September 30, 2025 • 56 mins
For centuries the U.S. government conspired to persecute, attack and marginalize the native population. When open warfare became too expensive, some factions of the government proposed a different approach -- what if, they wondered, we erase native culture? This inspired a massive industry of forced assimilation. Thousands of children were forced into boarding schools where they were taught to act more 'European' while being abused, exploited and placed into forced labor. Tune in to learn more about the conspiracy of forced assimilation, and how its long-reaching consequences affect the country in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning with a story that
is harrowing to explore, but very much needs to be told.
It's the story of Native people and First Nations and
forced assimilation in multiple points in US history.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It's real.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
It's not one conspiracy, it's a series of conspiracies, and
the consequences of these continue in the modern day.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, it is one of the most heartbreaking aspects of
the history of this country, for sure.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
And we're going to get into it in the episode here.
There's been a lot of news about this subject since
May twenty twenty, where more and more revelations have occurred
since we recorded this, So we would just encourage you
to listen and then do your own research afterwards a
quick cursory Google search, we'll find news story after news
story of revelations from countries across the world, not just.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
In the US.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
And with that, we're going to pause for a word
from our sponsor and we'll return.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
iHeartRadio Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are
here and that makes this stuff. They don't want you
to know. We've been opening at times with a Twitter
roll call or a shout out on social media. Today
(01:54):
we wanted to do a very special version of that,
and it's one that's timely and it's one that is important.
So Blows of Mercy approached me on Instagram and I
believe also called on the phone. Numbers that correct, Matt.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yes, this person left a message with this, a very
similar message that she left to you on Instagram. I
guess we'll just let's call this person Blows of Mercy
for now.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and we Blows of Mercy. I say, guys,
a screenshot so we'd all be looped in before we
were on air. Raised a point that I think a
lot of us in the audience have heard about recently,
and it's a disturbing one. It's worth a PSA. We'll
(02:44):
just well read this if that's all right. I think
you guys have a copy of it too. Blows of
Mercy says the xenophobia happening during this outbreak is really
affecting my quality of life. I haven't been back to
China since two thousand and six, Not that anyone random
would know, but it hurts to still be yelled at.
Could you guys maybe just remind people that Asians are
(03:07):
not the virus. We aren't to blame. The Chinese government
screwed up, not us. Hearing the attacks happening on Asians
lately literally scares me for being me. People's lives are
being up and did and I understand the outrage. It
just sucks that it's been blamed on an entire continent.
Thanks again. And you know, have you guys been seeing
(03:28):
some of the reports in the news about that here
in the States.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Yeah, just like the kind of alarming uptick in racially
motivated attacks and verbal abuse at the very least, and
definitely seeing some people that are actually getting accosted physically.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And this person actually I called this person back and
we had a brief conversation about this. But one of
the things that they expressed was just the fear of
going anywhere, stepping out of the house and looking way
you look, just because of the way you look and
being subject to this kind of discrimination, and then adding
(04:07):
and compounding to that wearing a mask, the way you know,
we were told to wear a mask and the way
that it's been recommended for us to do so, it
just kind of adds to that. Yeah, it's definitely something
we should be thinking about and just make sure we're
not a part of the problem, right.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, And a lot of our fellow listeners and fellow
conspiracy realists here aren't going to have that kind of
lapse in critical thinking, you know what I mean. It
reminded me a little bit about a few years ago.
You guys, remember the boycott's Chick fil A, which is
a tremendously popular chicken joint down here in southeast United States.
(04:50):
Because of their anti LGBT legislation and the enormous amounts
of money that they would donate every year, people start
a boycotting Chick fil A as is their right, and
they started protesting it as is the right. But there
was this video that went viral of this guy pulling
up to a Chick fil A drive through in a
car and just screaming at this cashier who couldn't have
(05:12):
been more than like sixteen and he was saying, like,
you did this, and you're you hate people, You're over
and she's like so confused, she's almost about to cry.
She's literally a teenager who's probably, I don't know, trying
to save up for a video game console or a car.
So I think that it's it's easy. It's a design
(05:33):
flaw in the human brain that makes it so easy
for us to project our big fears onto helpless people
and onto innocent people, people who are no way responsible.
And it doesn't it's not even like a left or
right thing. But if you are, if you're seeing that
kind of stuff in your neck of the woods, let
(05:56):
us know because we can guarantee you if there is
some sort of mass mind behind COVID nineteen, it's not
the person that walked into Target in front of you.
It's like, one hundred percent. You have our word on.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
That, well said Ben, So thank you for writing to
us and just making that point and calling and leaving
that message in for speaking with us. So just let's
keep that in mind as we keep going throughout this episode,
and as we keep living our lives.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Right, because we are aren't we we are living our
lives here. We are again, you know, hopefully one of
your favorite conspiracy shows, mid Pandemic. We hope you're well,
and Matt nol, I hope you guys are doing well.
Today we're looking at another crisis. It's a deeply disturbing
and sadly somewhat obscure practice that continues to affect the
(06:48):
United States and multiple other countries in the modern day.
Think about it this way, what would you do if
one day your government snatched your children away from you.
Kidnapped your children for the express purpose of teaching them
to forget where they came from and what their identity was.
(07:09):
Just keep that in mind. If you have kids that
you're close to in your life, now keep that in
mind as we explore today's episode. Here are the facts.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
So I think we all pretty much can accept the
notion that European expansion really changed the world and made
the world feel like sort of a smaller place. I
guess while Canada, the United States, and Australia are today
considered part of the anglosphere, ancient cultures existed in the
(07:38):
American and Australian contents for millennia before the arrival of
any of these interlopers, and the arrival of a lot
of these outsiders completely changed the fabric of the cultures
of the pre existing Native empires, which had been building
for thousands of years in many cases.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, and this might sound like something from a a
dusty history book in some neglected corner of your local library.
But history is alive, right, History is alive, and it's reactive.
And William Faulkner was right when he said the past
is not passed. The consequences of this expansion carry on
(08:16):
to the modern day in numerous ways. And when we
talk about the effects of the expansion here in the US,
we can easily see the past through the current and frankly,
the disturbing statistics. Like, all we have to do to
set the stage here is look at the statistics about
Native American income, health, and education here in the US,
(08:41):
and it's dire. It's improving now, but it's dire.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Native Americans are one of the most economically impoverished populations
within the United States. And let's just look at the
most recent year available when we're talking about income here,
as of twenty fifteen teen, the median household income for
a household that is identifying as Native American, it was
(09:07):
thirty seven thy two hundred and twenty seven, So that's
median yearly household income, and you compare that with the
nation as a whole, which has a median household income
of fifty three thousand, six hundred and fifty seven. There's
another thing here that we're you know, it's changing as
(09:28):
the day goes, especially as we're dealing with this new crisis.
But Native Americans in twenty fifteen at least have the
highest unemployment rate, and it's nine point nine percent in
twenty fifteen. That's the highest of any racial or ethnic
group or identifying ethnic group within the United States.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And it's it's important to remember we're talking about income
because income is a powerful income, like education is a
powerful predictor of health and life expectancy, and this income
disparity has some pretty profound consequences for the health and
well being of people in the Native American population. This
(10:07):
population also has a higher proportion of people who are
living in poverty. Twenty eight point three percent of people
identify as Native Americans live in poverty, and that, you know,
compare that to fifteen point five percent of the total population.
So it's outsize, you know, it's it's larger proportionally.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
And just while we're on that subject of income and
unemployment within Native American populations, I'd love to talk just
briefly about this documentary that I watched in preparation for
this called Little Dream Catchers. You can find it on
YouTube right now if you if you search for it. It
deals with a single population. It's it's in Minnesota. It's
(10:52):
called the White Earth Nation and a reserve. It's a
reservation there. And one of the main is that you
listen to in this is Irma J. Wisner or a visitor,
I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. She's a
former White Earth Nation chairwoman, and she's got a pretty
(11:13):
powerful quote here talking about this subject.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
During the Great Depression, when unemployment was twenty seven percent,
there was an outrage in this country, and yet we
have a great depression every day, year in and year out.
Education is our ticket out of poverty.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Here.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Eighty percent of a child's development takes place before five
years old, So it seems to be a no brainer
to me to focus in that area.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And like you said, Ben, that was.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
From Irma J. Visner, former White Earth Nation sharewoman.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
And I think it's a powerful quote. Specifically at the
end they're talking about how education is the way out,
and that is going to play in heavily to this episode.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, that's astute man, and this documentary is worth your time.
Do you check it out? Actually, there are a lot
of like great examinations of this in academia and easily
available on YouTube or online. But it doesn't seem it
still doesn't seem to get the attention that it needs
to get. So remember that we're talking about education and
(12:15):
how it affects health. So if we get to health,
we see some other disturbing numbers. Unlike a lot of
other what they would call racial or ethnic minority groups
in the US, Native American populations have legal rights to
federal health care services. And this is because of something
called the Snyder Act in nineteen twenty one and the
(12:37):
Indian Healthcare Improvement Act of nineteen seventy six. Together, those
sort of like vultron up and form the legislative authority
for the federal agency that we call the Indian Health
Service today. So one would think if we just knew
that that there would be maybe better health in general
(12:57):
in this population because of the game guaranteed right to
federal healthcare, which, as many people know, especially recently, most
Americans don't have. So the problem is this has not
erased the stark disparities in health. Native American populations, including
natives of Alaska, today have a life expectancy that's about
(13:21):
five point five years less than all of the other
populations of the US. However you want to slice them,
that's seventy three years to seventy eight point five years, respectively.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Another thing to note here is that American Indians and
Alaska Natives, so indigenous peoples, continue to die at higher
rates than any other Americans in a lot of categories.
