It is a pity that so many Americans today think of the Indian as a romantic or comic figure in American history without contemporary significance. In fact, the Indian plays much the same role in our American society that the Jews played in Germany. Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shifts from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere; and our treatment of Indians, even more than our treatment of other minorities, reflects the rise and fall in our democratic faith.
Just a little over 100 years after Lincoln signed the first Thanksgiving proclamation, these words by Felix Cohen appeared quoted in the opening to the 1969 Kennedy Report on Indian Education. The report was helmed by Senator Ted Kennedy and serves as a bedrock document in the Native education and political communities: For the first time, possibly ever, it signaled that major U.S. political players were finally paying attention to the erasure of Native communities from the American mosaic. As part of the report, a review of 100 educational texts taken from public schools across the country came to the belated conclusion that Native people were viewed as little more than “subhuman wild beasts in the path of civilization.”
While I was reporting last year on North Carolina’s decision to close down the High Plains Indian School and integrate my tribe, the Sappony, in 1963, I heard directly from family members about how such slanted curricula affected Native students’ experience. My uncles and aunts told me stories of the other kids at school asking them if they had scalped anyone or if they carried tomahawks, and of discriminatory treatment doled out by teachers and administrators to Sappony children, whose only crime was having skin that was a little darker than their own.
In the 50 years since the Kennedy Report was published, Americans have barely moved an inch when it comes to demanding an accurate historical or contemporary view of Native people be taught in public schools. And this has had a marked effect on Native children forced to listen to their histories being twisted to fit a narrative of deity-ordained land theft and warfare. Writing on this in 1985, Lee Little Soldier found that Native students still often felt “trapped between their birthright and the dominant society, losing touch with the former, but not feeling comfortable in the latter.”