complete

22spirit of the fatherThe free education promised in the Treaty of Medicine Creek, infact, carried a price. American Indian boarding schools opened tothrongs of supporters who hailed them as a means of survival, andlegions of critics who denounced them as cultural genocide. RichardPratt, founder of the first off-reservation boarding school, at Carlisle,Pennsylvania, unapologetically avowed, “A great general has saidthat the only good Indian is a dead one. . . . In a sense, I agree with thesentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the raceshould be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Pratt setout to kill the Indian by teaching Indians to be white. Uprooted fromhomes and taken from their reservations, Indian children bore thebrunt of a profound culture clash. They were silenced from speakingtheir Native tongue and urged to worship an unknown god.Along with schoolwork, teachers handed out new names. Mostcame from American politicians and did not reflect Indian historyor heritage. “At Fort Peck, we had a Grover Cleveland. We had theThomas Jeffersons. We had George Washingtons and we had JohnAdams. And these are all new names,” recalls Hank Adams. In fact,Adams himself is an Assiniboine-Sioux from Montana, the greatgrandsonof Digs the Ground, an Indian renamed John Adams inboarding school.One day a granduncle took Qu-lash-qud by the hand to St.George’s Industrial School for Indians, a Catholic boarding schoollocated in Milton. Qu-lash-qud was told to take the Indian out ofeverything, except the color of his skin. He dressed like a white man.He cut his hair short like a white man’s. His teachers gave him a whiteman’s name. Willie Frank rolled right off the tongue, and it was alogical choice. His father, Kluck-et-sah, shoed horses for a white mannamed Frank. Then and there Qu-lash-qud ceased to exist. He wasWillie Frank.