For
the first time, a bill to create a Truth and Healing Commission on
Indian boarding schools has reached the floor of the U.S. Senate. A
companion bill is working through the U.S. House. The concept of an
official panel to look into the abuses of boarding schools has surfaced
previously but failed to take hold. The action comes as the National
Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is launching a database of documents, photographs, and other records to help survivors and others connect understand the full weight of the boarding school era. And an important event to promote healing from Canada’s residential school era is taking place in Ontario. Some voices in Canada are calling for residential school “denialism” be criminalized.
GUESTS
Fallon Carey (Cherokee Nation), interim digital archives manager for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
Webinar on the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill on 9.27.23
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) hosted a virtual conversation on the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act (S. 1723).
NABS is joined by U.S. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) and a guest panel featuring Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), Dallas Goldtooth (Lower Sioux Dakota Nation), Mato Wahuyi (Oglala Lakota), and Georgeanne Growingthunder (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes).
Learn how you can advocate for the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission Bill.
We have a right to know the truth of what happened in Indian boarding schools in the United States.
Over the course of a century, hundreds of thousands of our
children were taken or coerced away from our families and Tribes and
forced to attend government-sanctioned Indian boarding schools. These
schools were tools of assimilation and cultural genocide, resulting in
the loss of language and culture and the permanent separation of
children from their families. To date, there has never been an
accounting of:
the number of children forced to attend these schools;
the number of children who were abused, died, or went missing while at these schools; and
the long-term impacts on the children and the families of children forced to attend Indian boarding schools.
We have a limited amount of time to hear directly from survivors and
record their stories. A Congressional Commission is needed to locate and
analyze the records from the 523 known Indian boarding schools that
operated in the U.S. A Commission would also bring together boarding
school survivors with a broad cross-section of tribal representatives
and experts in education, health, and children and families to fully
express and understand the impacts of this federal policy of Indian
child removal.
Haudenosaunee boarding school survivors seek justice
Kanentiio, whose name means “handsome pine,” describes life at an Indian boarding school, also known as a residential school, in the 1960s.
The first such facility, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was founded
in the 1870s by military Capt. Richard Pratt. It was a way to
assimilate Native American children into “white” society and, in Pratt’s words, “kill the Indian to save the man.”
“The intent was to extinguish us as
Aboriginal people and destroy whatever sense of self-worth we had, and I
can say that they succeeded to a large degree,” Kanentiio said. “They killed our spirit. They killed us.”
Many students sent to these schools went missing. Last month, 215
children’s remains were discovered in British Columbia at one of nearly
500 boarding schools in Canada and the U.S.
The discovery has sparked renewed calls for justice from Indigenous
communities and for further investigations — forensic and archeological —
into more residential schools.
“It’s
high time that this American country recognizes the great value and
resource in its indigenous populations and celebrates and promotes and
supports,” said Michael Galban, curator at the Seneca Art and Culture Center at Ganondagan State Historic Site.
Last year, Democrats in the U.S. Senate introduced a bill that would
create a Truth and Healing Commission, which would investigate and
document past injustices of what they call the federal government’s
cultural genocide. So far, the bill has not progressed in any fashion.
Undoing this magnitude of injustice would take multiple long-term solutions, Galban said, starting with policy changes.
“It would involve language restoration,” he said. “It would involve environmental restorations. It would involve, in some cases, restoring people to their original homelands.”
It would also mean recording oral histories of survivors’ experiences.
“Every day, we’re losing the stories from the survivors as they age out and pass away,” he said. “Hopefully they’re sharing their stories with their families.”
Survivors’ stories Galban’s grandmother, Evelyn Evans Galban, was a residential school survivor.
In the 1920s, she was taken from her home in California and sent to
the Stewart Indian School in Nevada, where Galban said she experienced
abuse.
“The idea was that you could strip these
Indian children of their culture and their ideologies and create a new
cheap labor class that certain areas of the country could exploit,” Galban said.
During the school year, she was taught how to fold laundry, set
tables and make beds, he said. During school breaks, she couldn’t go
home.
“During the summers, these schools would
hire out the students under the guise that they would be learning how to
live amongst the whites,” Galban said. “But really, they were being farmed out to hotels and resorts to be their domestic labor.”
She attempted to run away multiple times. On one occasion, she was caught “in the middle of the winter. They took away her shoes and basically whipped her back to school with no shoes on,” Galban said.
Finally, with the help of a cousin, she managed to run away to Montana, Galban said.
No choice Indian boarding schools were compulsory at the time. It
would be another 12 years before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978
would give Native American parents the legal right to refuse their
children’s placement in these kinds of schools off reservations.
Until then, Native leadership and families were essentially held hostage by the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada.
“If there was ever, whether it be by
leadership or families, any action to stop or take their children
(back), they were often persecuted and arrested and faced problems for
that as well,” said Mohawk Grandchief Abram Benedict.
In 1966, Kanentiio was 11 years old when police and social services
took him from the St. Regis Mohawk Reserve near Ottawa, Canada, and sent
him nearly 350 miles west to the Mohawk Institute in Brantford,
Ontario.
He’s now one of about 40 remaining Mohawk survivors.
At the school, Kanentiio said the abuse came not just from staff but
also from older students who he said were encouraged to discipline the
younger students.
After a few years, he managed to escape — first by way of expulsion: He and his classmates were non-compliant, troublemakers.
“Our rude behavior was our survival,” Kanentiio said. “We couldn’t just simply be compliant. We had to fight, physically if necessary, to stop these things from happening.”
Still, when he was expelled, he wasn’t sent back to the reservation.
He was put into foster care and bounced around from one home to the
next until he eventually managed to run away back home, he said.
More than 50 years later, Kanentiio wishes he could confront those
personally responsible for the brutal treatment, abuse, and for ripping
families apart.
“It’s a terrible thing to walk around believing that you’re not truly a human being or a complete human being,” he said. “Something deep and wonderful has been lost. And that’s the terror of this thing.”
kakichihiwewin project director S.A. sat down virtually with Congresswoman Deb Haaland (future Cabinet member) on November 24th to talk about the Truth & Healing Commission, her experiences and the importance of this telling our truths.
Today, I held a virtual roundtable with Tribal leaders. It’s the start of @joeBiden’s & my commitment to listening to our Indigenous communities as we work to address environmental injustice and live up to this country’s trust responsibility. https://t.co/BmktgyvsqA
