First the back story – I’ve become a big fan of Taylor Sheridan’s material – first when my son Bobby suggested I start watching Paramount’s Yellowstone series, which Sheridan created. I’d already missed the first season, but enjoyed Season #2, and eventually was able to find re-runs of the first season. And I’ve watched succeeding seasons through Part One of Season #5. It has become the most successful show on cable TV, by far.
Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across a west Texas movie called Come Hell or High Water (2016), loved it, and subsequently learned that Sheridan wrote that, too. Oscar-nominated sleeper. (He has also created the excellent TV series The Mayor of Kingston and Tulsa King for Paramount Plus.)
A couple of years ago, Sheridan (and Paramount Plus) decided to do a Yellowstone prequel, which he titled “1883.” The story consisted of eight-episodes, with Tim McGraw and Faith Hill playing James and Margaret Dutton traveling from Fort Worth, Texas to Bozeman, MT in 1883. One of the best mini-series I’ve ever seen. Right behind Lonesome Dove.
Because “1883” was almost as popular as Yellowstone, Paramount Plus prevailed upon Sheridan to develop another, later prequel. How about “1923,” 40 years later? This show was to run two seasons, with eight episodes each, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren, as Jacob and Cara Dutton. Apparently, James and Margaret were killed in 1894, and Jacob and Cara moved to MT to save the ranch and raise the two orphaned boys, John and Spencer. (Spoiler alert – daughter Elsa had died at the end of 1883).
Because “1883” was so good, I had great expectations for 1923, but was disappointed by Season One. Inexplicably, Sheridan decided to create three unrelated storylines. The first was the one we expected – i.e., the Dutton family (Ford and Mirren) trying to hold on to the ranch during the challenges of the Great Depression. The second storyline has Spencer hunting in Africa while dealing with a bad case of PTSD from his WWI service before being jolted to his senses upon learning that the ranch was in distress and needs him home. And the third storyline, which has nothing to do with the ranch or the Dutton family, involves a Indian girl rebelling against her abusers at a MT Indian boarding school run by Catholic priests and nuns.
Each story received about 15 minutes of screen time each week and severely disrupted the flow and continuity of the show. Every week, viewers on the Facebook fan page wondered when Sheridan would get Spencer home and how he would intertwine the Boarding School story. Boy, were they surprised when Season One ended with Spencer still trying to get home and the Boarding School still having no connection to the ranch other than the girl having the same last name, Rainwater, as one of the villains in the current Yellowstone series.
Aside from its irrelevance to the show, the Boarding School storyline also bothered me because it portrayed the multiple Catholic priests and nuns as evil sociopaths, and by implication indicted the entire Catholic religion. On the Facebook fan page, hundreds of viewers decried the shameful role of organized religion for centuries of evil and thanked Sheridan for bringing attention to this buried chapter of American history. According to them, there was no doubt that these atrocities reflected actual history.
I wasn’t so willing to entrust the history according to Sheridan, a western cowboy well known for having no use for organized religion and for idolizing Indians. So I decided to read the real history of Indian boarding schools. A quick survey of the field revealed a clear choice as best book – “Education for Extinction,” subtitled American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875 – 1928. Second edition, fully revised and expanded in 2020 to include the last twenty-five years of scholarship. Perfect.
Nothing in the 367 pages of the book (or 104 pages of footnotes) suggests anything like the atrocities committed in “1923.” The historical Boarding School system would not have enabled or tolerated such conduct, and the subsequent scholarship concerning the schools would surely have exposed what there was.
My son Bobby, who first referred me to Yellowstone, recently called me to discuss his thought that, while it is easy to criticize what happened to the Indians, almost no one suggests how America’s Manifest Destiny should have been handled differently – what should the advanced civilization have done when it encountered a primitive civilization? And how can a nation best help natives adapt to a new world order? (Ironically, in “1993” Jacob Dutton explained to his nephew that every civilization is built on top of the civilization that it conquered, and he was determined to not allow Yellowstone to be conquered on his watch by developers and Indians.)
“Education for Extinction” begins in 1875, when this story’s protagonist, Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, was assigned to move 72 Indian rebels from Ft. Leavenworth in KS to St. Augustine in FL. While in Florida, Pratt tried to assimilate (vocational training and education) his prisoners. Three years later, he was authorized to release the rebels, but he gave the 17 youngest an opportunity to continue their education at Hampton School in Virginia, which was Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s school created to help educate recently freed slaves.
Based on his successes as St. Augustine and Hampton, Pratt quickly petitioned Congress to create a new Indian boarding school at Carlisle, PA in 1879. Carlisle became the model for Indian boarding schools throughout the nation, and by 1908 there were 27 off-reservation boarding schools (most of them in the West), along with more than 100 large on-reservation boarding schools and 150 smaller on-reservation day schools.
The first part of the book has three chapters – Reforms, Models, and System. Reforms concerns the philosophy in how best to help natives adapt. Generally, the Reformers believed that Indians were culturally, but not racially disadvantaged, and that the best way to help them catch-up to modern civilization was to expose them to it as much as possible. Sort of like immersion-learning for languages. Old people were too old to learn much, so the focus was on malleable young brains. And off-reservation boarding schools would be better than on-reservation boarding schools, which would be better than day schools.
Models for reform were Armstrong’s Hampton School and Pratt’s Carlisle School. And the System was consistent with the total-immersion concept – e.g., cut the hair, speak in only English, teach Christianity, extirpate Indian culture, etc.
The second part of the book has chapters on Institution, Classroom, and Rituals.
The third part of the book has chapters on Resistance and Accommodation. This is where I found very little evidence to support the “1923” storyline about the Rainwater girl. Yes, there is mention of harsh punishment at some schools and by some teachers, but nothing horribly scandalous. Lots of death by disease, but none by murder. In addition to the corporal punishment, the other prevalent Rainwater-type activity was runaways attempting to return home, even though in many cases their parents had sent them to school (often due to financial difficulties supporting kids amidst at home).
The final part of the book, called Causatum, has chapters on Home and Policy. The Home chapter concerns efforts to determine whether the Boarding Schools were graduating successful kids. The evidence was mixed at best. And the Policy chapter describes how in the early 1900s the mixed evidence of success caused the federal government to give up on the immersion system and begin converting to a system where kids were exposed to modern civilization gradually without trying to totally supplant their Indian culture. No longer “kill the Indian in order to save the man.”
In 1918 Carlisle School in PA closed and in 1923 Hampton School in VA quit educating Indians. Many off-reservation schools in western states continued, but their philosophy was never the same, with 1928 marking a significant sea-change at the leading off-reservation Boarding School in the west, the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, KS.
After finishing the book, I wrote to the author, an emeritus professor at Cleveland State, to get his thoughts about “1923” and whether the negative depiction of the nuns, priests, and Catholic Church was fair. He has not responded. One of the weaknesses of the book is that most comments and descriptions were global and indiscriminate without chronological order, or sorted by school administration (government, Catholic, or other church) or by tribe(s) at the school.
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