Indian Orphanages or The Dark Side of Democracy

Indian Orphanages

Author: Marilyn Irvin Holt

With their deep tradition of tribal and kinship ties, Native Americans had lived for centuries with little use for the concept of an unwanted child. But besieged by reservation life and boarding school acculturation, many tribes—with the encouragement of whites—came to accept the need for orphanages.

The first book to focus exclusively on this subject, Marilyn Holt's study interweaves Indian history, educational history, family history, and child welfare policy to tell the story of Indian orphanages within the larger context of the orphan asylum in America. She relates the history of these orphanages and the cultural factors that produced and sustained them, shows how orphans became a part of native experience after Euro-American contact, and explores the manner in which Indian societies have addressed the issue of child dependency.

Holt examines in depth a number of orphanages from the 1850s to1940s—particularly among the "Five Civilized Tribes" in Oklahoma, as well as among the Seneca in New York and the Ojibway and Sioux in South Dakota. She shows how such factors as disease, federal policies during the Civil War, and economic depression contributed to their establishment and tells how white social workers and educational reformers helped undermine native culture by supporting such institutions. She also explains how orphanages differed from boarding schools by being either tribally supported or funded by religious groups, and how they fit into social welfare programs established by federal and state policies.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 overturned years of acculturation policy by allowing Native Americans to finally reclaim their children, and Holt helps readers to better understand the importance of that legislation in the wake of one of the more unfortunate episodes in the clash of white and Indian cultures.

Publishers Weekly

Riding the wave of interest in adoption issues and Native American history, Holt (The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America) examines the development of orphanages in a half-dozen major Native American tribes, covering the late 1800s, the Depression and the decades up to the 1978 federal reversal on Indian adoption policy. From the outset, community-oriented Indian society bewildered white missionaries and social workers, who deemed deviations from the nuclear family pernicious. Yet "orphans" didn't exist in, for instance, Shawnee culture, where tribal "grandmothers" helped raise the young, and families welcomed parentless children. Holt's balanced view of orphans' dual experience being equipped for mainstream culture and stripped of their own distinguishes her account. While most poor ethnics were subject to Americanization, Indians had it worse: many whites, bent on eliminating Native Americans, targeted orphanages, often the only available school. While many may have been awful (Holt doesn't say much about daily life), the orphanages kept kids on the reservation, unlike subsequent programs. Holt combs official reports, teasing her story out of dry numbers (enrollment stats, spending per pupil) from several orphanages. Thematic organization and further Indian perspectives (understandably scarce) would have made her book more accessible and compelling. Still, it's a useful, if turgid, volume for specialists. 19 photos not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Holt (The Orphan Trains) carefully examines the establishment of Indian orphanages in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a previously little-studied subject. She discusses the emergence of orphanages in tribal communities ranging from the Seneca to the Sioux and their provision of basic care, including education. In reality, those orphanages underscored the destructive interchange with Euro-American peoples. Orphanages became necessary, Holt contends, after "war, disease, starvation, relocation, removal, ill-conceived federal policies, and missionary influences" had transformed traditional networks and kinships. Many non-Indian administrators viewed orphanages as a means to ward off complete immersion in white society. All the while, the orphanages worked to acculturate Indian children into the mainstream. Beginning in the 1930s, social welfare programs, foster care, and adoptions supplanted orphanages, whose closure often resulted in children being separated from "their own people." Not until 1978, with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, did Congress recognize "the transmission of Indian culture to future generations." Though the chronological makeup can be confusing and the prose occasionally leaden, this is a solid, well-researched study that scholars will appreciate. Recommended for academic libraries. R.C. Cottrell, California State Univ., Chico Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : roots of protest	1
1	Crumbling culture	18
2	First solution : Seneca	49
3	Orphans among us : Cherokee	84
4	After the war : Chickasaw	115
5	The missionaries : Choctaw and Creek	148
6	Tribal dissolution : Oklahoma	182
7	Catholic outposts : Ojibway and Sioux	216
	Epilogue : final transition	251

Interesting book: Our Iceberg Is Melting or The Gone Fishin Portfolio

The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing

Author: Michael Mann

This comprehensive study of international ethnic cleansing provides in-depth coverage of its occurrences in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as cases of lesser violence in early modern Europe and in contemporary India and Indonesia. After presenting a general theory of why serious conflict emerges and how it escalates into mass murder, Michael Mann offers suggestions on how to avoid such escalation in the future. Michael Mann is the author of Fascists (Cambridge, 2004) and The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge 1986).

Publishers Weekly

In addressing the origins of ethnic cleansing, UCLA sociologist Mann (Fascism) locates differing stages of political participation as a major factor. He begins with stable authoritarian regimes (e.g., Tito's Yugoslavia) that exclude participation; when such regimes break down, there is a period of everybody scrambling for power and trying to exclude somebody else with the "else" usually defined on ethnic lines. Other examples include Armenia, the Holocaust and Rwanda, as well as India (the Sikhs and Muslims) and Indonesia (the Chinese). Eventually, the author's somewhat optimistic scenario argues, we arrive at stable participatory societies, with everybody somewhat included and limits set on what can be done to exclude groups (the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in the U.S.). Free from sociological jargon and abundant in historical data, this study sufficiently allows lay readers access. It can be difficult at moments to tell if Mann's prediction of the high body count in the Third World's coming century or so of ethnic cleansing is Eurocentric, callous or grimly realistic, but such moments always resolve into that last choice. Mann proposes some feasible remedies and scales of intervention. (Nov.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Ethnic cleansing is typically seen as the work of primitive evildoers operating outside of modernity. In this important and provocative book, the distinguished sociologist Mann argues that murderous ethnic cleansing is in fact an ugly facet of our modern democratic age-that "it belongs to our own civilization and to us." Mann suggests that democratization in particular multiethnic settings can create situations in which "rule by the people" is defined in ethnic terms, leading a majority group to tyrannize minorities. A "danger zone" is reached when rival ethnic groups lay claim to the same territory, and do so with some legitimacy and prospect of success. Often an outgrowth of an unrelated crisis such as a war, ethnic cleansing breaks out when the weaker side fights because of the promise of outside aid-as in the Yugoslav, Rwandan, Kashmiri, and Chechen cases-or when the stronger side believes it can cleanse a state at considerable profit and little risk-as in the Armenian and Jewish genocides. Mann's account is not the last word on ethnic cleansing, but it certainly is among the most sophisticated yet.