Uniform Indians: Personal Reflections on the Eastern Band Cherokee Boarding School Experience

Abstract

Uniform Indians: Personal Reflections on the Eastern Band Cherokee Boarding School Experience Sarah Margaret Sneed (bio) My sister and I grew up away from our people, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, but our bedtime stories were most often about my mother’s days as a student at the Cherokee Boarding School. The stories were retold often and furnished us a bond to our tribe that was sustained during the time our family lived out west. Our mom, born Mary Smith, told about how one day around 1920, while picking blackberries, she and her sister, Rosie, were scooped up by John Crowe, a tribal lawman and truant officer, placed into the back of a wagon with other children and taken to the Cherokee Boarding School. Her widowed mother, Lucy Ann, had not given consent, nor was she notified, that her daughters had been taken to school. Mom never mentioned her oldest sister, Annie, when she told this story. Indeed, Annie may well have been away working as a servant in a white family’s home, as part of the boarding school program known as “Outing,” in which students were placed for employment. Mom said that, once at school, she had been immediately abandoned by Rosie, who, having started school two years earlier, had fallen in easily with her classmates. One of the first meals Mom was served at school was macaroni. She had never seen the likes of this strange food, but having had some experience with intestinal parasites, thought she was being asked to eat a plate of worms. Her rejection of the food was met with a knuckle rapping by a fierce, yonega-ageya dormitory matron. Mom was five years old and couldn’t understand why Lucy Ann didn’t come to take her and Rosie home, away from this terrifying environment. An account that caused me great distress was of how Mom had been told only after the fact that her mother had come to the school to see if her daughters were there. Mom would not see her mother until later that year at a Christmas program to which families were invited. Having been raised on stories of Mom’s attendance at the Cherokee Boarding School and later at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in [End Page 49] Kansas, I was especially honored to be selected to document the boarding school experiences of our people under a project Principal Chief Michell Hicks initiated through the Kituwah Preservation Education Program of the Eastern Band. Aside from the obvious negative impacts boarding school education effected, Chief Hicks has observed that forced removal in youth from families and from the Qualla Boundary may well have fostered values deeply held among Eastern Band elders, including the closeness they feel toward others of their generation and their devotion to the Eastern Band’s lands. In 2005, Chief Hicks initiated the publication of an Elders’ Yearbook, an album of photographs of and quotations from Eastern Band senior citizens, regarding memories from their youth, including a section regarding life at boarding school. This effort was subsequently expanded to include the development of a permanent compilation of materials regarding the Eastern Band boarding school experience. Photographs and videotaped interviews compiled through this project were mounted, and received very positive acclaim at the 2008 Tribal Fair in Cherokee. Interviews conducted with elders eighty years of age and older reflected the official strategies of Indian boarding school education of the day. Some shared experiences of harsh treatment by dorm matrons and teachers and most acknowledged that their experiences when first placed at the Cherokee Boarding School were frightening and confusing. But the interviews deviated in one dominant respect from the literature regarding boarding school experiences elsewhere. Eastern Band members in this age group expressed, and in a number of cases insisted that it be emphasized, that their bad experiences at the Cherokee Boarding School were balanced by positive outcomes, good things had come to them as a result of their education at the Cherokee Boarding School. Those elders seem to have genuinely taken an educational regime designed to break their tribal identities and reformed the school environment as their own. Their spirit in so doing is all...