May 6, 2020 • 55 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):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, 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.
(00:48):
Today 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, uh aproached me on Instagram and
I believe also called on the phone. Numbers that correct, Matt. Yes,
this person left a message with this very similar message
(01:10):
that she left to you on Instagram. And I guess
we'll just let's call this person blows a mercy for now.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and uh we uh blows of mercy.
I say, you guys screenshots so we can all be
looped in before we were on air. Uh raise a
point that I think a lot of us in the
(01:31):
audience have heard about recently, and it's it's a disturbing one.
It's worth a p s A. Uh, we'll just we'll
read this if that's all right. I think you guys
have a copy of it too. Uh. Blows of Mercy
says the xenophobia happening during this outbreak is really affecting
my quality of life. I haven't been back to China
(01:52):
since two thousand six. Not that anyone random would know,
but it hurts to still be yelled at. Could you
guys maybe just remind Pete all that Asians are 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
(02:13):
and died, and I understand the outrage. It just sucks
that it's been blamed on an entire continent. Thanks again. Uh,
And you know, have you have you guys been seeing
some of the reports in the news about that here
in the States. Yeah, just like the kind of alarming
uptick in uh racially motivated attacks and verbal abuse at
the very least, and definitely seeing some people that are
(02:35):
actually getting accosted physically. Yeah, and this person actually, uh
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 the way you look just
because of the way you look, and being subject to
(02:58):
this kind of discrimination. Um. And then adding and compounding
to that wearing a mask the way you know, we
were told to wear a mask in the way that
it's been recommended for us to do, so it just
kind of adds to that. Um. Yeah, It's definitely something
we should be thinking about and just make sure we're
not a part of the problem. Yeah. And a lot
(03:21):
of our fellow listeners and fellow conspiracy realists here, uh
aren't aren't going to have that kind of laps 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 in Southeast United States
(03:44):
because of their anti LGBT legislation and the enormous amounts
of money that they would donate every year. People started
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 been
(04:06):
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.
Uh So, so I think that it's it's easy. It's
(04:27):
a it's a design 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 in 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
(04:48):
of the woods, uh let it. Let us know because
we can guarantee you If there is some sort of
mastermind behind COVID nineteen, it's not the person that walked
into Target in front of you, like you have our
word on that, well said Ben, So thank you for
writing to us and just making that point and calling
and leaving that message and for speaking with us. So, um,
(05:12):
just let's keep that in mind as we keep going
throughout this episode and as we keep living our lives
right because we are aren't we we are living our lives.
Here we are again, uh, you know, hopefully one of
your favorite conspiracy shows, mid Pandemic. Uh, we hope you're well.
And Matt Noel, I hope, I hope you guys are
doing well. Um, we're today we're looking at another crisis.
(05:36):
It's a deeply disturbing and sadly somewhat obscure practice that
continues to affect the 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
(05:56):
purpose of teaching them to forget where they came from
and what their identity was. 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. So I think we all pretty much
can accept the notion that European expansion really changed the
(06:18):
world and made the world feel like sort of a
smaller place. I guess. While Canada, UH, the United States,
and Australia are today considered part of the Anglo sphere,
ancient cultures existed in the American and Australian contents for
millennia before the arrival of any of these interlopers UH,
(06:39):
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. Yeah, and and this might sound like
something from a dusty history book in some neglected corner
of your local library, But history is alive, right, History
(07:01):
is alive, and it's reactive. And William Faulkner was right
when he said the past is not past. The consequences
of this expansion carry on to the modern day and
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,
(07:26):
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, and it's it's dire.
It's improving now, but it's it's dire. Native Americans are
one of the most economically impoverished populations within the United States.
(07:46):
And well, let's just look at the most recent year
available when we're talking about income here, as of twenty fifteen,
the median household income for a household that is identifying
as Native amer Rican it was thirty seven thousand, two
hundred and twenty seven. So that's median yearly household income.
(08:08):
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. UM. There's another thing here
that where you know, it's changing as the day goes,
especially as we're dealing with this new crisis. But Native
Americans at least have the highest unemployment rate and it's
(08:31):
nine point nine in that's the highest of any racial
or ethnic group or identifying ethnic group within the United States.
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
(08:52):
disparity has some pretty profound consequences for the health and
well being of people in the Native American population. Uh,
this population also has a higher proportion of people who
are living in poverty. Twenty eight point three per cent
of people identify as Native Americans live in poverty, and that,
(09:14):
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. 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 that I watched
(09:34):
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 called the White Earth Nation, and
it's it's a reserve. It's a reservation there. And one
of the main voices that you listen to in this
(09:56):
is Irma j. Wisener or vision or I don't don't
know how to pronounce it correctly. She's a former White
Earth Nation sharewoman, and she's got a pretty powerful quote
here talking about this subject. During the Great depression. When
unemployment was there was an outrage in this country, and
yet we have a great depression every day, year in
(10:18):
and year out. Education is our ticket out of poverty.
Here 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. Uh. And, like you said,
and that was from irma j visitor, former White Earth
Nation chairwoman, And I think it's a powerful quote. Specifically
(10:39):
at the end they're talking about how education is the
way out and that is going to play in heavily
to this episode. Yeah, that's a stupid and uh. And
and this this documentary is is worth your time? Do
you check it out? Actually, there are a lot of
like great examinations of this in academia and you know,
easily available on YouTuber online. But it doesn't seem it
(11:02):
still doesn't seem to get the attention that it needs
to get. So remember that we're talking about education and
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
(11:24):
federal healthcare services. And this is because of something called
the Snyder Act in one and the 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
(11:45):
one would think if we just knew that that there
would be maybe better health in general in this population
because of the guaranteed right to federal healthcare, which, as
many people know, especially recently, most Americans don't have. So
the problem is this is not a race. The stark
(12:07):
disparities in health. Native American populations, including Natives of Alaska
today have a life expectancy that's about five point five
years less than all of the other populations of the
U S. However you want to slice them, that's seventy
three years to seventy eight point five years respectively. Another
(12:28):
thing to note here, um is that American Indians and
Alaska Natives, so indigenous people's, continue to die at higher
rates than any other Americans in a lot of categories.
And within this you're gonna find chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, diabetes, UM,
(12:49):
unintentional injuries, assaults, homicides, intentional self harm and suicide, and
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. Yeah,
I mean, it's the same kind of things we see
(13:10):
in a lot of impoverished parts of the country where uh,
like you know, things like um 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
are looking for an escape, and these things can take
(13:32):
hold and further ravage those communities. And we have another
set of findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey that showed UM, relative to white women, Native
American women are one point two times more likely to
have experienced violence in their lifetime, and that relative to
white men, Native American men are one point three times
(13:53):
more likely to have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Um.
Really kind of staggering, despaired you there, and when you
know we're pulling stats that are relatively recent, by which
they're like, you know, uh, maybe three, two, ten years
old now at this point for some of these things.
(14:14):
But we should note that the U S Census, if
it is able to be completed during the pandemic, may
have updated statistics to reveal. And there are there are
tons of incredibly intelligent researchers and analysts who are working
on this data continually, so we always love to hear
(14:35):
the updates. All of this plays in so income health.
