Native American Plights: The Struggle Against Inequality and Racism

By Mark C. Royce

This book is a compelling look at the often-ignored history of discrimination against Native Americans that educates, explains, and encourages readers to examine their own biases to make the world a better place for people who belong to minority groups.

 

If you are a member of a minority racial group, this book will guide you on how to cope with the constant microaggressions you face as you navigate through your life. Although rarely talked about, Native American groups form a large part of American history. This book will delve into the contributions of Native Americans, through modern day America, and why they deserve much more credit than they are afforded.

Every reader should be able to attain the following at the completion of this book:

 

• Confidently talk about the history of discrimination against Native Americans with their peers. The goal is to educate readers about the issues Native Americans face in both the past and the present.
• Know the modern forms of racism faced by Native American people, and how they can work on overcoming the social injustices they face today. Readers should recognize that the inequality experienced by Indigenous peoples is historical, systematic, and damaging. Readers will be equipped with tools to help combat discrimination against Native Americans, and foster reconciliation and healing in society.
• Develop a sense of self-awareness and understanding of the roots of Native American culture. Our roots are our source of identity. Through learning about our roots, we can confidently cement our positions in society.

The aim of the book is to challenge readers to know their role in society, whether they are activists against racism, or remain silent in situations that require them to speak out. The lessons learned from this book will teach them to become more responsible citizens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark C. Royce
• Release date: Aug 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201663629

Book preview

Prologue

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heyenne woke up that morning, just in time to catch her school bus to Arizona District School. Four months prior, she had been enrolled as a ninth-grade student, after being subjected to several aptitude tests to determine her academic standing, since she had moved from a reservation school into a public school. Her mother, Olivia Brown Navajo, had walked her to school that morning, and Cheyenne could notice that she was much more resigned to the idea of public school. Cheyenne had been struggling to adjust from her reservation school curriculum, which was basically cleaning, knitting, a few English language classes, catechist class, and basic arithmetic. She loved the facilities at her new school, although she could not shake off the fact that the curriculum was heavily daunting. Today, she had arithmetic with Miss Tracey, which always made her anxious, because her brain froze in anticipation of being beaten if she got her sums wrong.

Her memories always inadvertently led her to a particular time in her life when her father, Ahiga Tse Navajo, and her mother were forced to send her to a boarding school led by the white colonists. She was only eight years old when she was allocated to Saint Jude Catholic boarding school, which was found in a reservation known as Hopi. Cheyenne remembered being fluent in her home language, Navajo, and she knew when to say T'aa shoodi before asking for anything, and Tʼáá íiyisíí ahéhee after being offered anything. So she was completely confused when her parents told her that the reservation school was going to teach her how to be a disciplined girl who speaks English. As far as she was concerned, she had been greeting her parents every morning, she knew when to excuse herself, and was pretty much the best 8-year-old daughter in her village. She had also heard about school being compulsory for every Native girl as a prerequisite for being accepted into the new American society, so she knew better than to complain.

She remembered the summer of 1973, when her mother and father put her on the train that would take to her new school. Cheyenne wore her favorite cloth skirt with a length up to the ankles and a woolen shirt, which hung loosely over her shoulders. Her mom always braided her hair before she slept, and as a parting gift, her mother had spent thirty minutes making Cheyenne's hair into a beautiful bun, a tsiiyéél hairstyle. The train station was busy at that time of the year, since school term was starting, which gave Cheyenne's self-esteem a slight boost, because it reassured her that she would not be alone. Her natural instinct would have been to cry for her mom, but as soon as they reached the end of the platform, she waved goodbye to her parents, and quickly boarded the train. Any minute longer would have been a cry for help.

On the train, she found other students, some her age and some seemingly older than her. She walked straight to an empty seat and looked through the train window. Her parents had already left. She felt alone in a bus full of little girls and boys her own age. Thoughts like, Will I be able to make new friends? Will I ever return home to my tribe? raced through her mind. She did not look forward to learning about the white Catholic God, and often wondered why her own tribal gods weren't enough spirituality for her. She soon dozed off amidst the loud chatter, while the little girls were interacting with each other, unaware of what to expect at the school.

At 6 p.m., the train arrived at Saint Jude Catholic boarding school and the students were met by a very stern looking woman, who they would later find out was a nun and that they had to refer to her as sister. The woman stood at the exit of the train and commanded them to get out of the train. The children were so confused, wondering why this woman would speak to them in English, a language they had actually come to learn. Cheyenne remembers a sudden silence as the children waited for a translator. One of the older students later came to assist with orientation of the new students into the culture. Cheyenne could not believe how 'foreign' the student looked compared to the new students fresh from their tribal settlements. The senior student's hair was short, he wore khaki pants and tucked in his shirt neatly. Cheyenne had no idea what to expect.