And within this you're going to find chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, diabetes,
(13:55):
unintentional injuries, assaults, homicides, intentional self harm, in chronic lower
respiratory diseases. And that's not even to bring in the
drug issues within these populations because of other socioeconomic issues
that lead to a lot of these conditions.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's the same kind of things we
see in a lot of impoverished parts of the country
where like you know, things like opioids take hold or
things like methamphetamines, you know, I mean, it's definitely more
prevalent in areas that are economically depressed, because along with
being economically depressed often comes being psychologically depressed, and people
(14:35):
are looking for an escape, and these things can take
hold and further ravage those communities. And we have another
set of findings from the twenty ten National Intimate Partner
and Sexual Violence Survey that showed relative to white women,
Native American women are one point two times more likely
to have experienced violence in their lifetime, and that relative
(14:56):
to white men, Native American men are one point three
times more likely who have experienced violence in their lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Really kind of staggering disparity there.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And when you know, we're pulling stats that are relatively
recent by which they're like, you know, maybe three to
ten years old now at this point for some of
these things. But we should note that the US Census,
if it is able to be completed during the pandemic,
may have updated statistics to reveal. And there are tons
(15:32):
of incredibly intelligent researchers and analysts who are working on
this data continually, so we always love to hear the updates.
All of this plays in so income, health. All of
this plays in in concert with education. The US educational
system this should not be a spoiler for anyone, has
(15:53):
historically been a source of tremendous discrimination and in a
lot of cases trauma for the Native population in North
America and Hawaii, and even today, multiple reports will say
that educational progress for Native Americans still lags behind that
of other demographics. There was a report that came out
from in twenty twelve from the National Center for Education
(16:17):
Statistics that said that Native American populations have the highest
high school dropout rate in the country that was at
fourteen point six percent. But while these statistics are disturbing
and you should be disturbed by hearing them, you have
to keep in mind they only paint a small part
of the portrait here, because you see the effects of
(16:39):
education on these populations have a secret history. They have
a secret, damning history, and it's one that a lot
of factions, people in past administrations, a lot of people
in government today don't really want you to pay too
much attention to what are we talking about, will tell
you after a word from our sponsor, here's where it
(17:05):
gets crazy.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
So in the late nineteenth century, the United States government
forcibly removed Native American children from their homes, shipping them
off to different boarding schools in the hopes of assimilating
them to the United States as culture. This was only
one front in this culture war, which had begun long
(17:27):
long before that. The precedents were the idea of the
force assimilation that functioned in concert with forced removal from
Native land. It's the same way that the Minnesota Historical.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Society puts it. Quote.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
As white population grew in the United States and people
settled further west toward the Mississippi in the late eighteen hundreds,
there was an increasing pressure on the recently removed groups
to give up some of their new land.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, this is I like the way to put this here,
because what they're saying is the government had already forced
these native populations to move away, right if they're located
on the eastern seaboard, like think of the Trail of Tears.
And then in the late eighteen hundreds, they said, well,
we've got more European descended people who want to branch
(18:17):
out in this area. So let's get these people to
move again. Now we want the land that we gave
them earlier in eighteen thirty, the US forced Native Americans
to move west of the Mississippi to make room for
that expansion. You mentioned nol in what they called the
Indian Removal Act. And then just a few decades later,
Uncle Sam had a moment. I like to when I
(18:40):
think of supervillains like this, I like to think of
them as dark light bulb moments. They had a dark
light bulb moment and they said, you know what, if
we were running out of places to put these people,
we're running out of places to kick them to. We
have to figure out something else. And then another dark
(19:01):
light bulb pops on and someone says, since there's no
more land to push them toward, why don't we make
them like us? Why don't we pull the same kind
of move the borg pulls in Star Trek. Why don't
we forcibly assimilate them?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
This is really rough. This is really rough.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
I want to read another quote from that documentary I
mentioned earlier, The Little Dream Catchers. This is another quote
from Irma J. Weisener, and she says, quote, Historically, the
purpose of education for us as tribal people has been assimilation.
(19:45):
If we go back to the boarding school era of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose then, along with churches,
was to eradicate tribal culture, language, and traditions, and to
assimilate and civilize us, to christianize us. So our children
were taken away over one hundred thousand in the boarding schools.
(20:07):
The children were punished for speaking the language. The loss
of language, the loss of culture, the loss of tradition,
the loss of family, the loss of community. That brokenness
is generational, and there's historical trauma attributed to it.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
Yeah, And the idea of trauma passed down through generations
has always been really fascinating to me. There's some kind
of study that indicates that it can actually be passed
down almost through genes, you know, through epigenetics, and that's
fascinating to me on a whole other level. But of
course it's going to happen just experientially, especially in this
(20:45):
kind of situation.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Then you said it, you said it earlier. Just the
concept of someone coming in and ripping your children from
you and taking them somewhere else and putting them in school,
the dark lifeight bulb moment like that. They had there
to assimilate them, but the way they chose to go
(21:06):
about it here is just so heinous.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
So how did this situation begin? How did we get
from what we started to establish with pushing people out
to what they're exploring in that quote, it really kicks
into gearin in the eighteen hundreds and the late eighteen hundreds.
(21:31):
In eighteen eighty five, there's a guy named Hiram Price.
He's the then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he explains
the logic here by saying, simply, quote, it is cheaper
to give them education than to fight them. In eighteen ninety,
the US government ended official open warfare against Native American tribes.
(21:55):
And this was a very long war. It started in
the seventeenth century tree and it was it was exacerbated
and reached a bloody height throughout the nineteenth century. And
this had a terrible, terrible effect on the native populations.
We're talking about a huge group of unique, distinct cultures
(22:18):
that numbered in the millions and millions of people, and
now the population had plummeted to around two hundred and
fifty thousand. A lot of these communities were also confined
to reservations, and those reservations were a little sliver of
their traditional land. So what do you do when you
(22:38):
want to get into the you know, quote hearts and
minds of a people, when you want to change the
fabric of who they are, you start with their children.
You always start with their children. And that's you know,
that's why, at the risk of sound and crafts, Wu
tang is for the kids. Our species does this to
each other because it has such a powerful effect, even
(23:01):
when it's not even when the effects are not what
the instigators intended. So the goal became assimilation, to transform
Native American populations into quote, good Christian citizens. One school
founder put it this way. It's relatively offensive. Quote. It's
the one that lives on in infamy. They said, kill
(23:23):
the Indian in him and we will save the man.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yikes.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Spooky stuff, terrifying.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
So how did they go about attempting to kill the
Indian metaphorically?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Here?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
They started places like the Carlisle Indian School. It's the
full name is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was
founded in eighteen seventy nine. It was a military barracks
at one point that had been renovated. It was in Pennsylvania,
and it was founded by Richard Henry.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Pratt, who is is at the.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Time when he's founding it a captain in the army.
This place, the Carlisle School, it was the first federally
funded off reservation Indian boarding school, and it's definitely it's
the thing that it became the model basically.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, we should note too that Pratt, who later went
on to become a general in the army, he considered
himself somewhat progressive, and a lot of the people the
European American population that supported these schools also considered themselves progressive.
They said they thought they were saving people, they thought
(24:44):
they were working toward a greater good, and we know
how that usually turns out. Carlisle said that he said
something that sounds respectable at first. He says, look, Native
Americans are equal to European Americans. And he said, you know,
we're gonna the point of Carlisle School is to immerse
(25:05):
these children, and again these are children at different ages.
Immerse these children into mainstream European American culture, and then
they'll be able to advance themselves. They'll thrive in the
dominant European American society, and then bonus points, they'll return
to their own, their own lands, their own communities, and
they'll become agents of assimilation themselves.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
Which is particularly borglike if you really think about it
from through the lens of it being a kind of
pernicious thing that's being done, as opposed to this whole
magnanimous lens of looking at it. If anyone out there
wants an extra deep dive into some of this stuff,
O our sister podcast, Stuff You Miss in History Class
has a great episode about the history of Indian schools
(25:49):
just as a concept, and recommend that as a little bit,
you know, more of a if you want to take
this information a little further.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
So.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Carlisle's school became the model for twenty six Bureau of
Indian Affairs boarding schools in fifteen states and territories, plus
hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious denominations. Over time,
the school would become home to over ten thousand Native
American children from one hundred and forty different tribes, and
(26:19):
it was by no means the only one of its kind.
Missionaries had been doing something similar for centuries to your point,
been earlier across the world under that guise of saving people,
saving the you know, converting the heathens or whatever, the
unwashed masses or whatever. This whole idea of we're doing
you as solid you should appreciate this, the battle for
(26:40):
hearts and minds.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Really yeah, and speak of deep dives. There's a book
on this we'd like to recommend. It came out back
in six It's called Children Left Behind The Dark Legacy
of Indian Mission Boarding Schools by Tim Gago So Giago,
So do check that out, but do be warned that
(27:02):
these are these are not pleasant afternoon podcast or books.
You know, you will probably not be in a good
mood after you read them, and you shouldn't be. And
I appreciate your point nowe about this scale of this practice, right,
this battle for you know, a culture has sometimes been
(27:24):
described as the soul of a people, so in a way,
in a metaphorical way, this is a battle for the
souls of these communities. We want to pause for a
word from our sponsor, and then we're going to return
and give you a sense of the scale here and
a sense of the day to day experience of these children.
(27:53):
And we're back. So by nineteen hundred, this is still continuing.
It was a spoiler heads up, we'll tell you at
the end. But this went on for much longer than
a lot of people would think. By nineteen hundred, there
were three hundred and seven boarding schools and day schools
across the country. They educated more than twenty six thousand
(28:16):
Native students of all types of ages, from all types
of communities and tribes. The difference quickly between a day
school and a boarding school is that a day school
is what a lot of people grew up with. Right,
you go to school, maybe seven thirty, eight thirty or whatever.
