Kidnap the kids for their own good, government policy in the early 20th Century.
At the biannual Inland Tlingit Celebration Chris and I have horned in at the head table—and got away with it. We came to meet Ida Calmegane, but two other elders share the head table with her. And we learn the history of the kidnap.
Ida Calmegane, Emma Shorty and Pearl Keenan are Tlingit Elders, not just respected but revered as repositories of history, language and culture—living archives.
Emma Shorty, now in her mid-eighties, lived a sad story in First Nations history.
Early in the 20th century the government of Yukon decided that Tlingit kids could live happy, prosperous lives only by ceasing to be Tlingits. A helpful government would turn them into white people. Accordingly, they dispatched the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Mounties) to kidnap the kids, take them from their families and move them into special schools.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs took four-year-old Emma from her family in Teslin; took her to the Chooutla Indian School in Carcross. Schools like Chooutla exercised discipline that amounted to inexcusable cruelty. Getting caught speaking Tlingit brought an especially severe reaction. Emma vividly remembered the misery of her twelve years at the Chooutla School.
The hall is crowded, and the restrooms are up a set of steps through the crowd. Chris helps Emma make her way to the lady’s room. The crowd sees her coming, Chris hears Emma’s name repeated in hushed tones and the crowd parts in deep respect to let her pass.
I ask Ida Calmegane whether she, too, got kidnapped to the Chooutla school. She knew about it, of course, but she never went there. Knowing the Mounties would come, her father took his family “out to the land”, out of their reach. She had a hard time making me understand what “out to the land” meant. Out of the reach of the Mounties meant out of reach of other people, of groceries, of supplies. The family struggled hard to survive. But she escaped the school experience that Emma endured.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to ask Pearl Keenan about her history with the Chooutla School. But she well remembered the black soldiers of the 93rd. Pearl Keenan grew up on a homestead 19 miles down the lake from Teslin. Because of the homestead’s location, they didn’t see a lot of the men working on the road. But she remembered a time when some “colored” soldiers stopped to get warm. “They were just freezing. They stuck their hands right into the flames from the stove they were so cold.”
Emma Shorty also remembered the black soldiers who clambered off the train in Carcross. “White supervisors were mean. Treated the black men just like white’s treated us.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ efforts to stamp out Tlingit culture and language came perilously close to succeeding. The knowledge and memories of Elders like Emma and Ida and Pearl are embers that the Tlingits are coaxing back to life.
So sad and stupid what people with a little power do or try to do to people without much power.