All of this plays in uh in concert with education.
The US educational system, that should not be a spoiler
for anyone, has historically been a source of tremendous discrimination
and in a lot of cases trauma for the Native
population North American Hawaii, and even today, multiple reports will
(15:00):
say that educational progress for Native Americans still lags behind
that of other demographics. There was a report that came
out from the in two thousand twelve from the National
Center for Education Statistics that said that Native American populations
have the highest high school dropout rate in the country,
and that was at fourteen point six percent. But while
(15:22):
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 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,
(15:43):
a lot of people in government today don't really want
you to pay too much attention to what are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets create. So in the late nineteenth century,
the United States government forcibly removed Native American children from
(16:07):
their homes UH, shipping them off to different boarding schools
in the hopes of assimilating them to UH the United
States as culture UM. This was only one front in
this culture war, which had begun long long before that. UM.
The precedents were UH the idea of the forced assimilation
(16:27):
that functioned in concert with force removal from Native land. UM.
It's the same way that the Minnesota Historical Society puts
it uh quote. As white population grew in the United
States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in
the late eight hundreds, there was an increasing pressure on
the recently removed groups to give up some of their
new land. Yeah this this is uh like the way
(16:50):
they put this here, because what they're saying is they
the government's had already forced these native populations to move away,
right if they're located on the eatern seaboard, like think
of the Trail of Tears. Uh. And then the in
the late eighteen hundreds, they said, well, we've got more
uh European descended people who want to branch out in
(17:11):
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 in what they called the Indian Removal Act.
And then just a few decades later, Uncle Sam had
(17:32):
a moment. You know, I like to when I think
of supervillains like this, I like to think of them
as dark lightbulb moments. Uh. They had a dark lightbulb
moment and they said, you know what, if we were
running out of places to put these people, were running
out of places to to kick them too, Uh, we
have to figure out something else. And then another dark
(17:55):
lightbulb 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 you know, the same
kind of move the board pools in Star Trek. Why
don't we forcibly assimilate them? This is really rough, This
(18:16):
is really rough. I want to read another quote from
from that documentary I mentioned earlier, The Little Dream Catchers. Um.
This is another quote from Irma jave Wisner, and she says, quote, Historically,
the purpose of education for us as tribal people has
(18:37):
been assimilation. 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 a hundred thousand in
(18:58):
the boarding schools, 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. Yeah,
and the the idea of um trauma passed down through
(19:21):
generations has always been really fascinating to me, Uh, there's
there's there's some kind of study that indicates that it
can actually be passed down almost through genes, you know,
through epigenetics, and and that's fascinating to me on a
whole another level. But of course it's going to happen
is experientially, especially in this kind of situation. Then you
(19:41):
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. Um,
the dark lightbulb moment like that they had there to
assimilate them, but the way they chose to go about
(20:01):
it here is just so heinous. So how how did
this situation begin? How did we get from what we
what we started to establish with pushing people out to
UM to what they're exploring in that quote, it's it
really kicks into gearin in UM in the eighteen hundreds,
(20:24):
in the late eighteen hundreds and eighteen eighty five, there's
a guy named Hiram Price means, 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
(20:47):
warfare against Native American tribes. And this was, you know,
a very long war. It started in the seventeenth century
and it was it was exacerbated and reached a bloody
height through about the nineteenth century. And this had a terrible,
terrible effect on the Native populations. We're talking about a
(21:08):
huge group of of unique, distinct cultures that numbered in
the millions and millions of people, and now the population
and 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.
(21:30):
So what do you do when you 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
sounding crass, wu tang is for the kids. Our species
(21:51):
does this to each other because it has such a
powerful effect even when it's not even when the effects
are not what the 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
(22:12):
relatively offensive. Quote, it's the one that lives on an infamy.
They said, kill the Indian in him and we will
save the man Yanks. Spooky stuff, terrifying. So how did
they go about attempting to kill the Indian metaphorically? Here?
(22:32):
They started places like the Carlisle Indian School. It's 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 Pratt,
(22:53):
who is at the time when he's founding it a
captain in the army. This is the this play to
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 m m. Yeah. We should
(23:16):
note too that, uh 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
they said they thought they were saving people, they thought
(23:38):
they were working toward a greater good, and we know
how that usually turns out. Carlyle said that he said
something that sounds respectable at first. He says, look, Native
Americans are equal to European Americans. And he says, uh,
you know, we're gonna The point of Carlisle School is
to immerse these chill dren and again, these are children
(24:01):
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 uh, their own lands, their
own communities, and they'll become agents of assimilation themselves, which
(24:22):
is a particularly borg like 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 um if if
if anyone out there wants an extra deep dive into
some of this stuff. From our our sister podcast, Stuff
You Miss in History Class has a great episode about
the history of Indian schools just as as a concept,
(24:44):
and UM recommend that as a little bit you know,
more of a if you want to take this information
a little further. So, 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 school sponsored
by religious denominations. Over time, uh, the school would become
(25:07):
home to over ten thousand Native American children from one
hundred and forty different tribes. And it was by no
means the only one of its kind. Missionaries have been
doing something similar for centuries to your point, been earlier
across the world under that guise of of saving people,
saving the you know, converting the heathens or whatever, um,
(25:27):
the unwashed masses or whatever. And this whole idea of
we're doing you as solid you should appreciate this the
battle for hearts and minds really yeah, and speed deep dives.
There's there's a book on this, would like to recommend
h came out back in oh six. It's called Children
Left Behind the Dark Legacy of Indian mission Boarding Schools
(25:48):
by Tim Gago so g I A g O so
Do check that out. But do do be warned that
these are not These are not pleasant afternoon podcast or books.
You know. Uh, you will probably not be in a
good mood after you read them, and you shouldn't be.
And I appreciate your point. No about the scale of this,
(26:11):
of this practice, right, Uh, this battle for you know,
a culture has sometimes been described as the soul of
a people, so in a in a way, in a
metaphorical way, this is a battle for the souls of
these communities. We want to pause for word from our sponsor,
(26:32):
and then we're going to return and give you a
sense of the scale here in a sense of the
day to day experience of these children. And we're back.
So by n uh, this this is still continuing. It
(26:55):
was a spoiler. Heads up, we'll tell you what the ends.
By this went on for much longer than a lot
of people would think. Three hundred seven boarding schools and
day schools across the country. They educated more than twenty
six thousand native students of all types of ages, from
all types of communities and tribes. The difference quickly between
(27:16):
a day school and boarding school is that a day
school is what a lot of people grew up with right,
You go to school maybe thirty eight thirty or whatever.
You get out sometime in the afternoon, you go home, rents,
and repeat Monday through Friday. A boarding school is a
little more intense because you live on the campus. You
can't really go anywhere, uh and your parents have uh
(27:40):
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 these schools, these institutions and their supporters actually do.