You get out sometime in the afternoon, you go home, rense,
and repeat Monday through Friday. A boarding school is a
(28:36):
little more intense because you live on the campus, you
can't really go anywhere, and your parents have a much
higher bar to access if they want to see you,
to check on you, to make sure things are going
all right. So we can see the extent of the
practice here, but we have to ask ourselves what did
(28:58):
these schools, these institute and their supporters actually do. How
did they get the kids? How about that? Let's start
with that.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Okay, Well, the first thing is that the school itself
wasn't given as some kind of carte blanche or something
to act outside of the law to just go around
kidnapping kids. They weren't supposed to be kidnapping children. And
you know, there were certainly some parents out there, you know,
who knows how many numbers, there's no way to tell,
(29:27):
But there were some parents within the Native American populations
that did see it as an opportunity for their kids
to both learn English, learn other skills that were going
to be provided, you know, at that kind of school,
and they saw it as a real opportunity. But there
were a lot more people that saw this of these
institutions rather than the people who were running them. They
(29:49):
saw it as not schools at all. They saw it
as a machine, a part of you know, someone who
came a group that came along and took both took
their kids and wanted to change their kids so they
wouldn't be like them anymore. And we get we get
this stuff from sapiens dot org. That's s A p
(30:11):
i e n s dot org.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
Yeah, it's a really great article called Native American Children's
Historic Forced Assimilation by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Calwell
from this year, actually from the fifth of March of
twenty twenty. And it's not to say that parents just
allowed their children to be taken all the time. You know,
there was absolutely resistance, as you could imagine if you
(30:35):
you know, have a child or have you know, had
been charged with the care of a youngster, to have
that child ripped away from you and taken forcibly would
not sit well with most parents or guardians. But folks
who you know resisted were punished quite severely in the
(30:55):
most cruel ways imaginable. Folks that were implementing these these
policies would hold back food rations, and families were already
operating on razor thin margins of sustenance, you know, So
to have that held over your head, I mean, that's
a pretty that's the equivalent of having a gun pointed
at you, and that actually happened too. Oftentimes, fathers who
(31:18):
fought back were sent to prison, and in some very
extreme cases but not unheard of, there would be law
enforcement officials who would literally kidnap these children while holding
a gun on the parents.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
So you don't have to be a lawyer to know
the first things. First, what does that mean? It means
they were kidnapping children full stop. Means in some cases
they were forcibly kidnapping children. And now, how do we
define their mission what they do with these kids. Well,
it's similar to some of those quotes we had mentioned earlier.
You could define it in two words, one to civilize
(31:54):
and two to Christianize. What I find interesting about that
is there's not really at this time a difference, you
know what I mean. Even the secular schools, like the
ones that were state supported and built in renovated military barracks,
even those were still teaching children some version of Christianity, right,
(32:15):
and you know, they can be defined as much by
what they did not allow children to do as what
they did allow them to do. One of the first
things you would do when you got there is you
got a new name, and you could not use your name.
You had to, you know, if they call it. If
they were like, all right, your new name is Norman
or Janine or something like that, then you would be
(32:36):
punished if you were like, no, my name is you know,
something different. And then the kids also had to get
their haircut, which is weirdly specific to what was considered
a European American style haircut. They were, of course forbidden
from speaking their native language. There are a lot of
(32:57):
similarities with this and the Weiger rehdgidcation camps that are
that are currently still in operation in Western China.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Think about what that means. Those three, those three things
that bends outline there. Your identity, you're the thing that
you the person that you saw yourself as. The way
your hairstyle reminds you of maybe your father's or your
mothers or your grandparents. The language that is being spoken
(33:30):
to you in your home that you've grown up with,
that you speak much better than any other language, especially English.
You are you're punished for speaking that. This is this
is some intense psychological conditioning that's going on at these schools.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
If I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 5 (33:50):
There's a really fantastic series on HBO is called Bury
My Heart at Wounded Me that was based on a
book of the same name, and it was about just
the conflict between and you know, it was with sitting
bull and all of that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And I'm almost.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
Positive there that was sort of the last vestiges of
truly tribal, you know, Indian culture in the West, kind
of living out their lives as normal before all of this,
you know, like.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Reservations and stuff kicked.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
I mean, they were still reservd I'm sorry I'm not
remembering fully well what the story was, but there was
a character in that film who was an assimilated Native
American boy, and that it became a story point of
his disconnect from the you know, his people who were living,
you know, as they had always lived for so many generations.
(34:40):
And it became a very complicated thing for that character
to kind of struggle with because on the one hand,
he looks at his caretakers as being kind and positive
and helpful and teaching him and giving him food to
eat all that, but then he sees that he's a
little different and.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Is having a hard time reconciling all of that.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
I wanted to We will bring in another quote here
before we get into some of the even the more
physical dangers that the children had to face in these places.
If that's okay. It's just another quock quote from that documentary.
And this quote comes from a Barb Faber Fabre. She's
(35:25):
the director of the White Earth Child's Care Center there
on the reservation, and her quote is, many children were
ripped from their families, loaded onto trucks and not seeing
their parents for years. We're talking generations where parents couldn't
be parents, and so now you're seeing parents who maybe
don't know how to parent because they did not receive parenting.
(35:48):
And I think that really is a heavy concept to
think about here, But just being taken away from your
family like that, having your identity completely removed, and then
going back home at some point and not really recognizing
yourself or your immediate family because of the way you've
(36:08):
been changed.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And that was one of you know, that's the thing
like the old programming joke, it's not a bug, it's
it's a feature. Right, This was purposeful and at this
point we don't want to be too incredibly graphic, but
you know, as you might expect, there was a wealth
(36:34):
of abuse that occurred here as well as death through neglect.
There are multiple documented cases of physical abuse, of forced
manual labor, of sexual abuse with children as young as
nine years old, and then of course emotional abuse. How
(36:54):
could it not be an emotionally abusive situation for a
kid to be forced to do these things? And many
of those documented cases come from the church run institutions,
but that, by no means is meant to imply that
the quote unquote secular institutions were any better. One interesting
(37:15):
thing that bears thinking about is that due to the
living conditions, these children were also exposed to diseases that
could sometimes be fatal, like measles. There's this article in
The Atlantic that came out last year, Death by Civilization,
by Mary Annette Pember and Maryonnette Pember is the daughter
(37:36):
of a woman who was forced to live at one
of these boarding schools, and in this in her conversations
with her mother, she learns, like her mother says, education
was something that was done to us, not with us
or for us. And one of the things that really
hit home for me is that she described a culture
(38:00):
of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the school. Food
and access to medical care were sometimes denied as punishment,
and they were scarce to begin with. And because of that,
whether through violence or neglect, many children died and sometimes
their parents, especially the boarding schools, only learned that their
child had died after the kid had been buried in
(38:23):
a school cemetery, some of which some of those graves
are unmarked, I.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Believe today, and done generally in the Christian tradition, so
probably not in any way the traditions that have been
used by the Native American families.
Speaker 5 (38:41):
Yeah, and that can be a real deal breaker, you know,
culturally speaking, I mean that you know, they would really
truly believe that that individual's soul did not end up
where it needed to go in the afterlife. That goes
along with their belief system. So in a way, it's
a form of like psychological terrorism, you know, I mean,
I mean, I know it wasn't looked at that way,
(39:02):
but it is truly a absolute bastardization of people's most
sacredly held beliefs. And it's just I can't wrap my
head around it. It's just a total myopic worldview that
just bugs me in general. When people are so hung
up on my way is the only way no one
else can have their own ideas, their own beliefs. That
(39:24):
just really is one of my biggest pet peeves of
all of this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, well said, This practice again is continuing in the
nineteen hundred so into the twentieth century. As a matter
of fact, it was continuing less than a century ago.
In nineteen twenty eight, this thing comes out called the
Merriam Report. This is the first semi comprehensive study of
(39:51):
conditions for Native people since an earlier I think six
volume report that came back that came out in the
eighteen fifties, so it's been decades and decades, and they
are issuing a criticism and a condemnation of situations at
these schools. One of the big things is they said
infectious disease is widespread, not just because of overcrowding, but
(40:14):
because these kids are malnourished. There aren't good sanitary practices
in place, the staff isn't keeping up what we would
consider safety standards for a school nowadays, and the kids
were weakened by overwork. Like at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
These kids were working, you know what I mean. They
weren't just being forced to learn scripture and stuff. Death
(40:37):
rates at this time in these schools, according to this
nineteen twenty eight report, were six and a half times
higher than for any other group in the United States.
And this is where we get into maybe some conspiratorial territory,
because you have to wonder how much of this was purposeful,
(40:57):
how much of it was any of this like designed
to slowly kill actual people instead of just their culture.
Because so many contemporaneous accounts show people saying that they're
coming from a progressive place I think it's maybe just
they didn't have the follow through. I just it seems
(41:20):
like such an evil plan, doesn't it. It doesn't seem
like a progressive plan. Maybe that's because we're in twenty twenty.
But they did see some benefits. You know, from Uncle
Sam's perspective that one of the biggest benefits was the money.
It was just cost effective. It's actually it's weird. It
reminds me a little bit of their argument is that
(41:44):
erasing this culture this way through assimilation is less expensive
for the bottom line than it would be to wage
continual war against these communities, which is a brutal way
to look at it.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Yeah, I would definitely say money how a lot to
do with it. Just you really only have to think
about the fact that the Models school was based in
a barracks and started and led by, you know, a
member of the military. And when you think about those
two things, you either are going to fight these groups
(42:19):
with ammunition and men who some of them will die,
or the on the other side, build a school that
then stays there forever and can continually bring the children
through or at least forever in the minds of the
people who are starting the program.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Well, well, let's call it what it is too.
