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Sat 19 Feb, 2005 02:31 pm
Quote:February 19, 2005
Barbed wire gets cold reception at Indian school
By William McCall
The Associated Press
PORTLAND - Barbed wire turned out to be the wrong way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Chemawa Indian School, which serves tribes across the nation.
Construction crews began setting up an 8-foot-high fence, topped with barbed wire, around the 200-acre campus in Salem as the boarding school was preparing to celebrate its anniversary this weekend. The barbed wire was being removed Friday following protests.
The construction caught students and school advisory board members by surprise, resulting in a student demonstration and letters from parents to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ordered the $63,000 project.
"Chemawa means `happy home,' " student Jeremy Cummings told the Statesman Journal newspaper in Salem. "It doesn't make a happy home with a fence around it."
Nedra Darling, a BIA spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said the barbed wire atop the fence is temporary and was installed by the contractor during construction.
"It will be taken off," Darling said Friday. "I don't know how it got on the work order, but they'll put up the fence as fast as they can and then remove it."
The fence is intended to improve campus safety and define the campus grounds.
"We certainly understand the sensitivity of this," Darling said.
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Definitely a slow news weekend
I guess the story should have explained more about WHY people were upset about the barbed wire.
I was expecting to read that barbed wire was once known as Devil's Rope, and is responsible for all but eliminating the free range principle--which of course, by which the Native American Indians mostly lived.
But instead, the article said nothing about that--and in fact simply stated that some felt a fence shouldn't have been put up to begin with, in which case, why is the article addressing only the barbed wire atop the fence and not the whole fence?
Very poor piece of journalism.
Well, Indian schools in this part of the country used to be virtual prisons. The kids were not permitted the use of their own language, amongst other issues. They were certainly not permitted to leave, though some did. And some of them died attempting to find their way home.
Anything you might have heard from Australia's "Rabbit Proof Fence", applies to Indian Schools in the American Southwest.
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