Cutting hair symbolized the beginning of assimilation for boarding school students
Murals on the rear side of the abandoned Concho Indian Boarding School
in El Reno, Oklahoma, were painted by Steven Grounds of the Navajo and
Euchee tribes. (Photo by Mary Annette Pember / ICT)
WARNING: This story has disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from
the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the
US. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline in Canada can
be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
Tucked in hundreds of envelopes is the hair cut from Native children
as they arrived at boarding schools. Hidden away for nearly 100 years in
the recesses of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the
collection of hair samples offers tangible evidence of the trauma of
assimilation.
According to the hygiene of the day, cropping hair was the surest way
to avoid lice among the crowded populations of children coerced to
attend the nation’s Indian boarding schools.
For boarding school survivors, however, the haircuts came to
symbolize the harsh introduction to the process of assimilation, a
gesture disregarding their culture and families wishes.
Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, wept as she described her reaction to hearing about the museum’s findings.
“I began to shake and weep, especially thinking of how deeply
boarding school survivors may take this news,” said Lajimodiere,
co-founder of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and author of “Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors.”
Some of those sampled could still be alive today, Lajimodiere said.
The Peabody Museum recently discovered the box of human hair among
its holdings. Gathered nearly a century ago, the hair was taken by an
anthropologist from the heads of hundreds of Native children who
attended Indian boarding schools between 1930 and 1933.
Museum leaders released a public announcement on Nov. 10 about the findings.
“I imagine that many people, especially non-Natives, hardly gave it a
second thought,” said Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band
of Chippewa tribe.
“But for Native people hair represents cultural and spiritual
connections to family and place. Our hair is part of our strength.”
The United States is trailing Canada in addressing its history of government- and church-run Indian boarding schools.
In 2006, Canada created the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program as part of the country’s Indian Residential School Agreement.
Although the Department of the Interior under Secretary Deb Haaland’s leadership recently released the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report,
there are currently no services or support for survivors in the U.S.
Haaland is the first Indigenous person in a presidential cabinet.
But more needs to be done.
“There’s no mental health support for our survivors in the U.S.
unlike in Canada,” Lajimodiere said. “How do we begin to heal when the
trauma doesn’t stop?”
‘A spiritual violation’
When children first arrived at boarding schools, authorities would
routinely cut their long hair into short, uniform styles, an experience
that has left many survivors as well as their descendants suffering from
negative physical and mental impacts, according to researchers.
Basil Braveheart, Oglala Lakota Nation, still vividly recalls the
shock of having his long hair cut more than 80 years ago, when he first
entered the Holy Rosary Indian Mission on the Pine Ridge reservation.
“They cut my hair, a spiritual violation,” Braveheart told ICT and Reveal in
an earlier interview. “In our culture, only the maternal grandmother
had the right to cut our hair. When they let my hair fall to the floor
and stepped on it, I felt disrespected.”
No hair samples from Holy Rosary were among those discovered at the
Peabody Museum, and the names of those whose samples were discovered
have not been released. Holy Rosary has now been renamed Red Cloud
Indian School and is no longer a boarding school.
The Peabody Museum published an apology from Director Jane Pickering and a promise to return the hair to families and tribal nations.
The museum also created a website dedicated
to describing its process in addressing the hair samples, which were
originally collected by George Edward Woodbury, curator of the State
Historical Society of Colorado.
The acknowledgement section of the website reads, “It is impossible
to talk about hair taken from Indigenous people and its possession by
the Peabody Museum without acknowledging the ties between early
anthropological practices and colonialism, imperialism, and scientific
racism — the very same systems of dispossession and assimilation that
led to the establishment of Indian boarding schools.”
Woodbury and his wife Edna collected more than 1,500 samples of
Indigenous peoples’ hair between 1930 and 1933 from North and South
America as well as Asia and Oceania. They donated the collection to
Harvard in 1935.
A spokesperson for the museum told the The New York Times that
the collection has never been displayed. The samples include about 700
clippings of hair taken from students at Indian boarding schools and
have been stored in envelopes labeled with names, tribal affiliation and
locations of collection.