How did they get the kids? How about that? Let's
start with that. How okay, Well, the first thing is
(28:02):
that the school itself wasn't given 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. Um. And you know, there were certainly some
parents out there, you know, who knows how many numbers,
there's no way to tell, but there were some parents
(28:22):
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
(28:42):
who were running them. They saw it as not schools
at all. They saw it as a machine, a part
of you know, um, 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. Um.
And we get we get this stuff from sapiens dot org.
(29:04):
That's s A p i e n s dot org. Yeah,
it's a really great article called Native American Children's Historic
Forced Assimilation by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Callwell h
from this year, actually from the fifth of March. And
it's not to say that parents just allowed their children
to be taken all the time. You know, there there
(29:26):
was absolutely resistance. Um. As you could imagine if you
you know, have a child, um or have you know,
had been charged with the care of a youngster. Uh,
to have that child ripped away from you and taken
forcibly would not sit well with most parents or guardians.
But uh, folks who you know resisted were punished quite
(29:48):
severely in the most cruel ways imaginable. Um, 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 that's the equivalent of
of having a gun pointed at you. Uh, And that
(30:10):
actually happened too. Oftentimes, fathers who fought back were sent
to prison, and in some very extreme cases but not
unheard of, Uh, there would be law enforcement officials who
would literally kidnap these children while holding a gun on
on the parents. So you don't have to be a
lawyer to know the first things first, what does that mean?
(30:32):
It means they were kidnapping children full stop. Means in
some cases they were forcibly kidnapping children. And now, how
do how do we define their mission what they do
with these kids? Well, it's similar to us some of
those quotes we have mentioned earlier. You could define it
in two words, one to civilize and two to christianize.
What I find interesting about that is there's not really
(30:52):
at this time of difference, you know what I mean,
Even the secular schools like the ones that were states
supported and built in renovated military barracks. Even those uh
were still teaching children uh some some version of Christianity, right,
and you know, they can be defined as much by
what they did not allow children to do as what
(31:15):
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 uh
Norman or Janine or something like that, then you would
be punished if you were like, no, my name is
you know, something different and uh. Then the kids also
(31:37):
had to get their hair cut, which is weirdly specific
uh to what was considered a European American style haircut. Um.
They were of course forbidden from speaking their native language. Uh.
There are a lot of similarities with this and the
weager re education camps that are that are currently still
(31:59):
an operation in western China. Think about what that means.
Those three, those three things that bendes 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 mother's or your grandparents. UM, the
(32:22):
language that is being spoken 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, if I'm not mistaken. UM.
(32:44):
There's a really fantastic series on HBO is called Burying
My Heart at Wounded Knee that was based on a
book of the same name, and it was about, um,
just the conflict between you know, it was with sitting
bowl and all of that, and I'm almost positive there
that was sort of the last vestiges of truly tribal
you know, Indian culture, UM in the West, kind of
(33:07):
living out their lives as normal before all of this,
you know, like reservations and stuff kicked. I mean, they
were still reserving. 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
(33:28):
the you know, his people who were living you know,
as they had always lived for so many generations and
it became a very complicated thing for that character to
kind of struggle with, uh, 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 and all that, But then he sees that he's
(33:48):
a little different and is having a hard time reconciling
all of that. I wanted to, if possible, bring in
another quote here before we get into some of the
even uh, the more physical dangers that the children had
to face in these places. If that's okay. Um, It's
(34:09):
just another quick quote from that documentary. And this quote
comes from barb uh favor F A b r E.
She's the director of the White Earth Child Care Center
there and on the reservation, and her quote is, many
children were ripped from their families, loaded onto trucks and
(34:29):
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. And I think that really is a
a heavy concept to think about here, But just being
(34:50):
taken away from your family like that, having your identity
completely removed. Um. And then going back home at some
point and not really recognizing yourself or your immediate family
because of the way you've been changed. Mm hmmm. 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
(35:10):
a feature, right, this was this was purposeful and at
this point, um, we we don't want to be too
incredibly graphic, but um, you know, as you might expect,
there was a wealth of abuse that occurred here as
(35:31):
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. Um. And
then of course emotional abuse. How could it not be
an emotionally abusive situation for a kid to be forced
(35:53):
to do these things? And many of those documented cases
come from the church run institution, But that, by no
means is meant to imply that the quote unquote secular
institutions were any better. One. One interesting thing the Bears
thinking about is the due to the living conditions, these
(36:13):
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 Marionette Pember is the daughter of a woman who
was forced to live at one of these boarding schools,
(36:35):
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 of pervasive physical and sexual
(36:56):
abuse at the school. Uh, Food and access to medical
are were sometimes denied as punishment. They were scarce to
begin with, and because of that, whether through violence or neglect,
many children died and sometimes their parents, especially at the
boarding schools, only learned that their child had died after
the kid had been buried in a school cemetery, some
(37:19):
of which some of those graves are on unmarked I
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. Yeah, and that can
be a real deal breaker, you know, culturally speaking, I
mean that, you know, it's they would really truly believe
(37:42):
that that individual's soul did not end up where it
needed to go in in the afterlife that 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,
but it is truly a absolute bastization of people's most
sacredly held beliefs. And and uh, it's just I can't
(38:05):
wrap my head around it. It's just a total myopic
worldview that just bugs me in general. And 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 just really is one of my biggest
pet peeves. And of all of this kind of stuff. Yeah,
well said this, this practice again is continuing in the
(38:29):
nineteen hundreds so into the twentieth century. As a matter
of fact, it was continuing less than a century ago. Uh.
In this thing comes out called the Merriam Report. This
is the first semi comprehensive study of conditions for Native
people since and earlier I think six volume report that
(38:50):
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, as they said, infectious disease is widespread,
not just because of overcrowding, but because these kids are malnourished.
(39:10):
There aren't good sanitary practices in place that you know,
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 learning,
being forced to learn scripture and stuff. Death rates at
(39:32):
this time in these schools, according to this report, were
six and a half times higher than for any other
group in the United States. And this this is where
we get into maybe some conspiratorial territory, because you have
to wonder how much of this was purposeful, how much
(39:52):
of this was any of this like designed to slowly
kill actual people instead of just their culture. Be cause
so many contemporaneous accounts show people say it's 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
(40:14):
seems like such an evil plan, doesn't it. It doesn't
seem like a progressive plan. Maybe that's because we're in
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 it's actually, um, it's weird.
It reminds me a little bit of the Their argument
(40:37):
is that 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. Yeah, I would definitely
say money had a lot to do with it, just
and you really only have to think about the fact
(40:58):
that the Model's school was based in the 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 with ammunition and in
men who some of them will die, or the on
(41:21):
the other side, build a school that then stays there
forever and can continually bring the children through at least
forever in the minds of the people who are starting
the program. Well, well, let's call it what it is too.