Speaker 5 (42:39):
I mean, it is a militaristic forced camp essentially, I
mean it is it is. It's not a labor camp,
but it is a camp of forced something. They're not
forcing them to labor on behalf of the military, but
they're forcing them to become a thing that then can
be used.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Later by the military.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
And it's even more pernicious because it's happening without these
children's consent of absolutely without the consent of their their
their parents, and then they're turning them into a pawn
and and they're you know, they're great game.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true. This, this idea, this incredibly cold,
almost reptilian concept to the bottom line, reminds me of
a of another argument that we can make about the
current prison system of the United States. Did you know
you did? I don't know if people check. I know,
I know that we talked about this maybe years ago.
(43:36):
But it is so much cheaper to send a kid
to college than it is to send them to prison,
and certain Yeah, and the benefits to society are substantial
and measurable.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Well, it depends on how you want your society to look,
because that kid that goes to college becomes a weapon
of change, a weapon of you know, being able to
bring other people into a better understanding of the situations
that all of us find ourselves in. Right I think
(44:09):
I think you're drawing a line of comparison there with
prison populations and perhaps, let's say non white people who
are in prison, anyone who finds themselves to be brown
or black. We've talked about this, as you said, Ben,
and it feels very similar to this. I'm feeling a
lot of connections here to the modern day Nixon and
(44:32):
Reagan stuff that we've talked about.
Speaker 5 (44:35):
And by the way, I don't know who it was
the setup, but somebody a friend of mine said during
this COVID situation that we're dealing with right now, they
need to just let all the low level offenders just
out of prison because they're essentially, you know, being condemned
to potentially death from being in these prison populations and
getting these diseases.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
This disease.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yeah, I think I know for sure some countries have
really he's exactly what you're describing your friends, describing low
level prisoners. I think some I want to say that
some US areas have done it. But I don't have confirmation,
and you know, I see exactly what you're saying, because
for a lot of people, I don't know. It's weird.
(45:16):
Like Harvey Weinstein managed to get special treatment in prison,
right because of the COVID nineteen concerns. Did you guys
hear about that?
Speaker 5 (45:25):
I mean, like he wasn't already gonna get some special treatment.
But it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah, because he's.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
So old and frail and like, oh, poor Harvey.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
You know, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
How do judges feel, you know, when they see people
like that walking in suddenly on a walker? I don't
want to sound.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
Cold, No, it reminds me of the ambulance chasers who
put a neck brace on their clients, you know, to
get some goodwill points from the jury or whatever. It's
such an old con that you think judges would just
roll their eyes at it immediately, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
God, yeah, but yes, you're you're absolutely right, your friends,
absolutely right. The situation with the pandemic in prisons, it's
it's a powder keke it's waiting to explode if it
hasn't exploded already, and there are riots happening over it
here in the US in prisons. So we talked about this,
(46:17):
the benefits to the US government for this practice, what
they saw as the benefits they thought, you know, just
like we were talking about earlier. The idea was for
the children to study there and then go back to
their community and change. But this, this theory didn't account
for the intense PTSD these kids would encount would experience.
(46:37):
It didn't account for how disconnected and alienated they would
feel from their communities. It also clearly it irreparably weakened
the family structure, you know what I mean. Like, imagine
you're imagine you're like an elder kid in your family
and you get kidnapped, and you're there for a few years,
(46:58):
You survive, you come back and there are two more kids, right,
and those kids, let's say they're both like four, They
have no idea who you are. You're maybe a name
that they've heard. But you've grown up now for years
being forced to answer to Andrew or something, right, This
is damaging.
Speaker 5 (47:15):
Yeah, and not to mention the can you imagine how
powerless and just emasculated you must feel, as like, you know,
a head of a household. I say emasculated because obviously
the head of the household, you know, in these days
would have been considered the male. But you know, the
ability to not be able to protect your children, you
(47:36):
know that that has serious psychological implications over time, and
it leads to the kind of things we're talking about
with the drug abuse problems and the and the suicidal
ideations and just the generational mental health issues that go
along with these communities. I mean, it really is a
precedent that started farther back than even this, obviously, but
this is sure as a biggie, you know, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
And now we want to answer the question that we
alluded to earlier in the episode. When did this grim
practice end? We haven't really talked about it, and that's
because it wasn't until the late nineteen seventies that Congress
finally outlawed the forced removal of Native children from their
(48:20):
families nineteen seventy. Some of our fellow listeners are alive
when that happened. The late nineteen seventies. It's insane, that's
just a few years before some of us were born.
History is not over, and now even now, like it's
understandable that historians are still working to gauge the full
(48:42):
extent of the damage wrought by these programs. And they're
still discovering bodies of children.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
In August seventh, twenty seventeen, the United States Army, same
group that you know helped begin these schools, they exhume
the or began exhuming the graves of the bodies of
three children who originated from the Northern Arapaho tribe. These
three children died at that Carlisle Indian Industrial School in
(49:13):
the eighteen eighties. The children's names were Little Chief Horse
and Little Plume, And those names were not the names
that they were called while they were at the school.
Those were their actual names.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Can you imagine being denied your name? I mean, we
take it for granted, but it's such a you take,
you know, we live with it. And then if one
day someone said you're not null anymore, you're something else
that I say you are. It's a powerful psychological tool
to remove somebody's name, and like, it's the same as
(49:47):
giving someone a number, you know, in a prison system
or whatever. You are making them your slave essentially, or
at least at the very least, you are making them
an other. And you are like, you know, above them
and they are now your property and you tell them
what to do and they jump when you say jump.
It's it's really to do this with children, there's the
(50:09):
thing that really it's just unconscionable.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
I would see, yeah, i'd see definitely with Julia. I
think it's disgusting to do it with people. Like if
you give someone a nickname they don't like, or they say,
don't call me that, you know, Like, sometimes I'm very
careful when I meet people to you know, if they
have a name that has a couple of common derivations,
even it's just a small thing, and I want to
(50:33):
ask them, what what do you want to be called?
Because sometimes people are so beaten down that they feel
like they don't have a right to have the name
they want, which everybody does, you know what I mean?
And yes, does it always work out for me?
Speaker 4 (50:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:49):
I me met some guy in his fifties one time
who wanted to be called like snake bite. But that
was his choice and I'm not in charge of his life.
So so, snake bite, if you're listening, I hope you're
having a great day.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
We see you, snake, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
There we go, We see you and we know that
this was This is a very I mean, depressing doesn't
cover it episode, especially because there are a lot of
things here that will never get solved. We'll understand more
about the extent of the consequences in the fallout from
this practice, but we'll probably never know the full extent,
(51:26):
the full human extent of it. And we want to
know what you think about this situation. Is there is
there even more to the story, what discoveries are going
to happen. If you are listening and you're not in
the United States, have you experienced things like this or
do you know of things like this in your country
(51:49):
or your region's past. If you are listening and you
are in the US and you have personal experience with this,
what steps do you feel that the government has taken
to address this and do you feel those steps are adequate?
If not, what should be done? We want to hear
from you.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
One thing I would like to point out here is
that documentary that I keep bringing up, because really it's
one of the main things that really touched me when
I was prepping for this episode. They're at the White
Earth Nation in Minnesota, at the reservation there. One of
the strategies they're taking is to use education to bring
(52:30):
children of very young ages at least introduce them and
bring them back into the culture of their ancestors just
a little bit or as much as they can so
doing a lot of the old traditions, speaking the language
and learning the language when in school, and for them
(52:52):
it seems to be having a very positive effect on
this new generation who will eventually be the leaders whose
parents maybe have had to deal with the immediate the
immediate fallout to these schools into the elimination of culture
and tradition. So I would just say I think that
(53:15):
is one way forward, at least for some of the
Native American populations within the US.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Well said man, thanks for ending us on a positive
note today, as we said, or as positive as one
could be in this situation, as you said. We want
to hear from you. We hope this episode finds you well.
Regardless of where you live and regardless of which room
you find yourself stuck intoday, let us know your thoughts
(53:43):
and speak with our fellow listeners. You, specifically, you are
the best part of this show. You can find us
on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram, you can
find us on Twitter. Not just as people, but as individuals.
Speaker 5 (53:54):
Yeah, if you want to find me, I am exclusively
on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown. As the cabin
fever is setting in, I'm finding more random things to post.
Made some tied I T shirts with my daughter the
other day and that was a delight. And then we
also made some homemade chapstick because the madness has truly
taken hold.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
My friends.
Speaker 3 (54:15):
You can find me, Matt Frederick underscore iHeart something to
that effect. Good luck to you if you can find it.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
You've won the win, Matt, What do they win?
Speaker 3 (54:26):
You just win because you looked for something that you
didn't need to and you won't find anything new there,
but you still took the journey.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
You win a sense of accomplishment.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
You can also find me on Instagram. I'm at Ben Bolan.
You can find me on Twitter at Ben Bolan HSW.
You know you can turn off the lights in a
room with a mirror and just say some stuff a
few times. We'll see what happens. Schedules are busy. If
you don't like to mess with social media, boy, do
we have good news for you. We a phone number.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Yes, it is one eight three three st d WYTK.
Give us a call, leave a message, and we will
be listening to it. We've all got the log in.
We're all in there now. It's not just me anymore.
And we've been downloading a ton of messages writing out
who who you are, what you've said. We're pretty excited.
(55:22):
We're going to be diving into it pretty soon.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
And if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you just want to.
Speaker 5 (55:27):
You know, communicate with us the old fashioned way. No,
don't send us a letter. You could if you wanted to.
We don't only give out a mailing address. You could
find that though, if you really did some digging, that'd
be another fun scavenger hunt for you to do. But
you can send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning with a story that
is harrowing to explore, but very much needs to be told.
It's the story of Native people and First Nations and
forced assimilation in multiple points in US history.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
It's real.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
It's not one conspiracy, it's a series of conspiracies, and
the consequences of these continue in the modern day.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Yeah, it is one of the most heartbreaking aspects of
the history of this country, for sure.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
And we're going to get into it in the episode here.
