A brief timeline of Pacific Northwest boarding schools
1792. Snohomish tribes meet explorer Captain George Vancouver.
March 3, 1819. U.S. Congress passes the Civilization Fund Act to provide “against the further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes.” It tasks “persons of good moral character” to instruct Native Americans “in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation; and for teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic.”
May 11, 1847. Father Eugene Casimir Chirouse, a French priest, embarks on a “2,000-mile journey from Westport, Kansas, to Walla Walla, following the Oregon Trail.”
1853. Settlers build a sawmill at Tulalip Bay.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/a-brief-timeline-of-pacific-northwest-boarding-schools/
Survivor’s story: Snohomish man, 76, lives with boarding school trauma
TULALIP — Often during morning mass, “a handful of kids” would go limp and hit the church floor, passed out from hunger.
“We were always hungry,” said Matthew War Bonnet Jr., 76, of Snohomish, a survivor of the St. Francis Indian School in South Dakota. “That’s what I remember — being hungry all the time.”
Sometimes, he said, you could get a full meal from the priests’ quarters if you washed their dishes.
Otherwise, the food mostly consisted of a yellow or white “mush,” depending on the meal. The best eating came on Sundays: cornflakes in the morning and bologna sandwiches for lunch. War Bonnet remembers bologna being the only meat War Bonnet remembers the school served.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/survivors-story-snohomish-man-76-lives-with-boarding-school-trauma/
‘Genocide our people survived’: Tulalip school fueled generations of pain
TULALIP — There was no use running away, Harriette Shelton Dover recalled, when the Tulalip Indian School matron thrashed her with a horse whip from her neck to her ankles, swinging “as hard as she could.”
“Years later,” she said, “I found out that kind was also used in penitentiaries and outlawed. But it was used on us. And what were we doing? We were 9 years old and we were speaking our language.”
Matthew War Bonnet can still picture the priest’s “Jesus rope,” a thick cord with strands coming off it. He was a 6-year-old boy when authorities took him to the St. Francis Boarding School in South Dakota.
“We were hit with that and their razor straps as well,” said War Bonnet, now 76, a Snohomish resident of Sicangu Lakota descent, in testimony before a U.S. House committee in May. “One priest even used a cattle prod to hit us.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/genocide-our-people-survived-tulalip-school-fueled-generations-of-pain/
Unearthing the ‘horrors’ of the Tulalip Indian School
TULALIP — One night at the Tulalip Indian School, someone woke Rosemary Fryberg and eight other children, handing them brown sacks to pack their things and ushering them out of the dormitory.
“No, I didn’t know where I was going, I really didn’t,” said the elder, fondly known around Tulalip as Grandma Rose, in an interview with historians 60 years later.
After a long train ride, they stopped at a platform deep in a desert, she recalled. There was no breeze in the basin of sand and sagebrush, and it was hot. It was another 70 miles by horse-pulled wagon from Lovelock to Nixon, Nevada. There, at the Pyramid Lake Sanatorium, Fryberg spent the next year of her life — despite not being ill. She was 11.
Fryberg became one of tens of thousands of Native children severed from their families under false pretenses, caught up in a U.S. government campaign of cultural genocide that lasted well over a century. Authorities uprooted generations from traditional ways of life. Fryberg spent her childhood shuttled between boarding schools across the West, as she recounted before she died in 1995.
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/unearthing-the-horrors-of-the-tulalip-indian-school/