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, and they're
(41:43):
not forcing them to labor on behalf of the military,
but they're forcing them to become a thing that then
can be used later by the military. And it's even
more pernicious because it's happening without these children's consent um
of of absolutely without the consent of their their their parents,
and then they're turning them into a pawn and and
(42:04):
there you know, they're great game. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
absolutely true. This, this idea, this incredibly cold, almost reptilian
concept of the bottom line reminds me of of another
argument that we can make about the current prison system
of the United States. Did you know you did? I
(42:25):
don't know if people check. I know, I know that
we talked about this maybe years ago. But it is
so much cheaper to send a kid to college than
it is to sent into prison. Uh yeah, And the
benefits to society are substantial and measurable. Well, it depends
on how you want your society to look, because that
(42:47):
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 I think
you're drawing a line of comparison there with with prison
populations and perhaps, let's say non white people who are
(43:10):
in prison, anyone who finds themselves to be brown or black.
We've talked about this, as you said, been and it
feels very similar to this. I'm feeling a lot of
connections here to the modern day Nixon and Reagan stuff
that we've talked about. And by the way, I don't
know who it was the set at, but somebody a
(43:31):
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. This disease. Yeah,
I think I know for sure some countries have released
(43:54):
exactly what you're describing your friends, describing low level prisoners.
I think some I want to say that's 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 like
Harvey Weinstein managed to get special treatment in prison, right
(44:16):
because of the COVID nineteen concerns. Did you guys hear
about that? I mean, like he wasn't already gonna get
some special treatment. But it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah,
because he's so old and frail and like, oh, poor Harvey,
you know, oh my gosh. Yeah. How do judges feel,
you know, when they see people like that walking in
suddenly on a walker? I don't want to sound cold, No,
(44:37):
it reminds me of the ambulance chasers who put a
neck brace on their clients, you know, to get some
good will points from the jury or whatever. It's such
an old con that you'd think judges would just roll
their eyes at it immediately, you know. God, yeah, but
but yes, you're you're absolutely right, your friends absolutely right.
The um the situation with the pandemic and prisons, it's
(44:59):
it's it's a powder kick it's waiting to explode if
it hasn't exploded already. H And there are riots happening
over it here in the US in prisons. So we
talked about this, the benefits to the US government for
this practice. What they saw is the benefits they thought,
you know, just like we were talking about earlier. The
(45:19):
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
encounter would experience. It didn't account for how disconnected and
alienated they would feel from their communities. It also clearly
(45:39):
it irreparably weakened the family structure, you know what I mean? Like,
imagine your imagine you're like an elder kid in your family. Uh,
and you get kidnapped. Uh, And you're there for a
few years, 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.
(46:00):
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 this is damaging. Yeah, and not
to mention the can you imagine how powerless and just
emasculated you must feel, as like, you know, the head
of the household. Um. I say emasculated because obviously the
(46:21):
head of the household you know, in these days would
have been considered the mail. Uh. But you know, the
the ability to not be able to protect your children.
You 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
(46:43):
go along with these communities. I mean, it really is
a precedent that started further back than even this obviously,
but this is sure is a biggie, you know, I
can't imagine. And now we want to answer the question
that we we alluded to earlier in the episode. When
did this grim practice end? We haven't really talked about it,
(47:04):
and that's because it wasn't until the late nineteen seventies
that Congress finally outlawed the forced removal of Native children
from their families nineteen seventy. Some of our fellow listeners
are alive when that happened, the late nineteen seventies. It's insane.
(47:25):
That's just a few years before some of us were born.
History is not over and and and now even now,
like it's understandable that historians are still working to gauge
the full extent of the damage wrought by these programs,
and they're still discovering bodies of children. Yeah, in August
(47:45):
seven seen the United States Army, the same group that
you know helped begin these schools. They exhume the or
began exhuming the graves of the bodies of three children
who were NATed from the northern Arapaho tribe. These three
children died at that Carlisle, Indian Industrial School in the
(48:07):
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. 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
(48:28):
then if one day someone said you're not null anymore,
you're something else that I say you are. It's it's
it's a powerful, uh psychological tool to remove somebody's name.
And and really like it's the same as giving someone
a number, you know, in a prison system or whatever.
You are making them your um slave essentially, or at
(48:50):
least at the very least, you are making them another
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 John. Uh. It's
it's really to do this with children as there's the
thing that really it's it's just unconscionable. Let me see, yeah,
let's see. Definitely with jewelry. I think it's disgusting to
(49:11):
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 too, you know, if they have a name that
has a couple of common derivations, even it's just a
small thing, and want to I want to ask them
what what do you want to be called? Because sometimes
(49:32):
people are so beaten down that they feel like they
don't have a right to to have the name they want,
which everybody does, you know what I mean? And yes,
does it always work out for me? No. I 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
(49:53):
snake Bite, if you're listening, I hope you're having a
great day. Um, we see you, snake bite. Yeah, the
we go we see you, uh, 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. Will understand more
(50:14):
about the extent of the consequences and the fallout from
this practice, but we'll probably never know the full extent,
the full human extent of it um And we want
to know what 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
(50:35):
not in the United States, Oh, have you experienced things
like this? Or do you know if things like this
in your country or your regions past. If you are
listening and you are in the US and you have
personal experience with this, what what steps do you feel
that the government has taken to address this and do
(50:57):
you feel those steps are adequate? If not, what should
be done? We want to hear from you. 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 there at the White Earth Nation
in Minnesota, at the reservation there. One of the strategies
(51:20):
they're taking is to use education to bring the children
of very young ages at least introduced them and bring
them back into the culture of their ancestors just a
little bit or as much as they can. So UH
doing a lot of the old traditions, speaking the language
and learning the language when in school, and you know,
(51:44):
for for them, it seems to be having a very
positive effect on this new generation who will eventually be
the leaders um whose parents maybe have had to deal
with the immediate um the immediate fallout to these schools
into the elimination of culture and tradition. So I would
(52:07):
just say I think there that is one way forward,
at least for UH, some of the Native American populations
within the US. Well said man, and thanks for UH
ending us on a positive note today, as we said,
or as positive as one could be in this situation,
as you said, Uh. We want to hear from you.
We hope this episode finds you well. Regardless of where
(52:31):
you live and regardless of which room you find yourself
stuck intoday, let's know your thoughts 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. Yeah, if you
want to find me, I am exclusively on Instagram at
(52:52):
how now Noel Brown. Um. As the cabin fever is
setting in, I'm finding more random things to post. Made
some tight eyed t shirt with my daughter the other
day and that was a delight um. And then we
also made some homemade chapstick. Because the madness has truly
taken hold. My friends. You can find me, Matt Frederick
(53:12):
Underscore iHeart something to that effect. Good luck to you
if you can find it. You've won. Where they win, Matt,
what do they win? 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.
You win a sense of accomplishment. That's right. Uh. You
(53:33):
can also find me on Instagram. I'm at ben Bowling. Uh.
You can find me on Twitter at ben Bowling hs
w um. 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 have a
(53:54):
phone number, Yes it is one eight three three st
d w y t e K. 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
(54:14):
you've said. Uh, we're pretty excited. We're gonna be diving
into it pretty soon. And if you don't want to
do any of that stuff, and you just wanna, 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 really 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. We are
(54:36):
conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(54:58):
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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production of I Heart Radio, Welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Matt, my name is Nol. They called
me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Paul Mission controlled decade. Most importantly, you are you, 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.
