Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools.

By Ward Churchill. City Lights Publishers, 2004.

Charlie Wenjack died in 1966. He was twelve years old and running away from an Indian residential school near Kenora, Ontario, trying to get back to father and his people. There were many Charlies, too many. Generations of children were taken from their families and communities to these schools where everything familiar--from language to clothing to food to family--was forbidden, and in many cases lost to them forever. And as with Charlie, many died trying to get back home to who they were.

The story of Indian residential schools in Canada and the United States is little known, unless of course, you are a survivor or live in communities filled with descendants of survivors. Until the writing of Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, no one has written an adequate history of residential schools, with the facts and the numbers all laid out in their grim, unassailable stark truth. Because this is the one of the very few texts dealing specifically with residential schools, and because the impact of the residential schools was so enormous, this text should be mandatory reading for those who want to understand not only Native America's past but also its present.

In his introduction, Churchill writes that the purpose of this book is to augment his earlier A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1977). In that book, although he touched on boarding schools, he did not cover the historical ground he wished he had. Now he takes us through the history of residential schools and their subsequent and continuing impact in the on Native North America. "Kill the Indian's" main point is that the devastating impact of residential schools continues to reverberate today.

In the initial chapter, the author sets forth his argument that in order to adequately grasp the history of this continent, we must re-deploy the term "genocide" to describe what happened here. The United States government's policy towards Indians was a coordinated plan whose policy fit right into the myth of a "civilizing" conquest at once religious and militaristic. According to Churchill, "Churches had established Indian residential schools as part of their missionary programs long before governments of either the U.S. or Canada had set out to do so." Thus, churches were uniquely positioned to implement the official residential school policy of both governments. The collaboration between churches and governments was ideal as it offered both the indoctrination into Christianity and the simultaneous erasure of American Indian beliefs.

The schools themselves, as Churchill has painstakingly documented, were militarist in their design. The children wore uniforms, were awakened by bugles, were forced to line up and march. All aspects of life were regimented: "From the moment the terrified and bewildered youngsters arrived at the schools, designed as they were to function as total institutions, a comprehensive and carefully-calibrated assault on their cultural identity would commence." The children endured lack of adequate food, tuberculosis, forced labor, and the absence of any contact with family.

The records of these schools show that both the quality and quantity of food were abhorrent. Churchill does not spare us the details of how much was spent on each child, what they were fed, and what presumably the staff were eating. Undoubtedly, poor nutrition played a huge role in the appalling mortality rates. The disease rates were so high that in some schools as many as half of the children died within two years.

Children were "kept in the schools year-round and for as long as a decade, without either visits to their homes nor visits from their families where possible--even letters were sometimes withheld--because of the 'deleterious influences' such interactions might exert." Forbidden to speak their language even to pray or speak to one another, children were alienated from home as well as the dominant culture. Many survivors of the schools recounted how older students told them it would go much easier on them the sooner they learned English. Many, of course, lost their mother tongue never to regain their language.

Unfortunately, stolen language, inadequate food, and disease were not the worst of what these children faced. Churchill saves the record of systemic torture and sexual abuse for last. In some schools the rate of predation was 100%. Canada has taken a few steps to recognize the immensity of the long-term effects of such abuse, mostly in the form of payments to victims. The United States has done nothing. The silence from this government about the on-going fallout in Indian communities of sexual abuse at residential schools is deafening.

In his inimitable fashion, Ward Churchill again tells the truth on America. Many of us--Native, non-Native, Mixed-blood--want to believe that we know what happened to Native people in the last five centuries on this continent. Looking at the historical data in this book leaves no room for imagining. It is full of terrible truths, truths we must understand to really grasp our present political reality.