There's been a lot of news about this subject since
May twenty twenty, where more and more revelations have occurred
since we recorded this, So we would just encourage you
to listen and then do your own research afterwards a
quick cursory Google search, we'll find news story after news
story of revelations from countries across the world, not just.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
In the US.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
And with that, we're going to pause for a word
from our sponsor and we'll return.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 3 (01:18):
iHeartRadio Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are
here and that makes this stuff. They don't want you
to know. We've been opening at times with a Twitter
roll call or a shout out on social media. Today
(01:54):
we wanted to do a very special version of that,
and it's one that's timely and it's one that is important.
So Blows of Mercy approached me on Instagram and I
believe also called on the phone. Numbers that correct, Matt.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yes, this person left a message with this, a very
similar message that she left to you on Instagram. I
guess we'll just let's call this person Blows of Mercy
for now.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and we Blows of Mercy. I say, guys,
a screenshot so we'd all be looped in before we
were on air. Raised a point that I think a
lot of us in the audience have heard about recently,
and it's a disturbing one. It's worth a PSA. We'll
(02:44):
just well read this if that's all right. I think
you guys have a copy of it too. Blows of
Mercy says the xenophobia happening during this outbreak is really
affecting my quality of life. I haven't been back to
China since two thousand and six, Not that anyone random
would know, but it hurts to still be yelled at.
Could you guys maybe just remind people that Asians are
(03:07):
not the virus. We aren't to blame. The Chinese government
screwed up, not us. Hearing the attacks happening on Asians
lately literally scares me for being me. People's lives are
being up and did and I understand the outrage. It
just sucks that it's been blamed on an entire continent.
Thanks again. And you know, have you guys been seeing
(03:28):
some of the reports in the news about that here
in the States.
Speaker 5 (03:31):
Yeah, just like the kind of alarming uptick in racially
motivated attacks and verbal abuse at the very least, and
definitely seeing some people that are actually getting accosted physically.
Speaker 4 (03:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
And this person actually I called this person back and
we had a brief conversation about this. But one of
the things that they expressed was just the fear of
going anywhere, stepping out of the house and looking way
you look, just because of the way you look and
being subject to this kind of discrimination, and then adding
(04:07):
and compounding to that wearing a mask, the way you know,
we were told to wear a mask and the way
that it's been recommended for us to do so, it
just kind of adds to that. Yeah, it's definitely something
we should be thinking about and just make sure we're
not a part of the problem, right.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, And a lot of our fellow listeners and fellow
conspiracy realists here aren't going to have that kind of
lapse in critical thinking, you know what I mean. It
reminded me a little bit about a few years ago.
You guys, remember the boycott's Chick fil A, which is
a tremendously popular chicken joint down here in southeast United States.
(04:50):
Because of their anti LGBT legislation and the enormous amounts
of money that they would donate every year, people start
a boycotting Chick fil A as is their right, and
they started protesting it as is the right. But there
was this video that went viral of this guy pulling
up to a Chick fil A drive through in a
car and just screaming at this cashier who couldn't have
(05:12):
been more than like sixteen and he was saying, like,
you did this, and you're you hate people, You're over
and she's like so confused, she's almost about to cry.
She's literally a teenager who's probably, I don't know, trying
to save up for a video game console or a car.
So I think that it's it's easy. It's a design
(05:33):
flaw in the human brain that makes it so easy
for us to project our big fears onto helpless people
and onto innocent people, people who are no way responsible.
And it doesn't it's not even like a left or
right thing. But if you are, if you're seeing that
kind of stuff in your neck of the woods, let
(05:56):
us know because we can guarantee you if there is
some sort of mass mind behind COVID nineteen, it's not
the person that walked into Target in front of you.
It's like, one hundred percent. You have our word on.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
That, well said Ben, So thank you for writing to
us and just making that point and calling and leaving
that message in for speaking with us. So just let's
keep that in mind as we keep going throughout this episode,
and as we keep living our lives.
Speaker 1 (06:24):
Right, because we are aren't we we are living our
lives here. We are again, you know, hopefully one of
your favorite conspiracy shows, mid Pandemic. We hope you're well,
and Matt nol, I hope you guys are doing well.
Today we're looking at another crisis. It's a deeply disturbing
and sadly somewhat obscure practice that continues to affect the
(06:48):
United States and multiple other countries in the modern day.
Think about it this way, what would you do if
one day your government snatched your children away from you.
Kidnapped your children for the express purpose of teaching them
to forget where they came from and what their identity was.
(07:09):
Just keep that in mind. If you have kids that
you're close to in your life, now keep that in
mind as we explore today's episode. Here are the facts.
Speaker 5 (07:17):
So I think we all pretty much can accept the
notion that European expansion really changed the world and made
the world feel like sort of a smaller place. I
guess while Canada, the United States, and Australia are today
considered part of the anglosphere, ancient cultures existed in the
(07:38):
American and Australian contents for millennia before the arrival of
any of these interlopers, and the arrival of a lot
of these outsiders completely changed the fabric of the cultures
of the pre existing Native empires, which had been building
for thousands of years in many cases.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Yeah, and this might sound like something from a a
dusty history book in some neglected corner of your local library.
But history is alive, right, History is alive, and it's reactive.
And William Faulkner was right when he said the past
is not passed. The consequences of this expansion carry on
(08:16):
to the modern day in numerous ways. And when we
talk about the effects of the expansion here in the US,
we can easily see the past through the current and frankly,
the disturbing statistics. Like, all we have to do to
set the stage here is look at the statistics about
Native American income, health, and education here in the US,
(08:41):
and it's dire. It's improving now, but it's dire.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Native Americans are one of the most economically impoverished populations
within the United States. And let's just look at the
most recent year available when we're talking about income here,
as of twenty fifteen teen, the median household income for
a household that is identifying as Native American, it was
(09:07):
thirty seven thy two hundred and twenty seven, So that's
median yearly household income, and you compare that with the
nation as a whole, which has a median household income
of fifty three thousand, six hundred and fifty seven. There's
another thing here that we're you know, it's changing as
(09:28):
the day goes, especially as we're dealing with this new crisis.
But Native Americans in twenty fifteen at least have the
highest unemployment rate, and it's nine point nine percent in
twenty fifteen. That's the highest of any racial or ethnic
group or identifying ethnic group within the United States.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
And it's it's important to remember we're talking about income
because income is a powerful income, like education is a
powerful predictor of health and life expectancy, and this income
disparity has some pretty profound consequences for the health and
well being of people in the Native American population. This
(10:07):
population also has a higher proportion of people who are
living in poverty. Twenty eight point three percent of people
identify as Native Americans live in poverty, and that, you know,
compare that to fifteen point five percent of the total population.
So it's outsize, you know, it's it's larger proportionally.
Speaker 3 (10:28):
And just while we're on that subject of income and
unemployment within Native American populations, I'd love to talk just
briefly about this documentary that I watched in preparation for
this called Little Dream Catchers. You can find it on
YouTube right now if you if you search for it. It
deals with a single population. It's it's in Minnesota. It's
(10:52):
called the White Earth Nation and a reserve. It's a
reservation there. And one of the main is that you
listen to in this is Irma J. Wisner or a visitor,
I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. She's a
former White Earth Nation chairwoman, and she's got a pretty
(11:13):
powerful quote here talking about this subject.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
During the Great Depression, when unemployment was twenty seven percent,
there was an outrage in this country, and yet we
have a great depression every day, year in and year out.
Education is our ticket out of poverty.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Here.
Speaker 5 (11:28):
Eighty percent of a child's development takes place before five
years old, So it seems to be a no brainer
to me to focus in that area.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And like you said, Ben, that was.
Speaker 5 (11:37):
From Irma J. Visner, former White Earth Nation sharewoman.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
And I think it's a powerful quote. Specifically at the
end they're talking about how education is the way out,
and that is going to play in heavily to this episode.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Yeah, that's astute man, and this documentary is worth your time.
Do you check it out? Actually, there are a lot
of like great examinations of this in academia and easily
available on YouTube or online. But it doesn't seem it
still doesn't seem to get the attention that it needs
to get. So remember that we're talking about education and
(12:15):
how it affects health. So if we get to health,
we see some other disturbing numbers. Unlike a lot of
other what they would call racial or ethnic minority groups
in the US, Native American populations have legal rights to
federal health care services. And this is because of something
called the Snyder Act in nineteen twenty one and the
(12:37):
Indian Healthcare Improvement Act of nineteen seventy six. Together, those
sort of like vultron up and form the legislative authority
for the federal agency that we call the Indian Health
Service today. So one would think if we just knew
that that there would be maybe better health in general
(12:57):
in this population because of the game guaranteed right to
federal healthcare, which, as many people know, especially recently, most
Americans don't have. So the problem is this has not
erased the stark disparities in health. Native American populations, including
natives of Alaska, today have a life expectancy that's about
(13:21):
five point five years less than all of the other
populations of the US. However you want to slice them,
that's seventy three years to seventy eight point five years, respectively.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Another thing to note here is that American Indians and
Alaska Natives, so indigenous peoples, continue to die at higher
rates than any other Americans in a lot of categories.
And within this you're going to find chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, diabetes,
(13:55):
unintentional injuries, assaults, homicides, intentional self harm, in chronic lower
respiratory diseases. And that's not even to bring in the
drug issues within these populations because of other socioeconomic issues
that lead to a lot of these conditions.