(00:48):
Today 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, uh aproached me on Instagram and
I believe also called on the phone. Numbers that correct, Matt. Yes,
this person left a message with this very similar message
(01:10):
that she left to you on Instagram. And I guess
we'll just let's call this person blows a mercy for now.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and uh we uh blows of mercy.
I say, you guys screenshots so we can all be
looped in before we were on air. Uh raise a
point that I think a lot of us in the
(01:31):
audience have heard about recently, and it's it's a disturbing one.
It's worth a p s A. Uh, we'll just we'll
read this if that's all right. I think you guys
have a copy of it too. Uh. Blows of Mercy
says the xenophobia happening during this outbreak is really affecting
my quality of life. I haven't been back to China
(01:52):
since two thousand six. Not that anyone random would know,
but it hurts to still be yelled at. Could you
guys maybe just remind Pete all that Asians are 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
(02:13):
and died, and I understand the outrage. It just sucks
that it's been blamed on an entire continent. Thanks again. Uh,
And you know, have you have you guys been seeing
some of the reports in the news about that here
in the States. Yeah, just like the kind of alarming
uptick in uh racially motivated attacks and verbal abuse at
the very least, and definitely seeing some people that are
(02:35):
actually getting accosted physically. Yeah, and this person actually, uh
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 the way you look just
because of the way you look, and being subject to
(02:58):
this kind of discrimination. Um. And then adding and compounding
to that wearing a mask the way you know, we
were told to wear a mask in the way that
it's been recommended for us to do, so it just
kind of adds to that. Um. Yeah, It's definitely something
we should be thinking about and just make sure we're
not a part of the problem. Yeah. And a lot
(03:21):
of our fellow listeners and fellow conspiracy realists here, uh
aren't aren't going to have that kind of laps 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 in Southeast United States
(03:44):
because of their anti LGBT legislation and the enormous amounts
of money that they would donate every year. People started
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 been
(04:06):
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.
Uh So, so I think that it's it's easy. It's
(04:27):
a it's a design 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 in 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
(04:48):
of the woods, uh let it. Let us know because
we can guarantee you If there is some sort of
mastermind behind COVID nineteen, it's not the person that walked
into Target in front of you, like you have our
word on that, well said Ben, So thank you for
writing to us and just making that point and calling
and leaving that message and for speaking with us. So, um,
(05:12):
just let's keep that in mind as we keep going
throughout this episode and as we keep living our lives
right because we are aren't we we are living our lives.
Here we are again, uh, you know, hopefully one of
your favorite conspiracy shows, mid Pandemic. Uh, we hope you're well.
And Matt Noel, I hope, I hope you guys are
doing well. Um, we're today we're looking at another crisis.
(05:36):
It's a deeply disturbing and sadly somewhat obscure practice that
continues to affect the 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
(05:56):
purpose of teaching them to forget where they came from
and what their identity was. 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. So I think we all pretty much
can accept the notion that European expansion really changed the
(06:18):
world and made the world feel like sort of a
smaller place. I guess. While Canada, UH, the United States,
and Australia are today considered part of the Anglo sphere,
ancient cultures existed in the American and Australian contents for
millennia before the arrival of any of these interlopers UH,
(06:39):
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. Yeah, and and this might sound like
something from a dusty history book in some neglected corner
of your local library, But history is alive, right, History
(07:01):
is alive, and it's reactive. And William Faulkner was right
when he said the past is not past. The consequences
of this expansion carry on to the modern day and
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,
(07:26):
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, and it's it's dire.
It's improving now, but it's it's dire. Native Americans are
one of the most economically impoverished populations within the United States.
(07:46):
And well, let's just look at the most recent year
available when we're talking about income here, as of twenty fifteen,
the median household income for a household that is identifying
as Native amer Rican it was thirty seven thousand, two
hundred and twenty seven. So that's median yearly household income.
(08:08):
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. UM. There's another thing here
that where you know, it's changing as the day goes,
especially as we're dealing with this new crisis. But Native
Americans at least have the highest unemployment rate and it's
(08:31):
nine point nine in that's the highest of any racial
or ethnic group or identifying ethnic group within the United States.
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
(08:52):
disparity has some pretty profound consequences for the health and
well being of people in the Native American population. Uh,
this population also has a higher proportion of people who
are living in poverty. Twenty eight point three per cent
of people identify as Native Americans live in poverty, and that,
(09:14):
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. 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 that I watched
(09:34):
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 called the White Earth Nation, and
it's it's a reserve. It's a reservation there. And one
of the main voices that you listen to in this
(09:56):
is Irma j. Wisener or vision or I don't don't
know how to pronounce it correctly. She's a former White
Earth Nation sharewoman, and she's got a pretty powerful quote
here talking about this subject. During the Great depression. When
unemployment was there was an outrage in this country, and
yet we have a great depression every day, year in
(10:18):
and year out. Education is our ticket out of poverty.
Here 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. Uh. And, like you said,
and that was from irma j visitor, former White Earth
Nation chairwoman, And I think it's a powerful quote. Specifically
(10:39):
at the end they're talking about how education is the
way out and that is going to play in heavily
to this episode. Yeah, that's a stupid and uh. And
and this this documentary is is worth your time? Do
you check it out? Actually, there are a lot of
like great examinations of this in academia and you know,
easily available on YouTuber online. But it doesn't seem it
(11:02):
still doesn't seem to get the attention that it needs
to get. So remember that we're talking about education and
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
(11:24):
federal healthcare services. And this is because of something called
the Snyder Act in one and the 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
(11:45):
one would think if we just knew that that there
would be maybe better health in general in this population
because of the guaranteed right to federal healthcare, which, as
many people know, especially recently, most Americans don't have. So
the problem is this is not a race. The stark
(12:07):
disparities in health. Native American populations, including Natives of Alaska
today have a life expectancy that's about five point five
years less than all of the other populations of the
U S. However you want to slice them, that's seventy
three years to seventy eight point five years respectively. Another
(12:28):
thing to note here, um is that American Indians and
Alaska Natives, so indigenous people's, continue to die at higher
rates than any other Americans in a lot of categories.
And within this you're gonna find chronic liver disease, cirrhosis, diabetes, UM,
(12:49):
unintentional injuries, assaults, homicides, intentional self harm and suicide, and
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. Yeah,
I mean, it's the same kind of things we see
(13:10):
in a lot of impoverished parts of the country where uh,
like you know, things like um 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
are looking for an escape, and these things can take
(13:32):
hold and further ravage those communities. And we have another
set of findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual
Violence Survey that showed UM, relative to white women, Native
American women are one point two times more likely to
have experienced violence in their lifetime, and that relative to
white men, Native American men are one point three times
(13:53):
more likely to have experienced violence in their lifetimes. Um.
Really kind of staggering, despaired you there, and when you
know we're pulling stats that are relatively recent, by which
they're like, you know, uh, maybe three, two, ten years
old now at this point for some of these things.
(14:14):
But we should note that the U S Census, if
it is able to be completed during the pandemic, may
have updated statistics to reveal. And there are there are
tons of incredibly intelligent researchers and analysts who are working
on this data continually, so we always love to hear
(14:35):
the updates. All of this plays in so income health.
