Tucked in a whole lot of envelopes is the hair cut from Native children as they arrived at boarding schools. Hidden away for nearly 100 years within the recesses of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, the gathering of hair samples offers tangible evidence of the trauma of assimilation.
Based on the hygiene of the day, cropping hair was the surest approach to avoid lice among the many crowded populations of kids coerced to attend the nation’s Indian boarding schools.
For boarding school survivors, nonetheless, the haircuts got here to symbolize the cruel introduction to the technique of assimilation, a gesture disregarding their culture and families wishes.
Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, wept as she described her response to hearing in regards to the museum’s findings.
“I started to shake and weep, especially considering of how deeply boarding school survivors may take this news,” said Lajimodiere, co-founder of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and creator of “Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors.”
A few of those sampled could still be alive today, Lajimodiere said.
The Peabody Museum recently discovered the box of human hair amongst its holdings. Gathered nearly a century ago, the hair was taken by an anthropologist from the heads of a whole lot of Native children who attended Indian boarding schools between 1930 and 1933.
Museum leaders released a public announcement on Nov. 10 in regards to the findings.
“I imagine that many individuals, especially non-Natives, hardly gave it a second thought,” said Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe.
“But for Native people hair represents cultural and spiritual connections to family and place. Our hair is a component of our strength.”
The US is trailing Canada in addressing its history of government- and church-run Indian boarding schools.
In 2006, Canada created the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program as a part of the country’s Indian Residential School Agreement.
Although the Department of the Interior under Secretary Deb Haaland’s leadership recently released the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, there are currently no services or support for survivors within the U.S. Haaland is the primary Indigenous person in a presidential cabinet.
But more must be done.
“There’s no mental health support for our survivors within the U.S. unlike in Canada,” Lajimodiere said. “How will we begin to heal when the trauma doesn’t stop?”
‘A spiritual violation’
When children first arrived at boarding schools, authorities would normally cut their long hair into short, uniform styles, an experience that has left many survivors in addition to their descendants affected by negative physical and mental impacts, in accordance with researchers.
Basil Braveheart, Oglala Lakota Nation, still vividly recalls the shock of getting his long hair cut greater than 80 years ago, when he first entered the Holy Rosary Indian Mission on the Pine Ridge reservation.
“They cut my hair, a spiritual violation,” Braveheart told ICT and Reveal in an earlier interview. “In our culture, only the maternal grandmother had the proper to chop our hair. Once they let my hair fall to the ground and stepped on it, I felt disrespected.”
No hair samples from Holy Rosary were amongst those discovered on the Peabody Museum, and the names of those whose samples were discovered haven’t been released. Holy Rosary has now been renamed Red Cloud Indian School and is not any longer a boarding school.
The Peabody Museum published an apology from Director Jane Pickering and a promise to return the hair to families and tribal nations.
The museum also created a website dedicated to describing its process in addressing the hair samples, which were originally collected by George Edward Woodbury, curator of the State Historical Society of Colorado.
The acknowledgement section of the web site reads, “It’s unimaginable to speak about hair taken from Indigenous people and its possession by the Peabody Museum without acknowledging the ties between early anthropological practices and colonialism, imperialism, and scientific racism — the exact same systems of dispossession and assimilation that led to the establishment of Indian boarding schools.”
Woodbury and his wife Edna collected greater than 1,500 samples of Indigenous peoples’ hair between 1930 and 1933 from North and South America in addition to Asia and Oceania. They donated the gathering to Harvard in 1935.
A spokesperson for the museum told the The Recent York Times that the gathering has never been displayed. The samples include about 700 clippings of hair taken from students at Indian boarding schools and have been stored in envelopes labeled with names, tribal affiliation and locations of collection.
Although the museum has released details about tribal affiliation and placement, it has not yet published the names of the owners of the hair.
Based on its website, the museum has reached out to some tribal leaders regarding the technique of repatriation and is waiting for feedback before releasing individuals’ names.
