Sublime

There were children, and then there were the children of Indians, because the merciless savage inhabitants of these American lands did not make children but nits, and nits make lice, or so it was said by the man who meant to make a massacre feel like killing bugs at Sand Creek, when seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons, and then

But it wasn’t simple for Plenty Horses to find his place. As Deloria points out, he had missed the essential period of Lakota education, which takes place between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Due to his absence and Euro-American influence, he was suspect among his own people, and even that world was disrupted by colonialist chaos and

Indigenous languages were sites of conflict, too. Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English. “We shall break up all the Indian there is in them in a very short time,”

That was the first time we performed being Indian for the white people. Some of us danced and drummed and sang—painted and feathered. I watched all the white people gather around us with that strange mix of disgust and astonishment. Later Pratt compared us to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. Said we “out Buffalo Billed Mr. Cody.” More performances

Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s guiding principle for Indian education, as summed up at the nineteenth annual National Conference of Charities and Correction held in Denver, Colorado, in 1892: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” This principle resulted in a policy now widely recognized as the embodiment of cultural genocide.

generic, though gendered, Native.