TIM GIAGO Brown ruling meant nothing to Indians

Fifty years in the annals of time is a mere blink of the eye. That is why the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education is such recent history.
A New York Times article reported that critics of mandatory integration contend that there is nothing wrong with having predominantly black schools; in fact they say, it is racist to suggest otherwise. What is more, the fatigue of busing their children for hours each day, only to see them do poorly at predominantly white schools, has led some black parents to almost yearn for the type of tight-knit network of black educators that integration disbanded.
Hundreds of school districts across the nation are still under court-ordered desegregation decrees that have stood for decades, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., which has worked on many of them. Even so, a series of Supreme Court rulings in the early 1990s has made it relatively easy for districts to come out from under the rulings.
According to the Times article, since 1990 alone, researchers at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard have found, more than 100 districts have been released from desegregation orders, including San Diego, Denver, Dallas, St. Louis and Miami.
Last line of defense
"This is the last line of defense for Brown," said Richard Cole, senior counsel for civil rights at the Massachusetts attorney general's office. "If school districts lose these voluntary plans, then the aspirations and the relevance of Brown to the 21st century is over."
There is little argument that Brown is one of the major Supreme Court rulings of the 20th century. But it affected only that segment of the United States population dealing with blacks and whites. What about the other ethnic minorities attending segregated schools in America?
I attended Holy Rosary Indian Mission boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota that was, and in many ways still is, a segregated school. In Texas and New Mexico there were, and still are, many schools that are nearly 100 percent Hispanic.
Not equal
On the Indian reservations there was no such thing as "separate but equal" schools as there were in the South. Our schools were "separate," but by no means equal. In the 1950s, when Brown was before the Supreme Court, there were only two kinds of schools on nearly every Indian reservation in America; the Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, most of these were boarding schools, and the church operated boarding schools.
The BIA schools were often poorly staffed and the teachers were more interested in bringing about assimilation ideologies to the Indian students. On the other hand, the church controlled schools were not only teaching methods in assimilation, but they were actively indoctrinating the students into a religious order. Classes in catechism and how to serve as an altar boy were an active part of the school curriculum at the Catholic boarding schools.
A great deal of study time at the Methodist, Mormon and Episcopalian boarding schools on the Indian reservations was centered on the study of the Bible or of the Book of Mormons.
Often the religious orders served as adoption agencies. Thousands of Indian children were shipped off to the homes of their parishioners across America. This was particularly true of the Mormon Church. This church was guilty of taking many Navajo and Hopi children away from their parents on the false assumption that the Indian parents were so backward that they could not raise their children to be contributing members of society.
'Stolen children'
Just as happened in Australia to the Aborigines, these "stolen children" became nothing more than slave labor in the homes and farms of the adopted parents. There they were shorn of their culture, traditions, language and traditional spirituality. Those who found their way home became strangers in their own land. Most did not make it home. They died as "stolen children" or became assimilated into a society that really did not want them.
Mind you, many of the things I mention here were taking place at the very time that Brown v. Board of Education was being argued in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court.
The schools on the Indian reservations were segregated and isolated. Out of sight, out of mind seemed to be the U.S. government's answer to the "Indian problem." It was the firm belief of the educators who came to the Indian reservations that if they could make the children over in their own image, they could more easily be assimilated into the mainstream and the "Indian problem" would cease to exist.
What they failed to understand is that there never was a problem until they brought the problem. Like so many mistakes that were made in the past the "cultural imperialism" foisted upon the Indian people was not for their own good, but for the own good of those who imposed it.
Reversing the damage
The Indian Education and Self-Determination Act of 1974 that came about during the term of President Richard Nixon reversed some of the damage that had been done by allowing tribal governments and Indian parents to have a say in how their children were educated. Prior to that they had none.
And so 20 years after Brown, the Indian people finally got the freedom to share in the education of their children. We've come a long way in those 30 years. We have our own school boards and there are now more than 30 tribally owned colleges across the Western United States. Brown meant nothing to the Indian people, but the Indian Education and Self-Determination Act of 1974 did.
X Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, is editor and publisher of the Lakota and Pueblo Journals. He is author of "The Aboriginal Sin" and "Notes from Indian Country" volumes I and II. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.