Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (review)

Reviewed by: Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools Beverly Slapin (bio) Ward Churchill . Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004. 157 pages. Churchill's latest diatribe is a single essay, with an incomprehensible yet self-serving preface by George E. Tinker: [End Page 141] The scope of demystification Churchill has pursued over the past twenty years or more has evolved to include nearly the full inventory of "interpretive techniques" . . . with which North America's settler intelligentsia has sought to expunge from the accuracy of memory certain actualities attending its forbears' initial "encounters" and subsequent "interactions" with the continent's indigenous peoples. (xvii) In miniscule type, the eighty-five pages of notes, bibliography, and index outweigh the actual text in verbiage and match it in pomposity. Many of the notes reference Churchill's earlier works and arguments. (See, for instance, note 64: "For additional samples of Churchill's rebuttals of those who would deliberately distort the definition of genocide for political reasons, see . . . ") There's nothing new here, except to note that Churchill's massive ego has grown even more. For narratives from people who had survived the boarding schools, he relies heavily on Brenda Child's Boarding School Seasons (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction (University Press of Kansas, 1995), at the same time excoriating Adams for not using the term "genocide." Kill the Indian, Save the Man is part of Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (City Lights, 1997), expanded, reargued, and made even more unreadable. From the introduction: I have by design engaged in no new research while assembling my essay. Instead, to underscore the obviousness of what is being obfuscated and "denied" by "responsible" scholars, I've chosen to rely exclusively on previously published data, most of it long and readily accessible to anyone willing to consider its implications. My main contribution to the literature, I think—aside from offering the first comparative assessment of residential school operations and impacts covering both the U.S. and Canada—is thus to have effected a synthesis of the relevant information, configuring it in a manner facilitating its being scrutinized through the lens of legality. [End Page 142] Yet Churchill's bibliography contains sixty-nine references to material published after 1997, the year A Little Matter of Genocide was published. He did not reference, however, Roland Chrisjohn's excellent essay "The Report," part of "Residential Schools: The Past is Present," by Michele Cheung, in Dark Night field notes, no. 17/annual issue 2001, in which Chrisjohn writes, "What happened with reservation schooling wasn't kind of like genocide, it wasn't cultural genocide, it wasn't something approximating genocide. It was genocide." Churchill had to have known about it, because he was on the editorial board. What he has seen fit to cite is Linda F. Witmer's questionable-at-best The Indian School: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1879–1918 (Cumberland County Historical Society, 2000) and Michael S. Cooper's abominable children's book Indian School: Teaching the White Man's Way (New York: Clarion Books, 1999), which Churchill describes as "a good, and very succinct study of how these principles were imposed in the U.S." Kill the Indian, Save the Man also contains a lot of archival residential school photos, randomly placed and some inappropriately captioned. See, for instance, the photo of little Richard Kissiti (Apache) at age four, captioned as being the "youngest 'student' at Carlisle in 1895." He was not a student, even if the word is surrounded by quote marks. His story is very painful, and apparently Churchill didn't feel it was necessary to tell (assuming he bothered to find out). Beverly Slapin Beverly Slapin is cofounder and executive director of Oyate, coeditor of Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children and A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, and a frequent contributor to Multicultural Review. She has garnered infamy, but not wealth, from her two books, The Basic Skills Caucasian Americans...

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