过去几个月，随着数以千计的儿童遗骸在加拿大原印第安寄宿学校的旧址被发现，北美洲原著民（印第安人）寄宿学校以及背后的黑暗历史也进入人们的视野。
然而对于美国的印第安人来说，这段历史对他们的社会和文化所产生的巨大破坏作用，和给他们每个家庭带来的巨大痛苦，延绵至今。
The remain of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, were discovered on the grounds of three former boarding schools for indigenous children in Canada since June. People were brought to face and to acknowledge, many for the first time, a dark chapter in the colonial history of North America.
今年6月，全国印第安人寄宿学校治愈联盟的塞缪尔·托雷斯（Samuel Torres）来到宾夕法尼亚州卡莱尔镇的（Carlisle）一处墓地。他肩负着一项严峻的任务：把1906年在此去世的17岁女孩儿索菲亚·特托夫（Sophia Tetoff）的遗体送回她在阿拉斯加的故乡。
1901年，索菲亚从白令海沿岸的家乡经过25天、6500公里的旅程，被强行带到这里。从那时起直到去世，她从未离开过卡莱尔镇。
五名阿拉斯加原著民儿童离开家乡，最右边的女孩为索菲亚·特托夫（Sophia Tetoff）
在卡莱尔印第安人工业学校（Carlisle Indian Industrial School）——美国第一所由政府开办的针对印第安人孩子的寄宿学校——索菲亚死于肺结核。
Samuel Torres of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition was at a cemetery in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with a somber task: to return to Alaska the remains of Sophia Tetoff, 17, who had died in 1906. She had died of tuberculosis at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the country’s first government-run off-reservation boarding school for Native American children. Five years earlier she had forcibly been taken there in a 25-day, 6,500-kilometer journey from her homeland by the Bering Sea.
索菲亚死后的学生信息卡
欧洲殖民者在征服美洲大陆的过程中，很长时间奉行“种族灭绝”（extermination）的政策，然而进入19世纪后，这种政策被认为是代价高昂并且收效不佳的。
在这样的背景下，美国政府推出 “文明化法案” （Civilization Fund Act），由国家资助兴办针对印第安人的学校，在学校中实行同化教育的政策（assimilative policy）, 主要执行者是当时兴建的很多教会学校。
Prior to the boarding school period, the federal policy towards Native Americans was extermination, a policy which, by the early nineteenth century, had been largely seen as a failure. In 1819 the US Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act encouraging “activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans … to stimulate the civilization process”. Mission schools flourished, but it would take another 60 years before the government officially took matters into its own hands, when the Carlisle school opened.
可是实行了一段时间，效果并不好，总结下来，原因被归结为学生们放学后还要回家，回到他们的印第安社区中，这样一来学校对他们推行的“文明化”教育的效果就大打折扣。这种观点的主要提出者正是卡莱尔印第安人工业学校的创始人理查德·亨利·普拉特（Richard Henry Pratt）将军。
理查德·亨利·普拉特（Richard Henry Pratt）
此人之前曾经参加对印第安人的作战，并且在一些战俘中对他的“去印第安化”理念加以实施。在自认为取得了很好的效果后，普拉特向政府提供兴建寄宿学校的想法，目的就是将印第安儿童从他们的土壤中“连根拔起”。
寄宿学校被认为最好应该设置在远离印第安人保留地（Indian reservation）的地方，于是就有了保留地外的寄宿学校（off-reservation boarding school）。
Having previously overseen the “civilizing” of a group of Native American prisoners of war in Fort Maison, Florida, US Army general Richard Henry Pratt decided that to wean indigenous children of their “Indianness”, these children must be removed from their tribal context. Thus the opening of boarding schools, many thousands of kilometers from students’ homes on Indian reservations.
据初步统计，在从1870年到1939年这段国家在印第安儿童中强力推行同化教育的年代里，全美大约兴建了380所印第安寄宿学校。
在1918年卡莱尔印第安人工业学校关门之前，来自140个部落的10000多名美国土著儿童（包括索菲亚·特托夫）被录取。
进入卡莱尔印第安人工业学校的印第安孩子们
孩子们一入学，就立刻被剪掉印第安人的长发、脱掉民族服饰、换成英文名字、改信基督教。
说部落语言是被严格禁止的，违者会受到严厉的处罚，比如被强制用肥皂洗嘴巴或者关小黑屋。
In fact on the very first day at the school they were stripped of all “outward Indianness”. Their long hair, a source of pride for all American Indians, was viewed as a sign of savagery and instantly sheared – boys’ mowed to military style and girls’ reduced to short bob. Their embroidered and fringed leather outfits and moccasin boots, sewn by mothers and grandmothers, were removed and replaced in many cases by military-type uniforms. The children, who at this point could barely speak a word of English, were given English names before being baptized as Christians.
