Buried Secrets Podcast

Chief James H. Red Cloud, grandson of the famous Chief Red Cloud who allowed the Jesuits to set up a school on Lakota land, addresses the 1958 graduating class of Holy Rosary Mission and a Jesuit father. Credit: Courtesy of the Red Cloud Indian School and Marquette University Holy Rosary Mission/Red Cloud Indian School records

 

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools

This week on Reveal, we’re bringing back a two-part investigation with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) about boarding schools for Native children and the United States’ effort to come to terms with an educational system that was designed to “kill the Indian and save the man.” ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember has been reporting on these boarding schools for more than 20 years. Much of her work focuses on the role the Catholic Church played in shaping federal policy toward Native people. The church was given more than 10,000 acres of tribal land by the federal government, as well as access to money that had been given to tribes through treaties with the U.S. government to build and operate the schools. In part one of this investigation, Pember takes us to the Catholic-run Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which is now trying to bring truth and healing to its community despite the open wound from the school’s history.

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DIG DEEPER

📝 Buried Secrets: Red Cloud takes the lead in uncovering boarding school past. Read.

📝 Red Cloud Indian School will dig for graves. Read.

📝 The Catholic Church siphoned away $30M paid to Native people for stolen land. Read.

📝 Deaths at Chemawa. Read.

📝 ‘Sometimes we hear the voices of children playing there.’ Read.

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