Memories of Childhood

A commentary on the lives of two children around the world who are met with their first experience of discrimination of their communities and a discussion on the life-long scar such an ordeal leaves.

1. MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD Instances of racial and caste-based discrimination in the young lives of Zitkala Sa and Bama

2. Efforts by: Saumya Panwar, S7-B Submitted to: Ms. Gita Bhasin 2

3. Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. ~Aristotle 3

4. INTRODUCTION No man can live alone . He has to enter into relationships with his fellowmen for living a life. No man can break the shackles of mutual dependence. This begins perhaps between the embryo and the mother and continues till his last breath. For this need of a sense of fraternity, he creates a society. For his sense of belonging & authority, he divides these pieces of tectonic plates for different societies and further dissects these societies into groups of people who look similar, speak similar or profess similar, with boundaries manifested only in his imagination. And for the rights of those smithereens of his own fancy, he doesn’t think twice before becoming a bloodthirsty predator of his own species. If not in wars or battles, men who possess greater influence on minds and lands, habitually indulge in discrimination by reason of skin color, mother tongue, fraternity, only to air their pride, turning willfully blind eyes to the scars they leave on many a lives. 4

5. ZITKALA SA a Native American girl in residential school in the late-nineteenth century

6. NATIVE AMERICANS Years before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt. 6 (i) Shows the initial pilgrim settlers thanking the Native Americans for aid (ii) Depicts one of the many gruesome English-American wars

7. By the early 20 century, the American-Indian Wars had effectively ended, but at great cost. Though Indians helped colonial settlers survive in the New World, helped Americans gain their independence and give up land and resources to pioneers, tens of thousands of Indian and non-Indian lives were lost to war, disease and famine, and the Indian way of life was almost completely destroyed. WHAT ENSUED… Indian boarding schools were founded during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with mainstream Euro-American culture, while also imparting European style education. 7 (iii) In this forced admission of children into boarding schools, countless families were separated forever. Before After

8. But antiquities are witness that settlers or invaders have tried gaining control by destroying the people’s identity and stripping them off their culture ; i n short, Cultural Genocide … 8

9. AMERICAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS These boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to kill , remove, or assimilate Native Americans. They forbade the children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s . Students were also susceptible to tuberculosis and flu, thousands died and were simply buried in cemeteries at the schools. 9 (vi) Girls were forced to attend cooking classes (iv) An everyday residential school scene (v) Two sick friends sharing perhaps their last embrace

10. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” 30,000 Native American children were thrown into boarding schools between 1880 and 1902. Since their culture regarded one’s hair as sacred, the settlers began targeting them through their ethnic sentiments. Hair of the children taken to these schools were cut to make them ‘more civilized’. Many even suffered sexual abuse. Since traumatic impressions of childhood never fully heal, these children were scarred for life, like in Zitkala Sa’s case. 10

11. 11 Zitkala Sa writes with passion about what she experienced the day when her long tresses were chopped up. It is an incidence she would fail to forget, just like all other reminiscences of childhood. She can only mourn for the untroubled child she didn’t get to be. These ordeals collectively affected the psyche of many like Zitkala Sa so much that they later gave way to generations of families that were dysfunctional, with high rates of alcoholism, diabetes and other health issues and school drop out, continuing even to this day.

12. A blithe Tamil Dalit girl who receive her first encounter with untouchability 12 BAMA

13. 13 CASTE SYSTEM IN INDIA Dalit, meaning "broken/scattered" in Sanskrit and Hindi, is a term used for those aboriginal ethnic groups who have been subjected to untouchability. Since the creation of the caste system in Hinduism, they have performed spiritually contaminating work that nobody else wanted to do, such as preparing bodies for funerals, tanning hides, and killing rats or other pests. Gradually, the system that had been prepared for division of labor seeped so deep in the fabric of society that people lost all social mobility : individuals were born into, worked, married, ate, and died within those groups. Kshatriya Brahmin Vaishya Shudra Dalits

14. 14 There are first-hand accounts of Dalits not being allowed to eat or bathe at the same place as the other castes; people would consider themselves ‘polluted’ if touched by them or their shadows.

15. DALITS IN TAMIL NADU Ever since then, Dalits all over the country have been discriminated, ostracized and have even faced violence. During the mid-twentieth century, leaders like Immanuel Sekaran , Iyothee Thass , and even B R Ambedkar fought for their rights, gaining them equal access to public places, voting rights and reservation. Today , they account for 21 per cent of Tamil Nadu’s population, However , Dalits in the State continue to be at the receiving end; and there seems to be no let-up in atrocities against them. 15 (vii) “ Mooknayak ” is a 100 year old fortnightly started by Ambedkar in Tamil Nadu to raise Dalit issues. (viii) To this day, newspapers are filled with cases of lynching, violence and abuse against Dalits .

16. BAMA’S WOE F ateful was the day of Bama’s childhood when she came to terms with the reality of her caste. Earlier, she had just been a carefree child, fascinated by the clamor of the bazaar. But, when her brother tells her the truth behind their local chief carrying the package so far-flung from his body, nothing about it remained amusing. 16 When Annan told her that everyone asked for their address so that they could know their caste, Bama was filled with a concoction of puzzlement and a burning frenzy. She could not stomach the futility of the practice of untouchability; s he says, “The thought of it infuriates me.”

17. CONCLUSION 17 After these incidents, both our protagonists – Zitkala Sa and Bama, must have been deeply shaken. Zitkala Sa completely lost her spirit; she felt powerless like “one of the many animals driven by a herder.” As a child, her mother had always comforted her when she used to sob but this time, there was no one but her shingled hair all around. In Bama’s case, a firm resolve was set in her to earn the respect she deserved; her brother had told her that education was the only way to live with dignity and from that day on, she studied like her life depended on it, because in a way, it did. In both the stories, these ghastly incidents slayed the child somewhere within both of them and made them move towards adulthood, with all its drudgery and distress, faster than they should have had. However, what is empowering is the realization that both of them endured the turmoil to tell its story to the world and did not succumb to their circumstances.

18. A scar does not form on dying. A scar means I survived. ~Chris Cleave 18

19. 19 Let us join hands to protect the childhood of the world’s most precious assets!