The New Yorker:

As the first Native American Cabinet member, the Secretary of the Interior has made it part of her job to address the travesties of the past.

By Casey Cep

When they would not let their children be taken, they were taken instead. A hundred and thirty years ago, nineteen men from the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, in Arizona, were arrested for refusing to surrender their sons and daughters to soldiers who came for them armed with Hotchkiss guns. For years, the United States had been trying to make the Hopi send their children to federal boarding schools—the children sometimes as young as four, the schools sometimes a thousand miles away. The intent and the effect of those boarding schools was forced assimilation: once there, students were stripped of their Native names, clothing, and language and made to adopt Christian names, learn English, and abandon their traditional religion and culture.

Hopi parents had tried placating the authorities, saying they would enroll their children soon, then hiding them whenever the soldiers returned. Indian agents, meanwhile, had tried withholding food and water from Hopi families to force their compliance; when that failed, they turned to physical force instead, sending soldiers onto tribal lands to round up all the school-age children. But some parents continued to resist, and, in the fall of 1894, the U.S. Army made the arrests. The nineteen men, who were from Orayvi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America, were marched, with their hands bound, a hundred and fifty miles to Fort Wingate, in New Mexico, then transported by horse, train, and ferry to California, where they were imprisoned for nearly a year on Alcatraz Island. In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs recommended holding “those Indian prisoners in confinement at hard labor until such time as in the opinion of the said military authorities who might be in charge of them, they should show beyond a doubt, that they fully realized the error of their evil ways and evinced in an unmistakable manner their determination to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its Indian wards.”

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