As a Diné child, I relished the time spent traveling to lectures that
my dad delivered to museums and universities about his work as a
photographer. The old Kodak projector slides dropped into focus with the
rhythm of his lessons: Navajo people are the land, Navajo culture is Navajo survival. Native culture is Native survival.
His talks would share what it meant to be Navajo. As he shared about
his work he would illustrate the legacy of Federal Indian Policy and its
treatment of Native people. I still couldn’t imagine at that age what
the U.S. government boarding schools had done to attack the very essence
of my identity and pride in my culture I held so dear. Each time he
delivered a talk, he asked a simple question that rings in my head to
this day: “how many schools do you know that have graveyards next to
them?”
That question rings in my head again today, and the past several
weeks as multiple First Nations and Indigenous communities have
uncovered mass graveyards of people— many of them children— at the sites
of former residential schools in Canada.
Here at the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, we’ve long stated the importance of providing a land acknowledgement before events, gatherings and meetings.
Whether in-person or online, the purpose of a land acknowledgement is
meant to restore and name the ancestral and continuing bond between
Indigenous peoples and the land, air, minerals, water, vision that we’ve
stewarded since time immemorial. We see this as a small first
step toward being in right relationship, toward true Native sovereignty.
Today, we ask you to join us in recommitting to acknowledging not only
the proper stewards of our land, but the specific violence that keeps
that space in settler occupation. We ask you to commit to naming and
contextualizing the violence that undergirds the places we call home.
For
most Americans, the idea of a boarding school might invoke images of
affluent college prep schools, or repositories for disobedient students.
For Indigenous people in the US and Canada, the term brings forth
terror. Indigenous boarding schools were a tactical experiment,
supported by the US War Department and the Department of Interior.
After hundreds of years of attempted ethnic genocide, Indigenous people
maintained their hard-fought connection to land and culture. The U.S.
government made the strategic decision to wage a new kind of war. Alongside the implementation of the Dawes Act of 1887, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a targeted effort to obliterate the ties children had between their culture and land before they were fully developed.
The continuing slogan of the first boarding school, Carlisle Indian
School was “kill the Indian, save the man.” A phrase illustrative of the
genocidal agenda at the center of these institutions. The school opened
in 1879 and swiftly became a “success” by white supremacist standards
as the children were taught Euro-centric education and were severely
punished for practicing any part of their culture, language or
Indigenous way of knowings.
According to the
National Boarding School Healing Coalition,
“between 1869 and the 1960s, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of
Native American children were removed from their homes and families and
placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the
churches.
Though we don’t know how many children were taken in
total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools,
and by 1925 that number had more than tripled.”In Canada, from the 1800s to 1996 over 150,000 children
were removed from their families and communities. Regardless of which
side of the colonial border, Indigenous children were sent away from
everything they knew and forced to assimilate into the settler culture.
For countless Indigenous children, this meant pervasive abuse,
psychological torment, cultural erasure and, as the recent headlines
illustrate, murder.
In times like these I think of my dad, the photographer, how
do you photograph the invisible? How do you document the erased? The
Indian Boarding School Project created ghost generations. I
have never wanted to become accepting of this horrific legacy in the
U.S. education system. Children “graduated” from these hellish places to
find a country that regarded them as subhuman, no matter how hard
they’d had the culture beaten out of them. Many tried to return home and
found they could no longer communicate with their own families, or
practice their most sacred rites. Many lay in graveyards next to these
schools, waiting to be found. We see now that the ghosts of this trauma
want to be seen.
So how can we begin to be in right relationship? Here are some first steps:
Research the location of boarding schools near you.
Since Carlisle proved to be “successful,” the U.S. and Canadian
governments funded the opening of these schools across both countries,
many times partnering with churches like the Catholic Church to operate
these schools. For these reasons there are hundreds of schools that were
opened across the U.S. and Canada.
Indigenous Nations and communities have long carried the living
history and trauma of the boarding school era. It is time for allies to
help in fighting for justice and truth. Without truth we will never
reach the hope of reconciliation.
Yours in solidarity,
Jaclyn Roessel, Director of Decolonized Futures & Radical Dreams
U.S. Department of Arts and Culture
