"Within hours of arriving at the school, Dzabahe was told not to speak her own Navajo language. The leather skirt her mother had sewn for her and the beaded moccasins were taken away and bundled in plastic, like garbage."

nytimes.com/2021/07/19/us/…
"She was given a dress to wear and her long hair was cut- something that is taboo in Navajo culture.

Before she was sent to the dormitory, one more thing was taken: her name. Image
But for many Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, the nightmare was never forgotten. Instead, the discoveries are a reminder of how many living Native Americans were products of an experiment in forcibly removing children from their families and culture. Image
“These things affect you spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally,” said Russell Box Sr., a member of the Southern Ute tribe.

“We couldn’t speak our language, we couldn’t sing our prayer songs,” he said. “To this day, maybe that’s why I can’t sing.” Image
"The idea of assimilating Native Americans through education dates back to the earliest history of the colonies.

Throughout the decades that they were in existence, the schools were seen as both a cheaper and more expedient way of dealing with the “Indian problem.” Image
Carl Schurz, the secretary of the interior in the late 1800s, argued that it cost close to $1 million to kill a Native American, versus just $1,200 to give his child 8 years of schooling, according to the account of the historian David Wallace Adams in “Education for Extinction.”
“The only good Indian is a dead one,” Capt. Richard Pratt, the founder of one of the first boarding schools, wrote in 1892. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him & save the man.”
Norman Lopez's grandfather taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of cedar. When the boy brought the flute to school, his teacher smashed it and threw it in the trash.

“I thought that it was part of the school,” said Mr. Lopez, now 78. Image
In her old age, Dzabahe now makes jewelry using traditional elements, like “ghost beads”. When she started selling online, she chose the domain: dzabahe.com.

It is her birth name, the one whose Navajo meaning endured: “woman who fights back.”

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More from @Anuraag_Shukla

21 Jul
~ Sri Aurobindo and Educating the Mind Image
The instrument of the educationist is the mind or antaḥkaraṇa, which consists of 4 layers. The reservoir of past mental impressions, the citta or storehouse of memory, which must be distinguished from the specific act of memory, is the foundation on which other layers stand.
The passive memory or citta needs no training, it is automatic and naturally sufficient to its task; there is not the slightest object of knowledge coming within its field which is not secured, placed, and faultlessly preserved in that admirable receptacle.
Read 10 tweets
11 Jul
~ Colonial India in Children’s Literature

In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Undertakers” (1895), a mugger (crocodile) proudly recounts to a crane and a jackal how his reputation as “murderer, man-eater, & local fetish” was established among the local population of an Indian
village.
However, the Mugger of Mugger-Ghat acknowledges that his reputation as “the demon of the ford” had taken a severe beating once a railway bridge had been built across the river by the British.
He was unable to prey on people crossing the river by boat because most of them now used the gleaming new bridge. As Mugger says: “Since the railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me, and that is breaking my heart”.
Read 8 tweets
10 Jul
~ Sri Aurobindo on Teaching ~

A very remarkable feature of modern training is its practice of teaching by snippets.

Much of the shallowness, discursive lightness, and fickle mutability of the average modern mind is due to the vicious principle of teaching by snippets.
The first attention of the teacher must be given to the medium and the instruments, and, until these are perfected, to multiply subjects of regular instruction is to waste time and energy.
~ child as a pedagogy ~

Every child is a lover of interesting narratives, a hero-worshipper, and a patriot. Appeal to these qualities in her and through them, let her master the knowledge.
Read 10 tweets
8 Jul
During the 16th & 17th centuries, Banaras was a site of significant social and intellectual contestation.

Mīmāṃsā & Advaita Vedānta were favored by that city’s intellectual elite, many of whom emigrated from the Deccan and South India.
Here is a spiritual map of Benaras, with all its learning/pilgrimage centers arranged around its numerous temples. Any pilgrimage to Benaras was incomplete without visiting its learning centers.
One company official, A Troyer, Secretary to the Government Sanskrit College, Benaras, filed a College progress report on January 31, 1835. In his report, he gives a break-up of 181 students enrolled and the subjects they were studying;
Read 7 tweets
7 Jul
In 1903, Japanese scholar Okakura Tenshin proposed the idea of 'Asia as One'.

This pan-Asianism was based on the idea of a civilizational unity between China, India, and Japan.
Rabindranath Thakur was, too, an active proponent of the pan-Asian concept, and met Okakura twice before the latter's death in 1913. Tagore was initially receptive, but then grew concerned about the Japan-centric vision that Okakura was promoting.
In 1907, inspired by Okakura's ideology, Chinese scholar Zhang Taiyan asked rhetorically, "Are not our three countries like a folding fan? India is the paper; China is the bamboo frame, and Japan is the pivot linking these two handles".
Read 4 tweets
30 Jun
Understanding Colonialism as an educational project;

What education essentially does? It modifies one's experience(s) by introducing certain frameworks for description.
These frameworks either form new experiences or introduce modifications in such a way that the earlier experiences are no longer accessible to the subject that is experiencing.

The early experience of a child, as shaped by his immediate environment, is no longer accessible.
In a way similar to the educational process, colonialism comes between the colonized and his experience of the world.

However, what distinguishes education from colonialism is the nature of the framework that intervenes between experience and its articulation.
Read 7 tweets

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