Silencing the Native Tongue

In the late 1800s, federally-run Indian boarding schools emerged as a key element in the widespread effort to “civilize” this segment of the American population. Native American children across the country were abruptly separated from their families and thrust into an unfamiliar environment. Students received haircuts, their traditional garments replaced with Euro-American uniforms. Conversing in their native languages was strictly forbidden.

The official plan — full assimilation and eradication of Indian culture. The unofficial slogan — kill the Indian, save the man.

“Boarding schools greatly impacted Native people’s lives all over the country,” says Laura Tohe, an associate professor in department of English at ASU. “There was a lot of disruption in family life, and one of the biggest impacts was probably the loss of our native languages. It was literally beaten out of us at these schools. We were prohibited from, and punished for, speaking our own language.”

The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ first school, Carlisle Indian School, was established in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Tohe’s great-great grandfather, Hoskie Thompson, was one of the first Navajo students to attend. Tohe herself later spent four years at an Indian school in Albuquerque, before moving on to a mainstream public school.

She likens the experience to having served a prison sentence in No Parole Today, a collection of poetry and prose memoir about attending Indian schools as a child in the 1950s. Though the boarding school phenomenon has had a deep and lasting impact on Native people’s education and culture, Tohe says her book is one of the few published that tell the stories of day-to-day life there.

Tohe wrote the majority of the manuscript as a graduate student at the University of Nebraska. It eventually became the basis for her creative dissertation.

“In college, I just started out writing poems about my experiences at boarding school as a creative writing exercise,” she explains. “But then I started thinking more about what those schools have meant not only to myself, but to my family and to other Indian people. And I thought maybe I could write something that speaks for not just my experience, but for other Native people’s experiences.”

No Parole Today tells of the boarding school experience through the eyes and voice of a young girl, though it is sprinkled with a bit of the wisdom that has come to Tohe in years of reflection as an adult. Her efforts in the book earned Tohe “Writer of the Year” honors from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers in 1999.

While this particular work is based on her personal experiences, Tohe’s academic research and writings further explore the impact of boarding schools and colonialism on Native American culture, literature, and oral storytelling traditions.—Jessica McCann