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Show 150 X. DINE BIKEYAH from Navajo culture. Students could never speak Navajo, wear Navajo clothing, or play the old Navajo games. Child labor kept the schools going in large part. Whippings enforced the discipline that the school officials thought was needed. If whipping did not work, students were placed in confinement, sometimes alone in black rooms. The dining room was hardly more cheerful than confinement. Uniformed students, often forbidden to talk at the table, ate what food the schools could buy with meager funds or grow with the labor of weak students. It is no wonder that bars were placed on dormitory windows and policemen stood at the doors. Children escaped in spite of these controls, though, choosing a long walk through the harsh desert weather over the prison life at the boarding school. As more parents suffered the loss of a child and heard the horror stories of those who escaped, Navajo resistance to forced education turned into outright defiance. At Round Rock in 1892, for instance, Agent Shipley ran into trouble when he tried to recruit students. A Navajo leader, Black Horse, had aroused the local Navajos to resist the agent. Shipley soon found himself inside a trading post, circled by angry fathers. It took a detachment of soldiers to put down the "insurrection" and rescue the agent. The army warned Shipley that taking school children could cause more serious trouble than this, and the army refused to catch Black Horse's band. Missionaries, like the one shown here, became a common sight on the reservation in the late nineteenth century. During this time, churches chose the Navajo agents and took charge of the schools. Photograph courtesy of the Library of the State Historical Society of Colorado. |