The Harvard University Native American Program wrote an email offering emotional support to the varsity’s Native students the day before the museum publicly announced information in regards to the collection of hair. Based on the e-mail, shared with ICT, “There are over 90 community members (students, staff and school) who’ve family names or tribes related to this list of relatives.”
Within the only article published from the research, “Differences Between Certain of the North American Indian Tribes: As shown by a microscopical study of their head hair,” Woodbury described texture and color differences among the many samples and noted “when these North American Indian hair specimens were compared with Mongoloid and White (European) hair specimens it seems that the Indian exhibits a stronger affinity toward the Mongoloid group.”
Regarding the scientific practice on the time the hair was collected, the museum wrote, “Much of this work was carried out to support, directly or not directly, scientific racism.”
Descriptions and measurements of hair types were used to justify racial categories and hierarchies.
– George Edward Woodbury
NAGPRA regulations
Although several Native people contacted by ICT lauded Harvard for its repatriation efforts as a superb start, many were critical of the method and questioned why the institution had waited so long to take motion.
“The web site is a superb start line; it helps us understand a bit of little bit of the history of the researcher and the gathering,” said Meredith McCoy, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa tribe descendant and assistant professor of American Studies and history at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.
“But there’s so way more we want to know; clearly the researcher had an intensive network of boarding school employees willing to send him samples of kids’s hair without parental permission,” she said.
“This kind of research is deeply unethical.”
Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, believes that Harvard has known in regards to the Woodbury collection for a very long time.
“I think they’ve known about it for years but just didn’t know what to do about it,” she said.
It’s so sad that institutions like Harvard would hold onto and support one of these thing.
– Deborah Parker, Tulalip Tribes, executive director of the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
After the stays of 19 enslaved people of African descent were discovered within the museum’s collection, Harvard created a Steering Committee on Human Stays in University Museum Collections in June 2021. A report by the committee, leaked to media in June 2022, states that the varsity holds the stays of nearly 7,000 Native Americans in its collections.
Although among the stays fall under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, often known as NAGPRA, Rachel Dane, spokesperson for Harvard, wrote in an email to ICT that the hair within the Woodbury collection doesn’t fall under the federal regulation.
Shannon O’Loughlin, Choctaw, attorney and chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, disagrees.
“Under NAGPRA regulations, human stays are defined because the stays of a body of an individual of Native American ancestry,” O’Loughlin said.
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“Although the law doesn’t apply to portions of stays shed naturally or freely given, children didn’t have agency to consent to the hair collecting; they weren’t at boarding schools of their very own free will.”
O’Loughlin also criticized Harvard’s stated intentions of collaborating with tribes in determining how the gathering can be handled. She noted that a process is already in place under NAGPRA that clearly outlines how institutions are to collaborate with tribes in repatriating or transferring human stays and other cultural items to appropriate parties.
“There may be little transparency,” she said. “I don’t hear Harvard say they’ll work with tribes and determine what tribes wish to do. As a substitute they announce they’re going to start out an entire other process and do it themselves.”
The Northern Arapaho Business Council issued an announcement on Nov. 21 demanding that Harvard and the Peabody Museum return hair samples improperly taken from Native children, including some from the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming.
“It’s unimaginable to undo atrocities committed against Native children ripped away from their families as a part of the federal government’s forced boarding program,” the tribe said in an announcement, “but Peabody Museum can and must stop its role on this abuse by returning to appropriate tribes any hair samples taken from these children.”
The statement continued, “It’s long gone time that museums, universities and other institutions apologize for his or her objectification of Native people and culture and return to rightful owners the sacred artifacts stolen from Indian Country.”
Boarding schools as laboratories
In 2018, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada on behalf of hundreds of Indigenous children used as research subjects between the Nineteen Thirties and Fifties in that country’s Indian residential school system. The suit also accused the federal government of “discriminatory and inadequate” medical care at Indian health institutions.
