These are actual handcuffs used by the U.S. government to restrain Native American children when removing them from their families to send them to the Indian boarding schools where their identities, culture and right to speak their Native languages were forcibly stripped away from them.
The Cultural Center & Museum located on the campus of the Haskell Indian Nations University, tells the full, and often cruel, story of Haskell’s painful past. Opened in 2002, the Center features the permanent exhibit 'Honoring Our Children Through Seasons of Sacrifice, Survival, Change and Celebration.' Among the artifacts currently on display is a heavy lock and key from the on site jail used to punish unruly students. Soon the handcuffs will be included among the artifacts, adding their own chilling testimony to the practices used by early educators to 'kill the Indian and save the child.'
The diminutive handcuffs, used to restrain captured Indian children, were donated to the Cultural Center by a white man who had the handcuffs for years but said that he no longer wanted to have them in his possession. “He seemed relieved to get rid of them,” said the Museum curator.
The curator continued, “I was shocked and afraid to touch them."
A number of elders and leaders, conducted a modest ceremony the next day around a medicine fire blessing the painful reminder. Women from the Creek and Choctaw Nations, provided a tiny handmade quilt in which the handcuffs were reverently wrapped.
The handcuffs are a tangible example of the history between Native people and the U.S. If those handcuffs could talk, they would tell some terrible stories.
A spokesman for the Museum said, "It’s good to have these sorts of things on display in the Cultural Center. They tell the REAL story of who truly paid the price.
*George Santayana
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