All of this plays in uh in concert with education.
The US educational system, that should not be a spoiler
for anyone, has historically been a source of tremendous discrimination
and in a lot of cases trauma for the Native
population North American Hawaii, and even today, multiple reports will
(15:00):
say that educational progress for Native Americans still lags behind
that of other demographics. There was a report that came
out from the in two thousand twelve from the National
Center for Education Statistics that said that Native American populations
have the highest high school dropout rate in the country,
and that was at fourteen point six percent. But while
(15:22):
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 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,
(15:43):
a lot of people in government today don't really want
you to pay too much attention to what are we
talking about. We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets create. So in the late nineteenth century,
the United States government forcibly removed Native American children from
(16:07):
their homes UH, shipping them off to different boarding schools
in the hopes of assimilating them to UH the United
States as culture UM. This was only one front in
this culture war, which had begun long long before that. UM.
The precedents were UH the idea of the forced assimilation
(16:27):
that functioned in concert with force removal from Native land. UM.
It's the same way that the Minnesota Historical Society puts
it uh quote. As white population grew in the United
States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in
the late eight hundreds, there was an increasing pressure on
the recently removed groups to give up some of their
new land. Yeah this this is uh like the way
(16:50):
they put this here, because what they're saying is they
the government's had already forced these native populations to move away,
right if they're located on the eatern seaboard, like think
of the Trail of Tears. Uh. And then the in
the late eighteen hundreds, they said, well, we've got more
uh European descended people who want to branch out in
(17:11):
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 in what they called the Indian Removal Act.
And then just a few decades later, Uncle Sam had
(17:32):
a moment. You know, I like to when I think
of supervillains like this, I like to think of them
as dark lightbulb moments. Uh. They had a dark lightbulb
moment and they said, you know what, if we were
running out of places to put these people, were running
out of places to to kick them too, Uh, we
have to figure out something else. And then another dark
(17:55):
lightbulb 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 you know, the same
kind of move the board pools in Star Trek. Why
don't we forcibly assimilate them? This is really rough, This
(18:16):
is really rough. I want to read another quote from
from that documentary I mentioned earlier, The Little Dream Catchers. Um.
This is another quote from Irma jave Wisner, and she says, quote, Historically,
the purpose of education for us as tribal people has
(18:37):
been assimilation. 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 a hundred thousand in
(18:58):
the boarding schools, 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. Yeah,
and the the idea of um trauma passed down through
(19:21):
generations has always been really fascinating to me, Uh, there's
there's there's some kind of study that indicates that it
can actually be passed down almost through genes, you know,
through epigenetics, and and that's fascinating to me on a
whole another level. But of course it's going to happen
is experientially, especially in this kind of situation. Then you
(19:41):
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. Um,
the dark lightbulb moment like that they had there to
assimilate them, but the way they chose to go about
(20:01):
it here is just so heinous. So how how did
this situation begin? How did we get from what we
what we started to establish with pushing people out to
UM to what they're exploring in that quote, it's it
really kicks into gearin in UM in the eighteen hundreds,
(20:24):
in the late eighteen hundreds and eighteen eighty five, there's
a guy named Hiram Price means, 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
(20:47):
warfare against Native American tribes. And this was, you know,
a very long war. It started in the seventeenth century
and it was it was exacerbated and reached a bloody
height through about the nineteenth century. And this had a terrible,
terrible effect on the Native populations. We're talking about a
(21:08):
huge group of of unique, distinct cultures that numbered in
the millions and millions of people, and now the population
and 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.
(21:30):
So what do you do when you 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
sounding crass, wu tang is for the kids. Our species
(21:51):
does this to each other because it has such a
powerful effect even when it's not even when the effects
are not what the 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
(22:12):
relatively offensive. Quote, it's the one that lives on an infamy.
They said, kill the Indian in him and we will
save the man Yanks. Spooky stuff, terrifying. So how did
they go about attempting to kill the Indian metaphorically? Here?
(22:32):
They started places like the Carlisle Indian School. It's 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 Pratt,
(22:53):
who is at the time when he's founding it a
captain in the army. This is the this play to
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 m m. Yeah. We should
(23:16):
note too that, uh 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
they said they thought they were saving people, they thought
(23:38):
they were working toward a greater good, and we know
how that usually turns out. Carlyle said that he said
something that sounds respectable at first. He says, look, Native
Americans are equal to European Americans. And he says, uh,
you know, we're gonna The point of Carlisle School is
to immerse these chill dren and again, these are children
(24:01):
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 uh, their own lands, their
own communities, and they'll become agents of assimilation themselves, which
(24:22):
is a particularly borg like 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 um if if
if anyone out there wants an extra deep dive into
some of this stuff. From our our sister podcast, Stuff
You Miss in History Class has a great episode about
the history of Indian schools just as as a concept,
(24:44):
and UM recommend that as a little bit you know,
more of a if you want to take this information
a little further. So, 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 school sponsored
by religious denominations. Over time, uh, the school would become
(25:07):
home to over ten thousand Native American children from one
hundred and forty different tribes. And it was by no
means the only one of its kind. Missionaries have been
doing something similar for centuries to your point, been earlier
across the world under that guise of of saving people,
saving the you know, converting the heathens or whatever, um,
(25:27):
the unwashed masses or whatever. And this whole idea of
we're doing you as solid you should appreciate this the
battle for hearts and minds really yeah, and speed deep dives.
There's there's a book on this, would like to recommend
h came out back in oh six. It's called Children
Left Behind the Dark Legacy of Indian mission Boarding Schools
(25:48):
by Tim Gago so g I A g O so
Do check that out. But do do be warned that
these are not These are not pleasant afternoon podcast or books.
You know. Uh, you will probably not be in a
good mood after you read them, and you shouldn't be.
And I appreciate your point. No about the scale of this,
(26:11):
of this practice, right, Uh, this battle for you know,
a culture has sometimes been described as the soul of
a people, so in a in a way, in a
metaphorical way, this is a battle for the souls of
these communities. We want to pause for word from our sponsor,
(26:32):
and then we're going to return and give you a
sense of the scale here in a sense of the
day to day experience of these children. And we're back.
So by n uh, this this is still continuing. It
(26:55):
was a spoiler. Heads up, we'll tell you what the ends.
By this went on for much longer than a lot
of people would think. Three hundred seven boarding schools and
day schools across the country. They educated more than twenty
six thousand native students of all types of ages, from
all types of communities and tribes. The difference quickly between
(27:16):
a day school and boarding school is that a day
school is what a lot of people grew up with right,
You go to school maybe thirty eight thirty or whatever.
You get out sometime in the afternoon, you go home, rents,
and repeat Monday through Friday. A boarding school is a
little more intense because you live on the campus. You
can't really go anywhere, uh and your parents have uh
(27:40):
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 these schools, these institutions and their supporters actually do.
