– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

In 2024, then-President Joe Biden delivered an

apology unlike any given  by a U.S. president before.

[PRESIDENT BIDEN] “But the federal government has never,

never formally apologized. Until today.

I formally apologize, as President of the United States of America.”

[CHE] He apologized for a federal policy that had forcibly separated

Native American children from their families and into boarding schools for more than 150 years.

The reception was … mixed.

While some Native people have expressed relief that this history is being formally acknowledged,

others have pushed for more.

Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, told the Associated Press:

“Sorry is not enough [...] A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us.”

I'm Che Jim and welcome to Crash Course Native American History.

[THEME MUSIC]

It’s 1883. After generations of broken treaties, wars, and forced removal,

things are as bad as they’ve ever been for Native Americans.

And white progressives calling  themselves “Friends of the Indian” 

are meeting to talk about  how to make things right.

At first, the Friends talk about things like honoring treaties and restoring stolen land.

But within a few years, they’ve pivoted: what if Native Americans just lived like settlers?

As bad as things already were… they were about to get a whole lot worse.

See, for about a hundred years, the U.S. government had used

a whole bag of tricks to deal with the fact that Native people a) existed,

and b) controlled land that settlers wanted.

This was the so-called “Indian problem.”

Which isn’t a joke. That’s  literally what they called it.

But by the late 19th century the government had exhausted most of its playbook.

Sign treaties with Native nations as equals? Check.

Break those treaties? Check.

Wage war? Check.

Remove tribes onto reservations? Check.

In short, they had tried everything  to solve “the Indian problem”.

Well, almost everything.

There was one more play. A real Hail Mary.

What if they turned Native  Americans into white Americans?

You know the old saying, if you can’t beat ‘em …make ‘em join you?

So, that’s when “Friends of the Indian,” began talking about assimilation:

absorbing Natives into American culture.

Conveniently, it suited the  U.S. government’s goals: 

If Native people lived and  thought just like settlers,

there would be no “problem” with using the land for all it was worth.

And as the idea caught on, some people saw it 

as a way to help Natives by,  quote, “civilizing” them.

Richard Henry Pratt put it this way, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Pratt was a U.S. Army officer who first started erasing Native identity

by forcing Native prisoners of war to cut their hair, wear uniforms,

and give up everything from their culture.

When he later founded the Carlisle  Indian Industrial School in 1879, 

he used the same methods on Native children.

Carlisle was the first federally run, off-reservation boarding school for Natives.

And between the late 19th  and early 20th centuries,

it became the model for dozens of other boarding schools supported by the U.S. government.

Thousands of Native children  were taken from their families, 

brought to schools hundreds of miles from home,

and forced to give up  everything from their cultures: 

their clothing, their languages,  their religion, even their names.

Those who defied the rules were beaten.

Many suffered malnutrition, disease, and abuse.

Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota who attended Carlisle, remembers,

“We went to school to copy, to imitate; not to exchange languages and ideas,

and not to develop the best traits that had come out of uncountable experiences

of hundreds and thousands of  years living upon this continent.”

Hundreds of Native children died at these schools, and the ones who made it out would return to homes

and cultures they no longer felt connected to.

A few Native parents willingly enrolled their kids, hoping for the best.

But many were forced.

Some schools even required that  parents give up custody entirely.

There was resistance, of course —

like the nineteen Hopi men who were incarcerated at Fort Alcatraz in 1894

for refusing to send their  kids to boarding schools.

Plenty of others spoke out about  the harms of boarding schools.

Like the Yankton Sioux  writer Zitkala-Ša, who shared 

her experience working as a  music teacher at Carlisle.

In The Atlantic, she wrote,  “Gazing upon the Indian 

girls and boys bending over their books,

the white visitors walked out of  the schoolhouse well satisfied: 

they were educating the children of the 'Red Man'!

But few have paused to  question whether real life or 

long-lasting death lies beneath  this semblance of civilization.”

Pratt dismissed her writing as “trash,” and fired her for speaking out.

Despite all this effort, boarding  schools still had a problem.

They only assimilated kids. What about the adults?

Senator Henry Dawes —a member of Friends of the Indian — had an answer.

He believed that the key to  assimilation lay in land ownership.

If the government could control which Natives owned what land and how that land was used,

then assimilation would finally be locked in.

So, in 1887, Dawes and  another Friend of the Indian, 

anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher,

co-drafted the General Allotment Act, a.k.a. The Dawes Act.

It authorized the president  to chop up reservations 

into parcels of up to 160  acres, called allotments,

that were given to individual tribal members.

Instead of a big chunk of land  shared by the whole tribe, 

each member would get a small  slice that belonged just to them!

It's giving... grift.

Allotment was supposed to be  the government’s golden ticket.

A fast-track to assimilation.

It would split up tribes and  open more land up to settlers.

Native men would farm, Native  women would keep the house, 

and the “Indian problem” would  finally go away for good!

And to sweeten the deal: U.S. citizenship for anyone who accepts an allotment

and relinquishes tribal citizenship.

No need to identify with a tribe when you’re a citizen of the good ol’ U S of A!

Allotment wasn’t a new  assimilation technique though.

In fact, it had already  happened to the Omaha Nation 

by the time the Dawes Act was signed.

Just a year before their  reservation was broken up, 

the Omaha’s Principal Chief  Ongpatonga (a.k.a. Big Elk)

wrote to his people, quote, 

“I bring to you news which it  saddens my heart to think of.

There is a coming flood which will soon reach us, and I advise you to prepare for it.”

He had foreseen not just the  collapse of the Omaha way of life, 

but a disaster that would wipe  away Native identity everywhere.

As the government forced allotments onto tribes across the country,

Big Elk’s vision became a reality.