Speaker 5 (14:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's the same kind of things we
see in a lot of impoverished parts of the country
where like you know, things like opioids take hold or
things like methamphetamines, you know, I mean, it's definitely more
prevalent in areas that are economically depressed, because along with
being economically depressed often comes being psychologically depressed, and people
(14:35):
are looking for an escape, and these things can take
hold and further ravage those communities. And we have another
set of findings from the twenty ten National Intimate Partner
and Sexual Violence Survey that showed relative to white women,
Native American women are one point two times more likely
to have experienced violence in their lifetime, and that relative
(14:56):
to white men, Native American men are one point three
times more likely who have experienced violence in their lifetimes.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Really kind of staggering disparity there.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And when you know, we're pulling stats that are relatively
recent by which they're like, you know, maybe three to
ten years old now at this point for some of
these things. But we should note that the US Census,
if it is able to be completed during the pandemic,
may have updated statistics to reveal. And there are tons
(15:32):
of incredibly intelligent researchers and analysts who are working on
this data continually, so we always love to hear the updates.
All of this plays in so income, health. All of
this plays in in concert with education. The US educational
system this should not be a spoiler for anyone, has
(15:53):
historically been a source of tremendous discrimination and in a
lot of cases trauma for the Native population in North
America and Hawaii, and even today, multiple reports will say
that educational progress for Native Americans still lags behind that
of other demographics. There was a report that came out
from in twenty twelve from the National Center for Education
(16:17):
Statistics that said that Native American populations have the highest
high school dropout rate in the country that was at
fourteen point six percent. But while these statistics are disturbing
and you should be disturbed by hearing them, you have
to keep in mind they only paint a small part
of the portrait here, because you see the effects of
(16:39):
education on these populations have a secret history. They have
a secret, damning history, and it's one that a lot
of factions, people in past administrations, a lot of people
in government today don't really want you to pay too
much attention to what are we talking about, will tell
you after a word from our sponsor, here's where it
(17:05):
gets crazy.
Speaker 5 (17:06):
So in the late nineteenth century, the United States government
forcibly removed Native American children from their homes, shipping them
off to different boarding schools in the hopes of assimilating
them to the United States as culture. This was only
one front in this culture war, which had begun long
(17:27):
long before that. The precedents were the idea of the
force assimilation that functioned in concert with forced removal from
Native land. It's the same way that the Minnesota Historical.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Society puts it. Quote.
Speaker 5 (17:41):
As white population grew in the United States and people
settled further west toward the Mississippi in the late eighteen hundreds,
there was an increasing pressure on the recently removed groups
to give up some of their new land.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
Yeah, this is I like the way to put this here,
because what they're saying is the government had already forced
these native populations to move away, right if they're located
on the eastern seaboard, like think of the Trail of Tears.
And then in the late eighteen hundreds, they said, well,
we've got more European descended people who want to branch
(18:17):
out in this area. So let's get these people to
move again. Now we want the land that we gave
them earlier in eighteen thirty, the US forced Native Americans
to move west of the Mississippi to make room for
that expansion. You mentioned nol in what they called the
Indian Removal Act. And then just a few decades later,
Uncle Sam had a moment. I like to when I
(18:40):
think of supervillains like this, I like to think of
them as dark light bulb moments. They had a dark
light bulb moment and they said, you know what, if
we were running out of places to put these people,
we're running out of places to kick them to. We
have to figure out something else. And then another dark
(19:01):
light bulb pops on and someone says, since there's no
more land to push them toward, why don't we make
them like us? Why don't we pull the same kind
of move the borg pulls in Star Trek. Why don't
we forcibly assimilate them?
Speaker 2 (19:20):
This is really rough. This is really rough.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
I want to read another quote from that documentary I
mentioned earlier, The Little Dream Catchers. This is another quote
from Irma J. Weisener, and she says, quote, Historically, the
purpose of education for us as tribal people has been assimilation.
(19:45):
If we go back to the boarding school era of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose then, along with churches,
was to eradicate tribal culture, language, and traditions, and to
assimilate and civilize us, to christianize us. So our children
were taken away over one hundred thousand in the boarding schools.
(20:07):
The children were punished for speaking the language. The loss
of language, the loss of culture, the loss of tradition,
the loss of family, the loss of community. That brokenness
is generational, and there's historical trauma attributed to it.
Speaker 5 (20:22):
Yeah, And the idea of trauma passed down through generations
has always been really fascinating to me. There's some kind
of study that indicates that it can actually be passed
down almost through genes, you know, through epigenetics, and that's
fascinating to me on a whole other level. But of
course it's going to happen just experientially, especially in this
(20:45):
kind of situation.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
Then you said it, you said it earlier. Just the
concept of someone coming in and ripping your children from
you and taking them somewhere else and putting them in school,
the dark lifeight bulb moment like that. They had there
to assimilate them, but the way they chose to go
(21:06):
about it here is just so heinous.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
So how did this situation begin? How did we get
from what we started to establish with pushing people out
to what they're exploring in that quote, it really kicks
into gearin in the eighteen hundreds and the late eighteen hundreds.
(21:31):
In eighteen eighty five, there's a guy named Hiram Price.
He's the then Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and he explains
the logic here by saying, simply, quote, it is cheaper
to give them education than to fight them. In eighteen ninety,
the US government ended official open warfare against Native American tribes.
(21:55):
And this was a very long war. It started in
the seventeenth century tree and it was it was exacerbated
and reached a bloody height throughout the nineteenth century. And
this had a terrible, terrible effect on the native populations.
We're talking about a huge group of unique, distinct cultures
(22:18):
that numbered in the millions and millions of people, and
now the population had plummeted to around two hundred and
fifty thousand. A lot of these communities were also confined
to reservations, and those reservations were a little sliver of
their traditional land. So what do you do when you
(22:38):
want to get into the you know, quote hearts and
minds of a people, when you want to change the
fabric of who they are, you start with their children.
You always start with their children. And that's you know,
that's why, at the risk of sound and crafts, Wu
tang is for the kids. Our species does this to
each other because it has such a powerful effect, even
(23:01):
when it's not even when the effects are not what
the instigators intended. So the goal became assimilation, to transform
Native American populations into quote, good Christian citizens. One school
founder put it this way. It's relatively offensive. Quote. It's
the one that lives on in infamy. They said, kill
(23:23):
the Indian in him and we will save the man.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Yikes.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Spooky stuff, terrifying.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
So how did they go about attempting to kill the
Indian metaphorically?
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Here?
Speaker 3 (23:38):
They started places like the Carlisle Indian School. It's the
full name is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was
founded in eighteen seventy nine. It was a military barracks
at one point that had been renovated. It was in Pennsylvania,
and it was founded by Richard Henry.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
Pratt, who is is at the.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
Time when he's founding it a captain in the army.
This place, the Carlisle School, it was the first federally
funded off reservation Indian boarding school, and it's definitely it's
the thing that it became the model basically.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah, we should note too that Pratt, who later went
on to become a general in the army, he considered
himself somewhat progressive, and a lot of the people the
European American population that supported these schools also considered themselves progressive.
They said they thought they were saving people, they thought
(24:44):
they were working toward a greater good, and we know
how that usually turns out. Carlisle said that he said
something that sounds respectable at first. He says, look, Native
Americans are equal to European Americans. And he said, you know,
we're gonna the point of Carlisle School is to immerse
(25:05):
these children, and again these are children at different ages.
Immerse these children into mainstream European American culture, and then
they'll be able to advance themselves. They'll thrive in the
dominant European American society, and then bonus points, they'll return
to their own, their own lands, their own communities, and
they'll become agents of assimilation themselves.
Speaker 5 (25:28):
Which is particularly borglike if you really think about it
from through the lens of it being a kind of
pernicious thing that's being done, as opposed to this whole
magnanimous lens of looking at it. If anyone out there
wants an extra deep dive into some of this stuff,
O our sister podcast, Stuff You Miss in History Class
has a great episode about the history of Indian schools
(25:49):
just as a concept, and recommend that as a little bit,
you know, more of a if you want to take
this information a little further.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
So.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
Carlisle's school became the model for twenty six Bureau of
Indian Affairs boarding schools in fifteen states and territories, plus
hundreds of private boarding schools sponsored by religious denominations. Over time,
the school would become home to over ten thousand Native
American children from one hundred and forty different tribes, and
(26:19):
it was by no means the only one of its kind.
Missionaries had been doing something similar for centuries to your point,
been earlier across the world under that guise of saving people,
saving the you know, converting the heathens or whatever, the
unwashed masses or whatever. This whole idea of we're doing
you as solid you should appreciate this, the battle for
(26:40):
hearts and minds.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Really yeah, and speak of deep dives. There's a book
on this we'd like to recommend. It came out back
in six It's called Children Left Behind The Dark Legacy
of Indian Mission Boarding Schools by Tim Gago So Giago,
So do check that out, but do be warned that
(27:02):
these are these are not pleasant afternoon podcast or books.
You know, you will probably not be in a good
mood after you read them, and you shouldn't be. And
I appreciate your point nowe about this scale of this practice, right,
this battle for you know, a culture has sometimes been
(27:24):
described as the soul of a people, so in a way,
in a metaphorical way, this is a battle for the
souls of these communities. We want to pause for a
word from our sponsor, and then we're going to return
and give you a sense of the scale here and
a sense of the day to day experience of these children.
(27:53):
And we're back. So by nineteen hundred, this is still continuing.
It was a spoiler heads up, we'll tell you at
the end. But this went on for much longer than
a lot of people would think. By nineteen hundred, there
were three hundred and seven boarding schools and day schools
across the country. They educated more than twenty six thousand
(28:16):
Native students of all types of ages, from all types
of communities and tribes. The difference quickly between a day
school and a boarding school is that a day school
is what a lot of people grew up with. Right,
you go to school, maybe seven thirty, eight thirty or whatever.
