Boarding school coercion directly caused an entire language’s near extinction

Evidence

A man with long gray braids tells how his mother hid him away when the Indian agents came to take the children. He escaped boarding school by hiding under an overhung bank where the sound of the stream covered his crying. The others were all taken and had their mouths washed out with soap, or worse, for “talking that dirty Indian language.” Because he alone stayed home and was raised up calling the plants and animals by the name Creator gave them, he is here today, a carrier of the language. The engines of assimilation worked well. The speaker’s eyes blaze as he tells us, “We’re the end of the road. We are all that is left. If you young people do not learn, the language will die. The missionaries and the U.S. government will have their victory at last.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 181

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch9 (assimilationist violence repeats in new institutional forms) and ch11 (boarding schools erased ~350 tongues) with the individual mechanism: washing mouths out with soap. — connects to: Most North American Indigenous languages will be extinct by 2050 — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 679; Boarding schools aimed to extinguish native culture by manufacturing consumer desires — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1198; Boarding schools severed whole generations from their ceremonial language and songs — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 125 (+2 more)
• SEED: A vivid causal couplet: the stream sound covering a child’s crying kept the language alive where soap silenced it — listening-as-method and language survival braided together.

Broader Connections

• Stolen Generations institutions routinely punished children for speaking Aboriginal languages #corroborates (0.95) — , The Rod and the Child, 5312