News American Indian colleges embrace native heritage
By Carey Gillam

Mon, 20 Jan 2003
Excerpted from: American Indian colleges embrace native heritage: AOL

LAWRENCE, Kansas, Jan 15

(Reuters) - In old photos, the American Indian boys wear military-style jackets, while the little girls wear simple dresses and aprons. An iron-barred shack serves to punish those who try to flee.

The scenes testify to the history of the Haskell Indian Nations University, an institution founded in1884 by the U.S. government to indoctrinate American Indian children into the ways of the white man, stripping them of all things Indian.

 In treaties dating back to the late 1700s, the U.S. government took millions of acres of Indian land in exchange for promises to provide education, health care and other services to American Indians.

A PAINFUL PAST

Haskell was one of a handful of "boarding schools" for American Indians founded in the late 1800s by the U.S. government. Dubbed the United States Indian Industrial Training School, Haskell opened in 1884 with 22students.

School leaders cut off the children's hair, discarded their Indian clothing and refused to let them speak in native languages or practice their religions. The students were not allowed to leave the school for family visits for at least four years and were drilled daily in "white man" ways.

The assimilation effort came after the U.S. government seized Indian lands amid westward white migration across the United States. School historians say some Indian families sent their children willingly to the school, believing it would help them, while others lost their children to government round-ups.

Of those original schools, Haskell is the only one operating today. Its transformation took place slowly, gaining steam in the 1960s and '70s along with Indian activism."The idea was to take the Indian out of the soul without killing the man," said Dr George Godfrey, national programme leader for multi-cultural alliances at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"Yet...out of this has developed an immense pride and a tool for pressing on with issues important to Indians," Godfrey said. "Haskell and these other schools are training native American peoples who will be the future policy makers and leaders throughout the country."

(Additional reporting by

Maggie Koerth)

(In the complete article it is clear that Haskell is now operating in a positive way that supports the Native heritages. The Painful Past was highlighted as an introduction into what Native people suffered in boarding schools around the turn of the 20th century when it became clear that it was more cost effective to assimilate Indians rather than exterminate them.

For more information on boarding schools:

Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust
The Untold Story of the Genocide of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada
http://www.hiddenfromhistory.org/

Any internet search will come up with more information.