Native American boarding school survivors tell of abuses

[PatrickforB]

Ever since I read Robin Kimmerer's brilliant book, Braiding the Sweetgrass, I have been bothered by the concept of these boarding schools. Kimmerer tells the story of how the US Army came onto their reservation and rounded up all the kids, forced them to go to a 'boarding school' back east, where they were essentially stripped of their culture and language.

Now, according to Kimmerer, who is Potawatomie, there are only NINE elders in that entire nation who even know the tribe's native language.

I saw a post here in early May that talks about that, and of course there was the story of a mass grave in a Canadian 'school.'

Here is an update: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/native-american-boarding-school-survivors-tell-abuses-2022-07-09/

This is an excerpt (good for Deb Haaland!!!):

ANADARKO, Okla., July 9 (Reuters) - U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Saturday met with elderly survivors of Native American boarding schools, her first stop on a year-long tour to hear first-hand accounts of widespread abuses committed at those institutions.

Haaland met with survivors at the Riverside Indian School, the nation's oldest federally operated boarding school for Native Americans, collecting oral histories of the atrocities they faced.

The schools were centers of forced assimilation that began in the early 1800s and continued through the 1970s, with the stated goal of wiping out Native American culture.

Definitely worth reading, and Braiding the Sweetgrass is GREAT. It really is.

[wnylib]

1. There is much more to the American boarding

school experience than being stripped of Native language and culture. The American schools were just as abusive as the Canadian schools. The system of boarding schools began in the US. We set the template that Canadian schools followed - federal money given to churches to run the schools. No oversight. No established requirements for "teacher" qualifications. Limited medical care. Inspections on paper only but not actually carried out.

So, the result was helpless children at the mercy of poorly educated, untrained staff whose mission was to destroy culture, language, and personal identities of people they already hated. What could go wrong?

What went wrong was that dregs of society were drawn to employment in those schools - people who had no skills or qualifications to work elsewhere and none for the schools, either. Paid extremely low wages, they took for themselves anything that was donated to the school - clothing, food, medicine - and let the kids go without.

Sanitary conditions were abysmal, causing rampant illness and deaths with no medical care. Sick children forced to carry out chores instead of resting to recover. Malnutrition. Physical and sexual abuse were common. Children learned only the basics of reading and writing. Their job training consisted of hiring them out to local farms and homes for domestic labor indoors or manual farm labor outdoors. The money they earned went directly to the schools, supposedly for food, clothing, and medicine, but usually into the hands of administrators for extra cash. Who would ever find out if give a damn? They were just "Injun" kids.

The ones who survived were turned loose at age 16 with no culture to belong to. Whites would not accept them. They no longer fit into the culture of their birth and families. They had been taught to hate and reject those things.

They went out into the world after growing up with no nurturing, no affection, no culture, and very minimal work skills. But they had an abundance of pain, self hatred, and bottled up anger from their abuse. Some turned to drugs and alcohol to escape the pain, and prostitution to make money. Prostitution was one skill that had been taught to them in the schools.

They had children of their own but no example of how to nurture and care for those children. Some acted out the abuse on their own children that they had experienced in the schools, creating social problems among Native people that had not existed with them before.

The fortunate ones found their way back into their cultures and learned to cope with their abuse through the advice of elders, through healing rituals and ceremonies, and had community help in raising their children.

Canada acknowledged their abuse and developed a "Truth and Reconciliation" program. The US did not. Only now, with a Native woman as Secretary of the Interior is the US just starting to face up to its horrific and shameful treatment of Native children.