They were immediately ushered into the girl's dormitory, where they were forced to take the mandatory first-day-at-school picture. She had been told that the teachers used this initiation picture as a tracker for the process of helping them leave their old ways behind. The next mandatory step was the hair; all children were instructed to join a queue where their heads were shaved clean. Her hair was her identity—her grandmother had told her that hair is a source of strength, and yet, here she was, losing her identity on the first day of school. Later that evening, the final blow to her initial schokc; they were told to hand over all their clothes, in exchange for a khaki dress that had an allocated student number for each of them. Within four hours of arrival, Cheyenne felt as foreign as the senior student who had stepped on the train to translate for them. Her identity was left somewhere within the nine-hour train ride from the Navajo reservation to Saint Jude Catholic, and her new christian identity as Mary.

As the hair fell from her head, she realized that she was leaving her old self behind and embarking on a completely new journey, unknown to her. Her first memory of physical assault was when a teacher caught her whispering to another student, and demanded that she should never hear her speak her traditional language at school. The punishment for speaking her language was so brutal that she mentally shut out anything that would remind her of her old life.

Cheyenne's memories of Catholic school were limited to the amount of housework she did, the number of times she got caned for speaking her native tongue, the number that was printed on her school uniform as a form of identity, and the fact that her name was changed to Mary, because Cheyenne was considered to be outdated and barbaric.

After six years of a life she never wants to be reminded of, the government finally ordered that parents had a right to remove their children from reservation schools that were not their homeland. Finally, in 1979, Cheyenne's mother requested that her daughter be sent home from school so she could attend school in the Navajo reservation. Cheyenne left Saint Jude Catholic boarding school, at the age of thirteen, as a completely different person. Her journey back to her home was one filled with anxiety and terror. She did not know whether she would find her parents alive. Because of her trauma, she could barely remember how to speak her native language. She came as an 8-year-old Navajo girl, and went home as a traumatized version of her old self with a newfound Christian God. She wore a rosary around her neck everywhere she went, because she was told that the Christian God would protect her from danger. This was ironic, because the only danger she was leaving was the terror of being beaten and subjected to corporal punishment. The train she took back home was almost empty, because half of the students who had enrolled at school with her had passed away.

When she arrived at her home, she was welcomed by her mother and paternal aunt. She felt a bit of comfort and protection when she set her eyes on her mom. Cheyenne was unaware at the time, but her father had passed away during an American-Indian war. She had not heard anything from home since she had boarded the train to school. She wished she had looked back to see her father's face just one more time, because at least she would have one last memory with him. She hugged her mother tight and greeted her shyly in English, because she could not remember her roots. The rosary around her neck reminded her of the terrible times she had at the boarding school, so she tore it off her neck. She was told that she would acquire knowledge and good manners from her boarding school, but all she had acquired was a lifetime of lack of identity. Her mother seemed foreign to her; the traditions in her society seemed archaic, and she was torn between two worlds—the new world with newly acquired English language, and the old life she could not have back, because everything had changed.

She was now a student at Arizona District School and was expected to know how to solve arithmetic problems at a ninth-grade level. For the first few months in public school, she pretended to be one of the white students, after all, isn't that what her boarding school experience had taught her? She quickly realized that she had achieved nothing from the boarding school and had relearn everything about her identity and origin from scratch. She therefore requested her teacher to enroll her in a history class that would teach her about the history of the Native American people. She wanted to know how her people had given up so much for nothing at all. To her disappointment, her school syllabus did not contain much information about her people. In fact, all they referred to Native Americans was that they were savages. She knew that there was a vast number of Native American tribes, and even though the boarding school had taken away five years of her Native experience, she would spend the rest of her life fighting for justice for people. However, first she had to let the teacher know that her name was Cheyenne, Cheyenne Kai from the Navajo Nation, not Mary from Catholic school.

Chapter 1:

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Pre-Colonized American Era

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t's hard to think of life before the colonial period, because it is associated with ancient traditions, and often deemed to be primitive. There are a lot of myths about life in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, because the majority of people are taught that the colonies were sparsely populated with little to no civilization. However, there is ongoing research about the life of the Native American people dating from 1491, before the arrival of the first Europeans. The first settlements happened in North America, and continued to spread out to South America, until all territories were fully colonized, losing their autonomy to the Europeans.

The Native Americans lived among tribes with organized political and social systems in place. They carried out large-scale farming and lived in densely populated villages, as opposed to the myths taught in schools that the land was found untouched and sparsely populated. Native American tribes were highly civilized, with a vast number of empires that had their own societal hierarchies. A few of the prominent empires