Some tribes resisted at first.

The Yankton Sioux, for example, knew their land wasn’t good for crops,

and wanted to keep all of it for communal grazing.

But federal officials used  military force to “persuade” 

members of the tribe to take allotments.

Many tribal leaders feared they’d just lose more of their land to settlers under the Dawes Act.

And they were right.

The government marked any non-allotted land as “surplus to Indian needs,”

and opened it up for non-Native  settlers to purchase.

Before the Dawes Act, Native nations controlled 138 million acres of land.

By the time allotment ended in 1934, they’d lost two-thirds of that acreage.

The Dawes Act also  

led to the creation of tribal rolls — lists of every member of a tribe.

The rolls came with their own problems, including the creation of blood quantum,

a way of measuring tribal membership  by fraction of tribal blood.

Which was basically just  an unscientific vibe check 

based on whether someone “looked” Native.

You can learn a lot more about that in episode 4.

Tribal members assumed to be mixed-race were assigned a lower blood quantum

and given U.S. citizenship and full control over their allotment right away.

But those assigned a higher blood quantum were assumed to be “incompetent,”

because they had no “European blood,” —basically, they weren’t white enough.

They were given a 25-year waiting period before they could take full control.

And when they finally received the  complete title to their allotment?

Many had to turn around and sell it because they couldn’t afford to pay the property taxes.

Yeah, big grift vibes from the Dawes Act.

Thanks to the practice of allotment, 

many reservations today are a  checkerboard of mixed ownership

— parcels owned by the tribe and tribal members are all jumbled together with parcels that aren’t.

For example, the Nez Perce Reservation stretches across 785,000 acres,

but only 13% of it is owned by  the tribe or tribal members.

Which makes it hard to do anything that requires 

large, connected chunks of  land—like farming and ranching

—or for tribes to carry  out traditional activities.

The effects of assimilation and  allotment can’t be understated.

And they’re still being felt generations later.

Allotment left a legacy of land ownership that was, at best, fractured.

After the death of those Natives  who could pay the property taxes, 

ownership was split up among their kids.

And their kids’ kids,

and their kids’ kids’ kids, and so on.

So today, many allotments have hundreds of owners!

And the legacy of boarding schools  is still being reckoned with.

Dr. Denise Lajimodiere, a poet and enrolled Citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa,

called the polices of that  era “cultural genocide.”

Many of her relatives, including her parents, spent time in boarding schools.

She wrote about their experiences, saying, “Speaking their tribal language was forbidden.

My father talked about lye soap put in mouths which caused painful blisters,

and pins put through tongues.”

But there is healing to be found.

Survivors of boarding  schools have told Lajimodiere 

that “language is medicine”  and “culture is treatment.”

The more these practices are revived, the more healing can happen.

And those efforts are underway  across tribal nations.

Like, in recent decades, many  Native nations have begun to 

teach their traditional languages  within tribal-run school systems.

A far cry from the boarding school era.

We’ll talk much more about these  efforts in a later episode.

By the late 19th century, Native nations had already seen

generations of bad deals, broken promises, and loss of land and life.

And in the era of assimilation and allotment, greed came disguised as a helping hand.

Be like us. Dress like us. Work like us. Speak like us. Worship like us.

And then, things will be “better.”

Despite Native resistance, these policies brought catastrophic losses of culture and land

—leaving scars that are still  felt, generations later.

But today, tribes are fighting to  reclaim their cultural identities, 

revive their languages, and  heal generations of trauma.

Next time, we’ll talk about what happened in 1934,

when the U.S. government tried to put power back into tribes’ hands.

And I will see you then.

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Native American History,

which was filmed at our studio  in Indianapolis, Indiana, 

and was made with the help  of all these nice people.

If you want to help keep Crash  Course free for everyone, 

forever, you can join our community on Patreon.

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
apologize /əˈpɒl.ə.dʒaɪz/ B1	verb - to say you are sorry for something wrong you have done
separate /ˈsep.ə.reɪt/ A2	verb - to divide into different parts or groups
acknowledge /əkˈnɒl.ɪdʒ/ B2	verb - to accept or admit the existence or truth of
destroy /dɪˈstrɔɪ/ B1	verb - to damage something so badly that it no longer exists or works
break /breɪk/ A2	verb - to make something come apart or stop working verb - to disobey or not obey a rule or law
force /fɔːs/ B1	verb - to make someone do something against their will noun - physical strength or power
deal /diːl/ A2	verb - to do business or trade with someone noun - an agreement or arrangement
solve /sɒlv/ A2	verb - to find a solution to a problem
join /dʒɔɪn/ A1	verb - to become a member of a group
assimilate /əˈsɪm.ɪ.leɪt/ C1	verb - to become part of a group, country, etc.
culture /ˈkʌl.tʃər/ A2	noun - the customs and beliefs of a society or group
government /ˈɡʌv.ən.mənt/ B1	noun - the group of people who officially control a country
school /skuːl/ A1	noun - a place where children go to learn
treaty /ˈtriː.ti/ C1	noun - a formal agreement between countries
land /lænd/ A1	noun - an area of ground or earth verb - to bring a plane to the ground
tribe /traɪb/ B2	noun - a group of people sharing the same culture or language
reservation /ˌrez.əˈveɪ.ʃən/ C1	noun - an area of land set aside for a special purpose, such as for Native Americans
citizenship /ˈsɪt.ɪ.zən.ʃɪp/ B2	noun - the legal right to belong to a country
genocide /ˈdʒen.ə.saɪd/ C1	noun - the deliberate murder of a whole group of people
trauma /ˈtraʊ.mə/ C1	noun - severe emotional shock