Although the museum has released information about tribal affiliation
and location, it has not yet published the names of the owners of the
hair.
According to its website, the museum has reached out to some tribal
leaders regarding the process of repatriation and is waiting for
feedback before releasing individuals’ names.
The Harvard University Native American Program wrote an email
offering emotional support to the school’s Native students the day
before the museum publicly announced information about the collection of
hair. According to the email, shared with ICT, “There are over 90
community members (students, staff and faculty) who have family names or
tribes associated with this list of relatives.”
In the only article published
from the research, “Differences Between Certain of the North American
Indian Tribes: As shown by a microscopical study of their head hair,”
Woodbury described texture and color differences among the samples and
noted “when these North American Indian hair specimens were compared
with Mongoloid and White (European) hair specimens it appears that the
Indian exhibits a stronger affinity toward the Mongoloid group.”
Regarding the scientific practice at the time the hair was collected,
the museum wrote, “Much of this work was carried out to support,
directly or indirectly, scientific racism.”
Descriptions and measurements of hair types were used to justify racial categories and hierarchies.
– George Edward Woodbury
NAGPRA regulations
Although several Native people contacted by ICT lauded Harvard for
its repatriation efforts as a good start, many were critical of the
process and questioned why the institution had waited so long to take
action.
“The website is a good starting point; it helps us understand a
little bit of the history of the researcher and the collection,” said
Meredith McCoy, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe descendant and
assistant professor of American Studies and history at Carleton College
in Northfield, Minnesota.
“But there’s so much more we need to know; clearly the researcher had
an extensive network of boarding school employees willing to send him
samples of children’s hair without parental permission,” she said.
“This type of research is deeply unethical.”
Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native
American Boarding School Healing Coalition, believes that Harvard has
known about the Woodbury collection for a long time.
“I believe they’ve known about it for years but just didn’t know what to do about it,” she said.
It’s so sad that institutions like Harvard would hold onto and support this type of thing.
– Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
After the remains of 19 enslaved people of
African descent were discovered in the museum’s collection, Harvard
created a Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum
Collections in June 2021. A report by
the committee, leaked to media in June 2022, states that the school
holds the remains of nearly 7,000 Native Americans in its collections.
Although some of the remains fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known
as NAGPRA, Rachel Dane, spokesperson for Harvard, wrote in an email
to ICT that the hair in the Woodbury collection does not fall under the
federal regulation.
Shannon O’Loughlin, Choctaw, attorney and chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, disagrees.
“Under NAGPRA regulations, human remains are defined as the remains
of a body of a person of Native American ancestry,” O’Loughlin said.
“Although the law doesn’t apply to portions of remains shed naturally
or freely given, children didn’t have agency to consent to the hair
collecting; they weren’t at boarding schools of their own free will.”
O’Loughlin also criticized Harvard’s stated intentions of
collaborating with tribes in determining how the collection will be
handled. She noted that a process is already in place under NAGPRA that
clearly outlines how institutions are to collaborate with tribes in
repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items to
appropriate parties.
“There is little transparency,” she said. “I don’t hear Harvard say
they are going to work with tribes and determine what tribes want to do.
Instead they announce they’re going to start a whole other process and
do it themselves.”
The Northern Arapaho Business Council issued a statement on Nov. 21
demanding that Harvard and the Peabody Museum return hair samples
improperly taken from Native children, including some from the Northern
Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming.
“It is impossible to undo atrocities committed against Native
children ripped away from their families as part of the federal
government’s forced boarding program,” the tribe said in a statement,
“but Peabody Museum can and must cease its role in this abuse by
returning to appropriate tribes any hair samples taken from these
children.”
The statement continued, “It’s long past time that museums,
universities and other institutions apologize for their objectification
of Native people and culture and return to rightful owners the sacred
artifacts stolen from Indian Country.”
Boarding schools as laboratories
In 2018, a
class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada on behalf of thousands of
Indigenous children used as research subjects between the 1930s and
1950s in that country’s Indian residential school system. The suit also
accused the government of “discriminatory and inadequate” medical care at Indian health institutions.
