes in that Mission.

I often find myself needing to stand the topic of “immigration” on its head a bit by going back one hundred (or five hundred) years. There is even a little inside joke, you see, among us members of the Native American component of the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Every time a colloquium topic of immigration comes up, we say, “Well—we’re against it.” Of course we’re talking about a five-hundred-year history and issue, not the contemporary one that most of us talk about today. I think that the Great Plains Indian experience with immigration needs addressing nonetheless. I can’t count the times that I’ve heard radio-talk-show callers proclaim during the current debate: “After all, we’re all immigrants!” As usual, a whole lot of forgetting and historical erasure is going on with such statements.

For the North American indigenous, immigration has been by and large that of Western colonization, spearheaded not only by the military forces of the Custers and Sheridans of the US Army and Cavalry, but by their complicit confreres of religious proselytizing, the Christian missionaries. Together in what I would dub a “Christo-Custer colonialism,” they performed a two-fisted attack upon the Plains Indian tribes and must have seemed a very strange Janus-faced figure, with a Winchester rifle in one hand and a King James Bible in the other—the brute force of avaricious land-grabbing conquest justified by ideological...