“仰望耶稣”，寄宿学校的学生们在接受宗教同化教育
还有一种惩罚叫“夹笞 （run the gauntlet）”，学生们被要求站成两列，受惩罚的孩子从两列中间走过，两列人都要用鞭子打他。这给孩子们的心里造成永远无法弥合的创伤。
Students were often subjected to severe punishment for talking in their native tongue, even among themselves. This included having their mouth washed out with soap, being held in dark solitary confinement for days, or forced to run a gauntlet whereby the victim went down in between two lines of fellow students, who swung their belts at the victim, egged on by the teacher. All present were in no doubt of their fate if they broke the same rule.
“随着语言消亡，他们的歌曲、音乐和仪式也随之消亡，还包括故事、历史、道德规范和价值观，” 美国哈斯克尔印第安民族大学专门教授北美洲原住民历史和文化的教授艾瑞克·安德森说（Eric Anderson）。
印第安孩子入学前后四个月对比
林赛·蒙哥马利（Lindsay Montgomery）是《生存的印记：从实物遗存看美国印第安人学校》一书的作者。
有两件（组）物品令她印象深刻：一个是寄宿学校的学生用传统印第安珠绣方法制作的有基督教教堂图案的药袋，另一个是学生们制作的一套穿着传统印第安服装的皮革娃娃。
“娃娃可以让她们想象自己穿上这些衣服的样子。” 蒙哥马利说：“在这里，我们看到印第安儿童可以拥有一些狭小空间，来表达让他们引以为骄傲的民族传统。”
For Lindsay Montgomery, author of the book Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, two things she has studied speak powerfully about this experience. One is a medicine pouch beaded with the image of a Christian church, made by a boarding school student employing indigenous handicraft; the other is a set of leather dolls students made that wear traditional Indian dresses, which “would have helped children imagine themselves”. “There we can see some space, however tiny it was, where native kids could express their own traditions in which they took pride,” says Montgomery, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.
但这样的空间不是经常有的。
在写书的过程中，蒙哥马利偶然听说了一个名叫克拉拉的印第安女孩的故事。华盛顿州的寄宿学校的克拉拉被老师发现教其他学生用传统方法编篮子。于是，这位老师用一把带金属边的木尺打她的手，一直到打出血。
But such space was not always available. During Montgomery’s research for the book she came across the story of an Indian girl named Clara who attended Tulalip Boarding School in Washington state. Caught teaching her fellow students how to weave traditional Indian baskets, she was hit repeatedly on the knuckles with a metal-edged wooden ruler until her fingers started to bleed.
由于资金匮乏、人满为患，寄宿学校的学生有时候甚至不得不共用毛巾、杯子和床，这导致了沙眼、麻疹和结核病的大爆发。1918-1919年间的大流感也重创了寄宿学校。
很多时候，家长直到孩子去世后才得到校方通知。孩子们在痛苦和孤独中死去，他们被埋在学校的墓地里，而棺材也是学生们做的。
1912年，卡莱尔学校的学生们在田地劳作，后面是他们的老师
20世纪20年代，加拿大政府负责印第安人事务的副督学邓肯·坎贝尔·斯科特（Duncan Campbell Scott）说：“寄宿学校里印第安孩子的死亡率比原住地要高得多。但这并不会让政策发生任何改变。”
“Indian children … in the residential schools … die at a much higher rate than in their villages,” Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian government’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, said in the 1920s. “But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.”
各种证据表明，斯科特的这个观点和托雷斯并无二致。
鲜为人知的是，卡莱尔学校在1879开学后不久，加拿大政府就派代表参观了卡莱尔和其他几家寄宿学校。代表团返回加拿大时称赞寄宿学校是“解决印第安人问题的一种人道和慈善方式”，并且强烈建议本国政府如法炮制。
“这是种族屠杀（genocide），用强迫手段把一个种族的孩子们从他们的原生环境中移植到另外一个环境，这符合现今联合国对种族屠杀的定义。” 托雷斯说。
What is little known is that back in 1879, the year Carlisle opened, Canadian government representatives visited it and other boarding schools and returned to Canada lauding what was seen as a “humanistic and philanthropic way to solve the Indian Problem”, to quote Torres, himself of Native descent. That, Torres believes, is genocide, if one considers the United Nations definition, which he says includes forcibly removing children and placing them into institutions outside their family and culture.
今年6月，应索菲娅·特托夫侄孙女的邀请，托雷斯参加了索菲亚遗体迁回故里的工作。当他们一层一层地清除泥土时，一个小小的木制棺材出现了。此后，托雷斯暂时离开了现场，让索菲亚的后人和他们的祖先“单独相处”。
1901年，索菲亚第一次踏上卡莱尔的土地，到她离开，整整120年过去了。
托雷斯说：“和索菲娅在一起的孩子，无论是生前在一起读书的，还是死后与她葬在一处的，都没机会做自己的选择。是时候回家了。”
记者：赵旭
编辑：陈月华
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