How did they get the kids? How about that? Let's
start with that. How okay, Well, the first thing is
(28:02):
that the school itself wasn't given 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. Um. And you know, there were certainly some
parents out there, you know, who knows how many numbers,
there's no way to tell, but there were some parents
(28:22):
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
(28:42):
who were running them. They saw it as not schools
at all. They saw it as a machine, a part
of you know, um, 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. Um.
And we get we get this stuff from sapiens dot org.
(29:04):
That's s A p i e n s dot org. Yeah,
it's a really great article called Native American Children's Historic
Forced Assimilation by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Callwell h
from this year, actually from the fifth of March. And
it's not to say that parents just allowed their children
to be taken all the time. You know, there there
(29:26):
was absolutely resistance. Um. As you could imagine if you
you know, have a child, um or have you know,
had been charged with the care of a youngster. Uh,
to have that child ripped away from you and taken
forcibly would not sit well with most parents or guardians.
But uh, folks who you know resisted were punished quite
(29:48):
severely in the most cruel ways imaginable. Um, 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 that's the equivalent of
of having a gun pointed at you. Uh, And that
(30:10):
actually happened too. Oftentimes, fathers who fought back were sent
to prison, and in some very extreme cases but not
unheard of, Uh, there would be law enforcement officials who
would literally kidnap these children while holding a gun on
on the parents. So you don't have to be a
lawyer to know the first things first, what does that mean?
(30:32):
It means they were kidnapping children full stop. Means in
some cases they were forcibly kidnapping children. And now, how
do how do we define their mission what they do
with these kids? Well, it's similar to us some of
those quotes we have mentioned earlier. You could define it
in two words, one to civilize and two to christianize.
What I find interesting about that is there's not really
(30:52):
at this time of difference, you know what I mean,
Even the secular schools like the ones that were states
supported and built in renovated military barracks. Even those uh
were still teaching children uh some some version of Christianity, right,
and you know, they can be defined as much by
what they did not allow children to do as what
(31:15):
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 uh
Norman or Janine or something like that, then you would
be punished if you were like, no, my name is
you know, something different and uh. Then the kids also
(31:37):
had to get their hair cut, which is weirdly specific
uh to what was considered a European American style haircut. Um.
They were of course forbidden from speaking their native language. Uh.
There are a lot of similarities with this and the
weager re education camps that are that are currently still
(31:59):
an operation in western China. Think about what that means.
Those three, those three things that bendes 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 mother's or your grandparents. UM, the
(32:22):
language that is being spoken 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, if I'm not mistaken. UM.
(32:44):
There's a really fantastic series on HBO is called Burying
My Heart at Wounded Knee that was based on a
book of the same name, and it was about, um,
just the conflict between you know, it was with sitting
bowl and all of that, and I'm almost positive there
that was sort of the last vestiges of truly tribal
you know, Indian culture, UM in the West, kind of
(33:07):
living out their lives as normal before all of this,
you know, like reservations and stuff kicked. I mean, they
were still reserving. 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
(33:28):
the you know, his people who were living you know,
as they had always lived for so many generations and
it became a very complicated thing for that character to
kind of struggle with, uh, 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 and all that, But then he sees that he's
(33:48):
a little different and is having a hard time reconciling
all of that. I wanted to, if possible, bring in
another quote here before we get into some of the
even uh, the more physical dangers that the children had
to face in these places. If that's okay. Um, It's
(34:09):
just another quick quote from that documentary. And this quote
comes from barb uh favor F A b r E.
She's the director of the White Earth Child Care Center
there and on the reservation, and her quote is, many
children were ripped from their families, loaded onto trucks and
(34:29):
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. And I think that really is a
a heavy concept to think about here, But just being
(34:50):
taken away from your family like that, having your identity
completely removed. Um. And then going back home at some
point and not really recognizing yourself or your immediate family
because of the way you've been changed. Mm hmmm. 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
(35:10):
a feature, right, this was this was purposeful and at
this point, um, we we don't want to be too
incredibly graphic, but um, you know, as you might expect,
there was a wealth of abuse that occurred here as
(35:31):
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. Um. And
then of course emotional abuse. How could it not be
an emotionally abusive situation for a kid to be forced
(35:53):
to do these things? And many of those documented cases
come from the church run institution, But that, by no
means is meant to imply that the quote unquote secular
institutions were any better. One. One interesting thing the Bears
thinking about is the due to the living conditions, these
(36:13):
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 Marionette Pember is the daughter of a woman who
was forced to live at one of these boarding schools,
(36:35):
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 of pervasive physical and sexual
(36:56):
abuse at the school. Uh, Food and access to medical
are were sometimes denied as punishment. They were scarce to
begin with, and because of that, whether through violence or neglect,
many children died and sometimes their parents, especially at the
boarding schools, only learned that their child had died after
the kid had been buried in a school cemetery, some
(37:19):
of which some of those graves are on unmarked I
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. Yeah, and that can
be a real deal breaker, you know, culturally speaking, I
mean that, you know, it's they would really truly believe
(37:42):
that that individual's soul did not end up where it
needed to go in in the afterlife that 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,
but it is truly a absolute bastization of people's most
sacredly held beliefs. And and uh, it's just I can't
(38:05):
wrap my head around it. It's just a total myopic
worldview that just bugs me in general. And 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 just really is one of my biggest
pet peeves. And of all of this kind of stuff. Yeah,
well said this, this practice again is continuing in the
(38:29):
nineteen hundreds so into the twentieth century. As a matter
of fact, it was continuing less than a century ago. Uh.
In this thing comes out called the Merriam Report. This
is the first semi comprehensive study of conditions for Native
people since and earlier I think six volume report that
(38:50):
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, as they said, infectious disease is widespread,
not just because of overcrowding, but because these kids are malnourished.
(39:10):
There aren't good sanitary practices in place that you know,
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 learning,
being forced to learn scripture and stuff. Death rates at
(39:32):
this time in these schools, according to this report, were
six and a half times higher than for any other
group in the United States. And this this is where
we get into maybe some conspiratorial territory, because you have
to wonder how much of this was purposeful, how much
(39:52):
of this was any of this like designed to slowly
kill actual people instead of just their culture. Be cause
so many contemporaneous accounts show people say it's 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
(40:14):
seems like such an evil plan, doesn't it. It doesn't
seem like a progressive plan. Maybe that's because we're in
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 it's actually, um, it's weird.
It reminds me a little bit of the Their argument
(40:37):
is that 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. Yeah, I would definitely
say money had a lot to do with it, just
and you really only have to think about the fact
(40:58):
that the Model's school was based in the 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 with ammunition and in
men who some of them will die, or the on
(41:21):
the other side, build a school that then stays there
forever and can continually bring the children through at least
forever in the minds of the people who are starting
the program. Well, well, let's call it what it is too.
