Cultural Warfare: The Early Fight for Lakota Youth and Identity
- 14 hours ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 9 hours ago
Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. 1900. You could find these schools throughout the entire country.
Lakota culture is passed down generation by generation. Through an oral tradition, the values and wisdom of ancestors are shared with each successive youngest one. From a very early age, the youth—revered as wakȟáŋheža, or sacred beings—are taught to ride horses, to cook traditional recipes, to draw a bow, and to craft intricate designs using porcupine quills. It’s these traditions that bind the Lakota to the natural resources they walk upon and the living beings they walk alongside.
The Shift from Open Warfare to Cultural Warfare
When the colonizers came, the changes were subtle at first. The Lakota stood their ground and resisted the settlements that threatened the balance with nature they fought so hard to achieve. Thriving on the plains was only possible through a delicate understanding of the surrounding ecosystem, taking only what you need. However, the thirst for expansion from the European settlers only grew. Once lines were crossed, tensions escalated. Treaties were drafted before being broken. New treaties were drafted with increasingly meager offers for the Lakota, and these promises were also broken.
Between 1854 and 1890, the Lakota and the U.S. exchanged many battles, victories, and losses. The massacre at Wounded Knee thrust the Lakota into a new era: a 20th century of isolation and reservations. Here, the open warfare morphed into cultural warfare. The government sought to break the Lakota spirit through the law. The Code of Indian Offenses in 1883 criminalized Lakota spirituality, ceremonies like the Sun Dance, and the practices of medicine men. Soon after, the Dawes Act of 1887 fractured the reservation lands into individual private plots, a calculated move to destroy the communal, tiyospaye (extended family) living structure.
Attempts to force the Lakota to embrace modern American culture and European heritage met fierce resistance from elders who saw the blatant erasure of Lakota tradition and the values at its core. Frustrated by this resilience, the government changed its tactics. The youth became the target for change.
The Horrors of the Boarding Schools
Like a number of North American tribes, many young Lakota were uprooted from their families and their community to be moved into government and church-run schools. The guiding philosophy of these institutions was brutally clear, summarized by the system's architect, Capt. Richard Henry Pratt: "Kill the Indian, save the man."
The teachings were alien to the Indigenous youth, and so was the Christianity imposed upon them. The stripping of identity was immediate. Children's long hair—a sacred symbol of identity and mourning in Lakota culture—was forcibly cut. Their traditional clothes were burned and replaced with military uniforms. Students were physically punished for speaking Lakota or comforting each other in their mother tongue, and they were forced to take English names.
These century-old schools will sometimes re-emerge in current headlines through the agonizing discoveries of mass unmarked graves of children who were reported “missing.” Their ties were severed from their family tree with no way to stay in touch. By the time the surviving Lakota returned home, the damage had been done. The bond with elders had faded through time, severely damaging the passing of the torch of legacy.
The Indian Relocation Act
In 1956, during the federal "Termination" era, the U.S. government finally began to see that earlier policies hadn't fully worked; systemic abuse of the Lakota identity had worn on even the proudest communities, but the culture stubbornly survived. In an attempt to dissolve reservations entirely, the Indian Relocation Act was devised.
The policy was framed as an opportunity, but the underlying intent was riddled with the parasites of contempt: “Native Americans are isolated and aren’t adopting the American ways of life. Let’s relocate them to cities so they can learn and integrate into civilized
society.”
If the foundational idea was dangerous, the execution was disastrous. Thousands of Native American families and individuals were displaced into starkly different urban environments, forced to integrate into an alien system with no support structure. Stripped of the tiyospaye—the extended family and community network that had forged the Lakota’s strength—individuals were left entirely alone. Homelessness exploded among Native American populations in these cities. Yet, even in this isolation, resistance grew. These very challenges ultimately propelled the growth of civil rights organizations like the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.), born in the urban centers to fight back.
Surviving the Unsurvivable
The resilience of the Lakota identity through these devastating times must be celebrated. It’s through the fight for recognition, the resistance to censorship, and the intergenerational passing of knowledge that Lakota culture defied extinction. However, the consequences of these policies still deeply scar the youth of this century.
