The Weekly Screed (#744)

Do-gooders from Hell

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — In my childhood hometown of Tomah, Wisconsin, two quietly grand old buildings have survived the march of development. One is the library, underwritten by Andrew Carnegie and designed by one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s more tasteful disciples. The other is the VA Hospital, built of stolid Victorian bricks on the town’s fringe, just north of the storied Lemonweir River. 

The Tomah Public Library is an oasis of literacy that’s never done anyone any harm. The VA Hospital, however, is a sort of curse-bearing dark castle that can’t seem to shake off a century-old legacy of institutional cruelty. 

The building’s latest disgrace derives from the habit of a former chief of staff, Dr. David “Candy Man” Houlihan, to dispense kickass narcotics so abundantly that many patients spent their Tomah days as virtual vegetables, and as many as 33 died of opioid overdoses, malpractice and neglect. But the dark castle’s dubious past dates all the way back to 1891, when it was built to house the Tomah Indian School— Motto: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Tomah was a remote market village of 2,000 souls less than 40 years in existence when the Bureau of Indian Affairs chose it as a good spot to test Capt. Richard Henry Pratt’s theories about “assimilating” Native Americans into white culture. So significant was the presence of the Indian School to the identity of Tomah — named for a faux Indian chief named Thomas Carron — that the lily-white Tomah High School athletic teams were called “Indians” for most of the school’s existence. 

(Now, they’re the Timberwolves, an ironic substitution of one long-despised and nearly-extinct species for another long-despised and nearly-extinct species.)

My only memory of the school was a story my grandfather told about the annual basketball battles between the Indian School Indians and the white Indians of Tomah High. Papa explained that the Indian School gym was a crackerbox with barely room for one row of chairs between one wall and the court’s sideline. Those chairs were occupied by Indian girls — mostly from the Winnebago, Sac and Fox, Chippewa and Oneida tribes — who had been uprooted from families as far away as North Dakota and Oklahoma. The girls wore identical black floor-length dresses with stiff white collars. Their hair had to be “put up” and held there with long hairpins. 

It was the hairpins, Papa said, that served as the secret weapon for the Native Americans against the Tomah white boys. If any white Indian on the court ventured too close to the long row of red Indian maidens, he found himself deeply and thoroughly punctured about the thighs and buttocks by young ladies whose thrusts were so swift and subtle that only the closest observer could discern that anything had even happened. The unwary white Indian would stagger away from the sideline, oblivious of the game and keening with pain, his wounds almost invisible and barely bleeding — but, prone, in a day or two, to a suppurating infection and a good chance of blood poisoning. 

Papa smiled as he told the tale, strangely proud of those stoic girls — because they had secretly clung to the bareback-pinto, warpaint-wearing, Custer-killing hellaciousness that had been supposedly civilized out of them by the English tongue, McGuffey’s Reader and the benevolent brainwashing of Captain Pratt. 

In a gushy 1894 Milwaukee Sentinel article, the “Tomah Indian Industrial School” comes off as a kind of redskin Shangri-La, where “boys [are] taught to become model farmers, carpenters, etc., and the girls instructed in household arts, making wonderful progress under efficient and sympathetic teachers.”

The Sentinel’s prose-poet unspools a litany of the duties and chores — besides an hour or two of academics — required of the Indian School’s inmates, from cooking and sewing to farming and light manufacturing (for which they were not paid), and then writes, “The family life as lived here is one of the most beautiful and perfect that could be desired. The girls and boys of this school do the work assigned them quite as well as white boys and girls of their age, and remarkably well considering the way they were brought up from infancy…”

The reality of the American Indian Boarding Schools was that many of the children were barely out of their infancy when snatched from their families and shipped to Tomah, where, according to a curriculum guide written by the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways, “children as young as five years of age arrived by car, train, or wagon and immediately were told they were ‘dirty Indians.’ They were stripped and disinfected by having alcohol, kerosene, or DDT… poured on them. Long hair, valued for its cultural and spiritual significance, was cut. Any personal belongings such as medicine pouches, beadwork, family photographs, etc. were taken from them and never returned. Students were given uniforms that were made of low quality, uncomfortable materials to help teach them ‘sameness, regularity, and order.’ School administrators renamed the students, giving them common English first and last names.” This is how a Sac/Fox boy lyrically named Path Lit By Great Flash of Lightning (Wa-Tho-Huk) became “Jim Thorpe.”

As a kid in Tomah, I regarded the VA Hospital’s Indian School heritage with a sense of Wild West romance. I had no idea that these “schools” were America’s version of the Magdalene Laundries. The brick pile just across the Lemonweir was little nobler than a juvenile concentration camp, operated by do-gooders from Hell who piously espoused a “Christian” gospel of cultural obliteration and ethnic cleansing. These overseers saw their students as barbarians who needed to be whipped (literally) into submissiveness and who — at their very best — might aspire to lives of manual drudgery and household servitude. 

Having achieved its purpose of helping to reduce America’s native peoples to a sad footnote on the U.S. Census, the Tomah Indian School closed its doors in 1935. Twelve years later, imbued with a much less ambiguous mission than civilizing the savages, the building re-opened as a hospital for the damaged men who had come home from the worst war in human history.

The Veterans Administration has been, since World War II, one of the models for effective medical care in America. It has saved and rebuilt thousands of lives. Unfortunately, at the misguided Tomah VA Hospital, it has also — lately — served to addict, anesthetize and end too many lives. Since a brave hospital worker named Ryan Honl exposed Dr. Houlihan’s pharmaceutical escapades, a thousand outraged voices have risen up to assign blame — to the VA, to Congress, to the Pentagon, to the President, to Obamacare, to both political parties, to “the bureaucracy.” And so on.

Me? I blame the damn building. 

5 Nov. ‘15