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, and they're
(41:43):
not forcing them to labor on behalf of the military,
but they're forcing them to become a thing that then
can be used later by the military. And it's even
more pernicious because it's happening without these children's consent um
of of absolutely without the consent of their their their parents,
and then they're turning them into a pawn and and
(42:04):
there you know, they're great game. Yeah, yeah, it's it's
absolutely true. This, this idea, this incredibly cold, almost reptilian
concept of the bottom line reminds me of of another
argument that we can make about the current prison system
of the United States. Did you know you did? I
(42:25):
don't know if people check. I know, I know that
we talked about this maybe years ago. But it is
so much cheaper to send a kid to college than
it is to sent into prison. Uh yeah, And the
benefits to society are substantial and measurable. Well, it depends
on how you want your society to look, because that
(42:47):
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 I think
you're drawing a line of comparison there with with prison
populations and perhaps, let's say non white people who are
(43:10):
in prison, anyone who finds themselves to be brown or black.
We've talked about this, as you said, been and it
feels very similar to this. I'm feeling a lot of
connections here to the modern day Nixon and Reagan stuff
that we've talked about. And by the way, I don't
know who it was the set at, but somebody a
(43:31):
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. This disease. Yeah,
I think I know for sure some countries have released
(43:54):
exactly what you're describing your friends, describing low level prisoners.
I think some I want to say that's 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 like
Harvey Weinstein managed to get special treatment in prison, right
(44:16):
because of the COVID nineteen concerns. Did you guys hear
about that? I mean, like he wasn't already gonna get
some special treatment. But it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, yeah,
because he's so old and frail and like, oh, poor Harvey,
you know, oh my gosh. Yeah. How do judges feel,
you know, when they see people like that walking in
suddenly on a walker? I don't want to sound cold, No,
(44:37):
it reminds me of the ambulance chasers who put a
neck brace on their clients, you know, to get some
good will points from the jury or whatever. It's such
an old con that you'd think judges would just roll
their eyes at it immediately, you know. God, yeah, but
but yes, you're you're absolutely right, your friends absolutely right.
The um the situation with the pandemic and prisons, it's
(44:59):
it's it's a powder kick it's waiting to explode if
it hasn't exploded already. H And there are riots happening
over it here in the US in prisons. So we
talked about this, the benefits to the US government for
this practice. What they saw is the benefits they thought,
you know, just like we were talking about earlier. The
(45:19):
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
encounter would experience. It didn't account for how disconnected and
alienated they would feel from their communities. It also clearly
(45:39):
it irreparably weakened the family structure, you know what I mean? Like,
imagine your imagine you're like an elder kid in your family. Uh,
and you get kidnapped. Uh, And you're there for a
few years, 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.
(46:00):
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 this is damaging. Yeah, and not
to mention the can you imagine how powerless and just
emasculated you must feel, as like, you know, the head
of the household. Um. I say emasculated because obviously the
(46:21):
head of the household you know, in these days would
have been considered the mail. Uh. But you know, the
the ability to not be able to protect your children.
You 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
(46:43):
go along with these communities. I mean, it really is
a precedent that started further back than even this obviously,
but this is sure is a biggie, you know, I
can't imagine. And now we want to answer the question
that we we alluded to earlier in the episode. When
did this grim practice end? We haven't really talked about it,
(47:04):
and that's because it wasn't until the late nineteen seventies
that Congress finally outlawed the forced removal of Native children
from their families nineteen seventy. Some of our fellow listeners
are alive when that happened, the late nineteen seventies. It's insane.
(47:25):
That's just a few years before some of us were born.
History is not over and and and now even now,
like it's understandable that historians are still working to gauge
the full extent of the damage wrought by these programs,
and they're still discovering bodies of children. Yeah, in August
(47:45):
seven seen the United States Army, the same group that
you know helped begin these schools. They exhume the or
began exhuming the graves of the bodies of three children
who were NATed from the northern Arapaho tribe. These three
children died at that Carlisle, Indian Industrial School in the
(48:07):
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. 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
(48:28):
then if one day someone said you're not null anymore,
you're something else that I say you are. It's it's
it's a powerful, uh psychological tool to remove somebody's name.
And and really like it's the same as giving someone
a number, you know, in a prison system or whatever.
You are making them your um slave essentially, or at
(48:50):
least at the very least, you are making them another
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 John. Uh. It's
it's really to do this with children as there's the
thing that really it's it's just unconscionable. Let me see, yeah,
let's see. Definitely with jewelry. I think it's disgusting to
(49:11):
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 too, you know, if they have a name that
has a couple of common derivations, even it's just a
small thing, and want to I want to ask them
what what do you want to be called? Because sometimes
(49:32):
people are so beaten down that they feel like they
don't have a right to to have the name they want,
which everybody does, you know what I mean? And yes,
does it always work out for me? No. I 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
(49:53):
snake Bite, if you're listening, I hope you're having a
great day. Um, we see you, snake bite. Yeah, the
we go we see you, uh, 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. Will understand more
(50:14):
about the extent of the consequences and the fallout from
this practice, but we'll probably never know the full extent,
the full human extent of it um And we want
to know what 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
(50:35):
not in the United States, Oh, have you experienced things
like this? Or do you know if things like this
in your country or your regions past. If you are
listening and you are in the US and you have
personal experience with this, what what steps do you feel
that the government has taken to address this and do
(50:57):
you feel those steps are adequate? If not, what should
be done? We want to hear from you. 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 there at the White Earth Nation
in Minnesota, at the reservation there. One of the strategies
(51:20):
they're taking is to use education to bring the children
of very young ages at least introduced them and bring
them back into the culture of their ancestors just a
little bit or as much as they can. So UH
doing a lot of the old traditions, speaking the language
and learning the language when in school, and you know,
(51:44):
for for them, it seems to be having a very
positive effect on this new generation who will eventually be
the leaders um whose parents maybe have had to deal
with the immediate um the immediate fallout to these schools
into the elimination of culture and tradition. So I would
(52:07):
just say I think there that is one way forward,
at least for UH, some of the Native American populations
within the US. Well said man, and thanks for UH
ending us on a positive note today, as we said,
or as positive as one could be in this situation,
as you said, Uh. We want to hear from you.
We hope this episode finds you well. Regardless of where
(52:31):
you live and regardless of which room you find yourself
stuck intoday, let's know your thoughts 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. Yeah, if you
want to find me, I am exclusively on Instagram at
(52:52):
how now Noel Brown. Um. As the cabin fever is
setting in, I'm finding more random things to post. Made
some tight eyed t shirt with my daughter the other
day and that was a delight um. And then we
also made some homemade chapstick. Because the madness has truly
taken hold. My friends. You can find me, Matt Frederick
(53:12):
Underscore iHeart something to that effect. Good luck to you
if you can find it. You've won. Where they win, Matt,
what do they win? 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.
You win a sense of accomplishment. That's right. Uh. You
(53:33):
can also find me on Instagram. I'm at ben Bowling. Uh.
You can find me on Twitter at ben Bowling hs
w um. 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 have a
(53:54):
phone number, Yes it is one eight three three st
d w y t e K. 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
(54:14):
you've said. Uh, we're pretty excited. We're gonna be diving
into it pretty soon. And if you don't want to
do any of that stuff, and you just wanna, 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 really 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. We are
(54:36):
conspiracy at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff they don't want
(54:58):
you to know is a production of I heart Radio.
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Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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