You get out sometime in the afternoon, you go home, rense,
and repeat Monday through Friday. A boarding school is a
(28:36):
little more intense because you live on the campus, you
can't really go anywhere, and your parents have a much
higher bar to access if they want to see you,
to check on you, to make sure things are going
all right. So we can see the extent of the
practice here, but we have to ask ourselves what did
(28:58):
these schools, these institute and their supporters actually do. How
did they get the kids? How about that? Let's start
with that.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Okay, Well, the first thing is that the school itself
wasn't given as some kind of carte blanche or something
to act outside of the law to just go around
kidnapping kids. They weren't supposed to be kidnapping children. And
you know, there were certainly some parents out there, you know,
who knows how many numbers, there's no way to tell,
(29:27):
But there were some parents within the Native American populations
that did see it as an opportunity for their kids
to both learn English, learn other skills that were going
to be provided, you know, at that kind of school,
and they saw it as a real opportunity. But there
were a lot more people that saw this of these
institutions rather than the people who were running them. They
(29:49):
saw it as not schools at all. They saw it
as a machine, a part of you know, someone who
came a group that came along and took both took
their kids and wanted to change their kids so they
wouldn't be like them anymore. And we get we get
this stuff from sapiens dot org. That's s A p
(30:11):
i e n s dot org.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
Yeah, it's a really great article called Native American Children's
Historic Forced Assimilation by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Calwell
from this year, actually from the fifth of March of
twenty twenty. And it's not to say that parents just
allowed their children to be taken all the time. You know,
there was absolutely resistance, as you could imagine if you
(30:35):
you know, have a child or have you know, had
been charged with the care of a youngster, to have
that child ripped away from you and taken forcibly would
not sit well with most parents or guardians. But folks
who you know resisted were punished quite severely in the
(30:55):
most cruel ways imaginable. Folks that were implementing these these
policies would hold back food rations, and families were already
operating on razor thin margins of sustenance, you know, So
to have that held over your head, I mean, that's
a pretty that's the equivalent of having a gun pointed
at you, and that actually happened too. Oftentimes, fathers who
(31:18):
fought back were sent to prison, and in some very
extreme cases but not unheard of, there would be law
enforcement officials who would literally kidnap these children while holding
a gun on the parents.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
So you don't have to be a lawyer to know
the first things. First, what does that mean? It means
they were kidnapping children full stop. Means in some cases
they were forcibly kidnapping children. And now, how do we
define their mission what they do with these kids. Well,
it's similar to some of those quotes we had mentioned earlier.
You could define it in two words, one to civilize
(31:54):
and two to Christianize. What I find interesting about that
is there's not really at this time a difference, you
know what I mean. Even the secular schools, like the
ones that were state supported and built in renovated military barracks,
even those were still teaching children some version of Christianity, right,
(32:15):
and you know, they can be defined as much by
what they did not allow children to do as what
they did allow them to do. One of the first
things you would do when you got there is you
got a new name, and you could not use your name.
You had to, you know, if they call it. If
they were like, all right, your new name is Norman
or Janine or something like that, then you would be
(32:36):
punished if you were like, no, my name is you know,
something different. And then the kids also had to get
their haircut, which is weirdly specific to what was considered
a European American style haircut. They were, of course forbidden
from speaking their native language. There are a lot of
(32:57):
similarities with this and the Weiger rehdgidcation camps that are
that are currently still in operation in Western China.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Think about what that means. Those three, those three things
that bends outline there. Your identity, you're the thing that
you the person that you saw yourself as. The way
your hairstyle reminds you of maybe your father's or your
mothers or your grandparents. The language that is being spoken
(33:30):
to you in your home that you've grown up with,
that you speak much better than any other language, especially English.
You are you're punished for speaking that. This is this
is some intense psychological conditioning that's going on at these schools.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
If I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 5 (33:50):
There's a really fantastic series on HBO is called Bury
My Heart at Wounded Me that was based on a
book of the same name, and it was about just
the conflict between and you know, it was with sitting
bull and all of that.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And I'm almost.
Speaker 5 (34:03):
Positive there that was sort of the last vestiges of
truly tribal, you know, Indian culture in the West, kind
of living out their lives as normal before all of this,
you know, like.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Reservations and stuff kicked.
Speaker 5 (34:17):
I mean, they were still reservd I'm sorry I'm not
remembering fully well what the story was, but there was
a character in that film who was an assimilated Native
American boy, and that it became a story point of
his disconnect from the you know, his people who were living,
you know, as they had always lived for so many generations.
(34:40):
And it became a very complicated thing for that character
to kind of struggle with because on the one hand,
he looks at his caretakers as being kind and positive
and helpful and teaching him and giving him food to
eat all that, but then he sees that he's a
little different and.
Speaker 2 (34:56):
Is having a hard time reconciling all of that.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
I wanted to We will bring in another quote here
before we get into some of the even the more
physical dangers that the children had to face in these places.
If that's okay. It's just another quock quote from that documentary.
And this quote comes from a Barb Faber Fabre. She's
(35:25):
the director of the White Earth Child's Care Center there
on the reservation, and her quote is, many children were
ripped from their families, loaded onto trucks and not seeing
their parents for years. We're talking generations where parents couldn't
be parents, and so now you're seeing parents who maybe
don't know how to parent because they did not receive parenting.
(35:48):
And I think that really is a heavy concept to
think about here, But just being taken away from your
family like that, having your identity completely removed, and then
going back home at some point and not really recognizing
yourself or your immediate family because of the way you've
(36:08):
been changed.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
And that was one of you know, that's the thing
like the old programming joke, it's not a bug, it's
it's a feature. Right, This was purposeful and at this
point we don't want to be too incredibly graphic, but
you know, as you might expect, there was a wealth
(36:34):
of abuse that occurred here as well as death through neglect.
There are multiple documented cases of physical abuse, of forced
manual labor, of sexual abuse with children as young as
nine years old, and then of course emotional abuse. How
(36:54):
could it not be an emotionally abusive situation for a
kid to be forced to do these things? And many
of those documented cases come from the church run institutions,
but that, by no means is meant to imply that
the quote unquote secular institutions were any better. One interesting
(37:15):
thing that bears thinking about is that due to the
living conditions, these children were also exposed to diseases that
could sometimes be fatal, like measles. There's this article in
The Atlantic that came out last year, Death by Civilization,
by Mary Annette Pember and Maryonnette Pember is the daughter
(37:36):
of a woman who was forced to live at one
of these boarding schools, and in this in her conversations
with her mother, she learns, like her mother says, education
was something that was done to us, not with us
or for us. And one of the things that really
hit home for me is that she described a culture
(38:00):
of pervasive physical and sexual abuse at the school. Food
and access to medical care were sometimes denied as punishment,
and they were scarce to begin with. And because of that,
whether through violence or neglect, many children died and sometimes
their parents, especially the boarding schools, only learned that their
child had died after the kid had been buried in
(38:23):
a school cemetery, some of which some of those graves
are unmarked, I.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Believe today, and done generally in the Christian tradition, so
probably not in any way the traditions that have been
used by the Native American families.
Speaker 5 (38:41):
Yeah, and that can be a real deal breaker, you know,
culturally speaking, I mean that you know, they would really
truly believe that that individual's soul did not end up
where it needed to go in the afterlife. That goes
along with their belief system. So in a way, it's
a form of like psychological terrorism, you know, I mean,
I mean, I know it wasn't looked at that way,
(39:02):
but it is truly a absolute bastardization of people's most
sacredly held beliefs. And it's just I can't wrap my
head around it. It's just a total myopic worldview that
just bugs me in general. When people are so hung
up on my way is the only way no one
else can have their own ideas, their own beliefs. That
(39:24):
just really is one of my biggest pet peeves of
all of this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, well said, This practice again is continuing in the
nineteen hundred so into the twentieth century. As a matter
of fact, it was continuing less than a century ago.
In nineteen twenty eight, this thing comes out called the
Merriam Report. This is the first semi comprehensive study of
(39:51):
conditions for Native people since an earlier I think six
volume report that came back that came out in the
eighteen fifties, so it's been decades and decades, and they
are issuing a criticism and a condemnation of situations at
these schools. One of the big things is they said
infectious disease is widespread, not just because of overcrowding, but
(40:14):
because these kids are malnourished. There aren't good sanitary practices
in place, the staff isn't keeping up what we would
consider safety standards for a school nowadays, and the kids
were weakened by overwork. Like at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
These kids were working, you know what I mean. They
weren't just being forced to learn scripture and stuff. Death
(40:37):
rates at this time in these schools, according to this
nineteen twenty eight report, were six and a half times
higher than for any other group in the United States.
And this is where we get into maybe some conspiratorial territory,
because you have to wonder how much of this was purposeful,
(40:57):
how much of it was any of this like designed
to slowly kill actual people instead of just their culture.
Because so many contemporaneous accounts show people saying that they're
coming from a progressive place I think it's maybe just
they didn't have the follow through. I just it seems
(41:20):
like such an evil plan, doesn't it. It doesn't seem
like a progressive plan. Maybe that's because we're in twenty twenty.
But they did see some benefits. You know, from Uncle
Sam's perspective that one of the biggest benefits was the money.
It was just cost effective. It's actually it's weird. It
reminds me a little bit of their argument is that
(41:44):
erasing this culture this way through assimilation is less expensive
for the bottom line than it would be to wage
continual war against these communities, which is a brutal way
to look at it.
Speaker 3 (41:56):
Yeah, I would definitely say money how a lot to
do with it. Just you really only have to think
about the fact that the Models school was based in
a barracks and started and led by, you know, a
member of the military. And when you think about those
two things, you either are going to fight these groups
(42:19):
with ammunition and men who some of them will die,
or the on the other side, build a school that
then stays there forever and can continually bring the children
through or at least forever in the minds of the
people who are starting the program.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Well, well, let's call it what it is too.
Speaker 5 (42:39):
I mean, it is a militaristic forced camp essentially, I
mean it is it is. It's not a labor camp,
but it is a camp of forced something. They're not
forcing them to labor on behalf of the military, but
they're forcing them to become a thing that then can
be used.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Later by the military.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
And it's even more pernicious because it's happening without these
children's consent of absolutely without the consent of their their
their parents, and then they're turning them into a pawn
and and they're you know, they're great game.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely true. This, this idea, this incredibly cold,
almost reptilian concept to the bottom line, reminds me of
a of another argument that we can make about the
current prison system of the United States. Did you know
you did? I don't know if people check. I know,
I know that we talked about this maybe years ago.
