Thread by @nech_pacheco

I really wanna talk about this. Native American kids and their tendencies to keep quiet. (A thread on Native American history)
cbsnews.com/amp/news/color…

Lets go back a ways to the 1800s. In 1860 the Bureau of Indian Affairs created this thing called an Indian Boarding school. The idea was to take a Native child & put them in boarding schools so they can learn to read, write, learn math, etc. The plan was to assimilate the child.

Which wouldn't have been so bad had they not went about it so horribly. The real plan was not to educate the Natives so much as to strip them of their cultural identity entirely. They would do this in a number of harsh ways. Like...

1: Cutting our hair (sacred)
2: ripping us from family & tribe
3: forcing child labor on young children. Olive picking, live-in maids, other manual labor
4: physical, emotional, verbal, & sexual abuse at these schools by teachers and staff
5: punishment for not speaking English

And all kinds of other good shit a child as young as 5 yrs old were shipped to these horrible schools and had to stay until they were teenagers. And this was all NON OPTIONAL! It was illegal to keep a child home from these schools. Many parents encouraged ranaways & some Natives

Were imprisoned for hiding children from the school system where they knew they were being abused. Also they knew if the child went they would probably never see them again.

One of the mottos for these Indian schools was "kill the indian save the man" we're talking about kids remember. So these kids went to these school only speaking their native language (NOT ENGLISH) and the school didn't like that at all!

So when the kids got there they were ONLY permitted 2 speak english (a language they did not know and some had never heard) and if caught speaking anything but they were punished: bed without supper, extra chores, or even beaten. Lets be honest, mainly beaten.

So lets role play, if you were beaten for speaking the only language you know and you're having trouble learning the language they want you to speak you tend to get a little quiet don't you? Native kids tend to get quiet and mistrust non native people.

Anytime native children spoke in front of non-native people they got punished. If 5 year old goes to touch the stove and you slap them pretty soon he stops touching the stove so if a five-year-old speaks and you slap them pretty soon the five year old stops speaking.

If a 5 y/o is getting punished for not speaking/understanding English and you're telling him he's getting punished in Eng a language in which he doesn't know or understand how are they supposed to know why they're getting punished? Logically they think speaking gets them punished

So when did these boarding schools end? They didn't there's still some up and running as of May 2018 but when did it become illegal to steal native kids and force them into these schools? 1978 with passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act. 1978!

What year were your parents born?

So when u learn something at a young age what do you tend to do? TEACH YOUR KIDS THE SAME THING! Most native people you meet have grandparents that grew up in Indian boarding schools (me) those grandparents raise children to think and act like they do quiet around non natives.

Those parents teach their kids to be distrustful and quiet around non-natives... Native Americans are funny, we are loud, we are happy, we are distrustful. When surrounded by non natives we remember what we learned from our parents and grandparents to be quiet or to be punished.

These boys were in a new place at a new school surrounded by non-natives they were quiet and they were shy probably how they were taught to be since they were little because native people have been hurt time and time again and then they were judged for how they were created to be

nativepartnership.org/site/PageServe…

^ some links for u to learn more about the horrors yourselves.