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Ian Mosby, assistant professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, has published research showing quite a few examples of Indigenous children getting used as subjects of experiments to check tuberculosis vaccines. Mosby also found that government agencies conducted dietary experiments through which children were systematically starved to be able to provide a baseline reading in testing the impact of vitamin and mineral supplements and enriched flours and milk. Dental services were also withheld in some schools to supply test data.
The Canadian lawsuit also includes other medical experiments performed on Indigenous populations without their consent, including skin grafting among the many Inuit within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, contraception and forced sterilization of ladies from the Nineteen Twenties to the Nineteen Seventies.
Thus far, there are only a handful of verified examples of comparable research and testing have been found on Native populations here within the U.S.
In 1976, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that Native children in government boarding schools were used as subjects in researching trachoma, an eye fixed disease, without parental consent. The investigation, ordered by U.S. Sen. James Abourezk, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, also showed that greater than 3,000 women were sterilized at Indian Health Service facilities without adequate consent.
Because the investigation into U.S. boarding school history moves forward, many predict that more examples of presidency sanctioned research and experimentation will come to light.
Native people have long been the topic of research influenced by colonialism, race-science or eugenics, including Samuel Morton’s infamous nineteenth century Cranial Collection consisting of the skulls of around 1,300 people from around the globe. Based on the Smithsonian Magazine, there are an estimated 500,000 Native American stays and nearly 1 million associated funerary objects currently held in U.S. museums.
“We weren’t considered to be human to white settlers,” said Lajimodiere. “Our bodies were just a part of the fauna, available for exploitation.”
The museum shared information in regards to the collection with leadership on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and Lajimodiere and Azure report that they recognize several of the names listed among the many Woodbury collection.
“I can say that the museum has been extremely helpful and willing to do whatever we feel is true to get the stays back to the family,” Azure said. “There may be a bit of little bit of a silver lining to this; it’s bringing people together to speak about not only the importance of the hair but in addition finding a approach to bring it back to the community in a superb way.”
Azure noted, nonetheless, that tribal leadership has been unprepared for the mental health challenges related to growing awareness in regards to the boarding school era.
“Some survivors have opted to not attend our events and commemorations,” Azure said. “They find it too triggering.”
Where are the resources?
The shortage of mental health resources for boarding school survivors and their descendants continues to be an issue.
I ponder what number of other institutions are digging around of their dark basements and can find similar things in the long run.
– Denise Lajimodiere, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa
Parker, with the boarding school coalition, noted that although the coalition can direct survivors toward mental health resources, there aren’t nearly enough. She noted that in accordance with a 2018 GAO study, the federal government allocates twice as much money per Medicaid recipient because it does for Indian Health Service patients.
“In Canada they’ve the residential school healing line; I believe that’s something we want here as well,” she said.
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Parker and the coalition are also pushing for passage of a federal boarding school truth and healing bill, which might create a commission to research the history of faculties and supply trauma-informed resources for survivors and descendants.
“The federal government and institutions like Harvard should bear responsibility for the harm inflicted at boarding schools,” she said.
Stacey Montooth, Walker River Paiute Nation, executive director of the State of Nevada Indian Commission, agreed.
“How persistently do now we have to be traumatized by news like this?” she asked during an interview with ICT.
Montooth’s office is situated in the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City, Nevada. The federal school operated from 1890 to 1980 serving children primarily from Nevada’s Great Basin tribes — Washoes, Paiutes and Shoshones.
Based on its website, the organization’s mission, which opened in 2020, is to inform the story of the hundreds of American Indian children who were educated at Stewart. The campus can be a hub for Native art, lectures and other public programming and academic activities.
Montooth expressed surprise that Harvard didn’t reach out to the middle and museum in regards to the collection of hair. Stewart Indian School is listed amongst the gathering locations and lots of of Nevada’s tribes are amongst sources listed for the hair samples. She heard in regards to the collection from a colleague in one other state.
“Harvard must open up their checkbook and never only pay for, but help us discover, the easiest psychologists, counselors and others who’re best equipped to assist our people,” Montooth said.
ICT asked Harvard officials if the university had any plans to supply such funding or services.
“We should not have a comment,” was the reply.