(43:36):
But it is so much cheaper to send a kid
to college than it is to send them to prison,
and certain Yeah, and the benefits to society are substantial
and measurable.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
Well, it depends on how you want your society to look,
because that kid that goes to college becomes a weapon
of change, a weapon of you know, being able to
bring other people into a better understanding of the situations
that all of us find ourselves in. Right I think
(44:09):
I think you're drawing a line of comparison there with
prison populations and perhaps, let's say non white people who
are in prison, anyone who finds themselves to be brown
or black. We've talked about this, as you said, Ben,
and it feels very similar to this. I'm feeling a
lot of connections here to the modern day Nixon and
(44:32):
Reagan stuff that we've talked about.
Speaker 5 (44:35):
And by the way, I don't know who it was
the setup, but somebody a friend of mine said during
this COVID situation that we're dealing with right now, they
need to just let all the low level offenders just
out of prison because they're essentially, you know, being condemned
to potentially death from being in these prison populations and
getting these diseases.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
This disease.
Speaker 1 (44:56):
Yeah, I think I know for sure some countries have
really he's exactly what you're describing your friends, describing low
level prisoners. I think some I want to say that
some US areas have done it. But I don't have confirmation,
and you know, I see exactly what you're saying, because
for a lot of people, I don't know. It's weird.
(45:16):
Like Harvey Weinstein managed to get special treatment in prison,
right because of the COVID nineteen concerns. Did you guys
hear about that?
Speaker 5 (45:25):
I mean, like he wasn't already gonna get some special treatment.
But it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah, because he's.
Speaker 2 (45:31):
So old and frail and like, oh, poor Harvey.
Speaker 1 (45:33):
You know, oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
How do judges feel, you know, when they see people
like that walking in suddenly on a walker? I don't
want to sound.
Speaker 5 (45:42):
Cold, No, it reminds me of the ambulance chasers who
put a neck brace on their clients, you know, to
get some goodwill points from the jury or whatever. It's
such an old con that you think judges would just
roll their eyes at it immediately, you know.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
God, yeah, but yes, you're you're absolutely right, your friends,
absolutely right. The situation with the pandemic in prisons, it's
it's a powder keke it's waiting to explode if it
hasn't exploded already, and there are riots happening over it
here in the US in prisons. So we talked about this,
(46:17):
the benefits to the US government for this practice, what
they saw as the benefits they thought, you know, just
like we were talking about earlier. The idea was for
the children to study there and then go back to
their community and change. But this, this theory didn't account
for the intense PTSD these kids would encount would experience.
(46:37):
It didn't account for how disconnected and alienated they would
feel from their communities. It also clearly it irreparably weakened
the family structure, you know what I mean. Like, imagine
you're imagine you're like an elder kid in your family
and you get kidnapped, and you're there for a few years,
(46:58):
You survive, you come back and there are two more kids, right,
and those kids, let's say they're both like four, They
have no idea who you are. You're maybe a name
that they've heard. But you've grown up now for years
being forced to answer to Andrew or something, right, This
is damaging.
Speaker 5 (47:15):
Yeah, and not to mention the can you imagine how
powerless and just emasculated you must feel, as like, you know,
a head of a household. I say emasculated because obviously
the head of the household, you know, in these days
would have been considered the male. But you know, the
ability to not be able to protect your children, you
(47:36):
know that that has serious psychological implications over time, and
it leads to the kind of things we're talking about
with the drug abuse problems and the and the suicidal
ideations and just the generational mental health issues that go
along with these communities. I mean, it really is a
precedent that started farther back than even this, obviously, but
this is sure as a biggie, you know, I can't imagine.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
And now we want to answer the question that we
alluded to earlier in the episode. When did this grim
practice end? We haven't really talked about it, and that's
because it wasn't until the late nineteen seventies that Congress
finally outlawed the forced removal of Native children from their
(48:20):
families nineteen seventy. Some of our fellow listeners are alive
when that happened. The late nineteen seventies. It's insane, that's
just a few years before some of us were born.
History is not over, and now even now, like it's
understandable that historians are still working to gauge the full
(48:42):
extent of the damage wrought by these programs. And they're
still discovering bodies of children.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
In August seventh, twenty seventeen, the United States Army, same
group that you know helped begin these schools, they exhume
the or began exhuming the graves of the bodies of
three children who originated from the Northern Arapaho tribe. These
three children died at that Carlisle Indian Industrial School in
(49:13):
the eighteen eighties. The children's names were Little Chief Horse
and Little Plume, And those names were not the names
that they were called while they were at the school.
Those were their actual names.
Speaker 5 (49:27):
Can you imagine being denied your name? I mean, we
take it for granted, but it's such a you take,
you know, we live with it. And then if one
day someone said you're not null anymore, you're something else
that I say you are. It's a powerful psychological tool
to remove somebody's name, and like, it's the same as
(49:47):
giving someone a number, you know, in a prison system
or whatever. You are making them your slave essentially, or
at least at the very least, you are making them
an other. And you are like, you know, above them
and they are now your property and you tell them
what to do and they jump when you say jump.
It's it's really to do this with children, there's the
(50:09):
thing that really it's just unconscionable.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
I would see, yeah, i'd see definitely with Julia. I
think it's disgusting to do it with people. Like if
you give someone a nickname they don't like, or they say,
don't call me that, you know, Like, sometimes I'm very
careful when I meet people to you know, if they
have a name that has a couple of common derivations,
even it's just a small thing, and I want to
(50:33):
ask them, what what do you want to be called?
Because sometimes people are so beaten down that they feel
like they don't have a right to have the name
they want, which everybody does, you know what I mean?
And yes, does it always work out for me?
Speaker 4 (50:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (50:49):
I me met some guy in his fifties one time
who wanted to be called like snake bite. But that
was his choice and I'm not in charge of his life.
So so, snake bite, if you're listening, I hope you're
having a great day.
Speaker 2 (51:03):
We see you, snake, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:05):
There we go, We see you and we know that
this was This is a very I mean, depressing doesn't
cover it episode, especially because there are a lot of
things here that will never get solved. We'll understand more
about the extent of the consequences in the fallout from
this practice, but we'll probably never know the full extent,
(51:26):
the full human extent of it. And we want to
know what you think about this situation. Is there is
there even more to the story, what discoveries are going
to happen. If you are listening and you're not in
the United States, have you experienced things like this or
do you know of things like this in your country
(51:49):
or your region's past. If you are listening and you
are in the US and you have personal experience with this,
what steps do you feel that the government has taken
to address this and do you feel those steps are adequate?
If not, what should be done? We want to hear
from you.
Speaker 3 (52:08):
One thing I would like to point out here is
that documentary that I keep bringing up, because really it's
one of the main things that really touched me when
I was prepping for this episode. They're at the White
Earth Nation in Minnesota, at the reservation there. One of
the strategies they're taking is to use education to bring
(52:30):
children of very young ages at least introduce them and
bring them back into the culture of their ancestors just
a little bit or as much as they can so
doing a lot of the old traditions, speaking the language
and learning the language when in school, and for them
(52:52):
it seems to be having a very positive effect on
this new generation who will eventually be the leaders whose
parents maybe have had to deal with the immediate the
immediate fallout to these schools into the elimination of culture
and tradition. So I would just say I think that
(53:15):
is one way forward, at least for some of the
Native American populations within the US.
Speaker 1 (53:21):
Well said man, thanks for ending us on a positive
note today, as we said, or as positive as one
could be in this situation, as you said. We want
to hear from you. We hope this episode finds you well.
Regardless of where you live and regardless of which room
you find yourself stuck intoday, let us know your thoughts
(53:43):
and speak with our fellow listeners. You, specifically, you are
the best part of this show. You can find us
on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram, you can
find us on Twitter. Not just as people, but as individuals.
Speaker 5 (53:54):
Yeah, if you want to find me, I am exclusively
on Instagram at how Now Noel Brown. As the cabin
fever is setting in, I'm finding more random things to post.
Made some tied I T shirts with my daughter the
other day and that was a delight. And then we
also made some homemade chapstick because the madness has truly
taken hold.
Speaker 2 (54:14):
My friends.
Speaker 3 (54:15):
You can find me, Matt Frederick underscore iHeart something to
that effect. Good luck to you if you can find it.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
You've won the win, Matt, What do they win?
Speaker 3 (54:26):
You just win because you looked for something that you
didn't need to and you won't find anything new there,
but you still took the journey.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
You win a sense of accomplishment.
Speaker 3 (54:36):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (54:38):
You can also find me on Instagram. I'm at Ben Bolan.
You can find me on Twitter at Ben Bolan HSW.
You know you can turn off the lights in a
room with a mirror and just say some stuff a
few times. We'll see what happens. Schedules are busy. If
you don't like to mess with social media, boy, do
we have good news for you. We a phone number.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
Yes, it is one eight three three st d WYTK.
Give us a call, leave a message, and we will
be listening to it. We've all got the log in.
We're all in there now. It's not just me anymore.
And we've been downloading a ton of messages writing out
who who you are, what you've said. We're pretty excited.
(55:22):
We're going to be diving into it pretty soon.
Speaker 2 (55:24):
And if you don't want to do any of that
stuff and you just want to.
Speaker 5 (55:27):
You know, communicate with us the old fashioned way. No,
don't send us a letter. You could if you wanted to.
We don't only give out a mailing address. You could
find that though, if you really did some digging, that'd
be another fun scavenger hunt for you to do. But
you can send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1 (55:41):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (56:03):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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