Ian Mosby, assistant professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, has published research showing
numerous examples of Indigenous children being used as subjects of
experiments to test tuberculosis vaccines. Mosby also found that
government agencies conducted nutritional experiments in
which children were systematically starved in order to provide a
baseline reading in testing the impact of vitamin and mineral
supplements and enriched flours and milk. Dental services were also
withheld in some schools to provide test data.The Canadian lawsuit also includes other medical experiments
performed on Indigenous populations without their consent, including skin grafting among the Inuit in the 1960s and 1970s, birth control and forced sterilization of women from the 1920s to the 1970s.
So far, there are only a handful of verified examples of similar
research and testing have been found on Native populations here in the
U.S.
In 1976, a Government Accountability Office investigation
found that Native children in government boarding schools were used as
subjects in researching trachoma, an eye disease, without parental
consent. The investigation, ordered by U.S. Sen. James Abourezk,
chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, also showed that
more than 3,000 women were sterilized at Indian Health Service facilities without adequate consent.
As the investigation into U.S. boarding school history moves forward,
many predict that more examples of government sanctioned research and
experimentation will come to light.
Native people have long been the subject of research influenced by
colonialism, race-science or eugenics, including Samuel Morton’s
infamous 19th century Cranial Collection consisting of the skulls of around 1,300 people from around the world. According to the Smithsonian Magazine,
there are an estimated 500,000 Native American remains and nearly 1
million associated funerary objects currently held in U.S. museums.
“We weren’t considered to be human to white settlers,” said
Lajimodiere. “Our bodies were just part of the fauna, available for
exploitation.”
The museum shared information about the collection with leadership at
the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and Lajimodiere and Azure report
that they recognize several of the names listed among the Woodbury
collection.
“I can say that the museum has been extremely helpful and willing to
do whatever we feel is right to get the remains back to the family,”
Azure said. “There is a little bit of a silver lining to this; it’s
bringing people together to talk about not only the significance of the
hair but also finding a way to bring it back to the community in a good
way.”
Azure noted, however, that tribal leadership has been unprepared for
the mental health challenges associated with growing awareness about the
boarding school era.
“Some survivors have opted not to attend our events and commemorations,” Azure said. “They find it too triggering.”
Where are the resources?
The lack of mental health resources for boarding school survivors and their descendants continues to be a problem.
I wonder how many other institutions are digging around in their dark basements and will find similar things in the future.
– Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa
Parker, with the boarding school coalition, noted that although the
coalition can direct survivors toward mental health resources, there
aren’t nearly enough. She noted that according to a 2018 GAO study, the federal government allocates twice as much money per Medicaid recipient as it does for Indian Health Service patients.
“In Canada they have the residential school healing line; I think that’s something we need here as well,” she said.
Parker and the coalition are also pushing for passage of a federal boarding school truth and healing bill,
which would create a commission to investigate the history of schools
and provide trauma-informed resources for survivors and descendants.
“The government and institutions like Harvard should bear responsibility for the harm inflicted at boarding schools,” she said.
Stacey Montooth, Walker River Paiute Nation, executive director of the State of Nevada Indian Commission, agreed.
“How many times do we have to be traumatized by news like this?” she asked during an interview with ICT.
Montooth’s office is located in the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in
Carson City, Nevada. The federal school operated from 1890 to 1980
serving children primarily from Nevada’s Great Basin tribes — Washoes,
Paiutes and Shoshones.
According to its website, the organization’s mission, which opened in
2020, is to tell the story of the thousands of American Indian children
who were educated at Stewart. The campus is also a hub for Native art,
lectures and other public programming and educational activities.
Montooth expressed surprise that Harvard did not reach out to the
center and museum about the collection of hair. Stewart Indian School is
listed among the collection locations and many of Nevada’s tribes are
among sources listed for the hair samples. She heard about the
collection from a colleague in another state.
“Harvard needs to open up their checkbook and not only pay for, but
help us identify, the very best psychologists, counselors and others who
are best equipped to help our people,” Montooth said.
ICT asked Harvard officials if the university had any plans to provide such funding or services.
“We do not have a comment,” was the reply.
City seeking information from anyone connected to Albuquerque Indian School
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