The Washington Post has a wonderful multi-media research piece that attempted to count the number of Native American children killed at the horrifying Indian boarding schools.
The number they came up with 3,100, but it’s very difficult to know for sure given the disturbing level of incompetence and lies that infect the record keeping at these schools. This is three times higher than the Dept. of Interior figures released earlier this year. Both of these numbers could be too low.
The purpose of these schools was not education, but cultural genocide. Kill the Indian, and save the man, was the idea. This reeducation was brutal. Children had their hair cut with knives, forced to eat soap if they spoke the language, and there were also beatings. From the Washington Post:
The Post’s investigation found the deaths by drawing on hundreds of thousands of government documents that also revealed how children were beaten and harshly punished if they did not adhere to strict rules in the classroom — and in the fields, laundry rooms, kitchens or workshops where they often were forced to spend half their days.
“These were not schools,” said Judi Gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, whose relatives were sent to Indian boarding schools. “They were prison camps. They were work camps.”
The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents, records show. Dozens died in suspicious circumstances, and in some instances, the records provide indications of abuse or mistreatment that likely resulted in children’s deaths. A 10-year-old boy was fatally shot in 1912 at an Alaska school, a newspaper reported. A girl in Oregon “fell from a high window there & was brought home a corpse” in 1887, according to a teacher’s diary.
Some children also were sexually abused.
As someone of Native descent, none of this is shocking to me. The Native community has talked about it for decades, but it is good that this terrible story is finally being told to non-Natives. Earlier this year, President Biden offered a long-overdue apology for these atrocities.
A lot of Americans think this stuff is ancient history, terrible acts carried out a long time ago. But as often is the case of atrocities committed against Natives, it’s not. The Post researched schools going back to 1828, but also up to 1970. Some of these schools didn’t close until the 1980s. These children were forcibly removed from their families, often by soldiers or police, and it wasn’t until 1978 when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation that parents could refuse to send their children to these torture schools.
These were things going on after the birth of some reading this post. Certainly not in some misty distant past.
The Indian school atrocity is among the many things that right-wingers want to bury once again and keep out of school curriculums, museums, etc. Knowledge of what happened is not about making white people feel bad or putting down America. Our history is a complicated one with dark periods and light periods, all part of a true story. The purpose of America is supposed to be to provide an example of an equal heterogeneous democracy, something we haven’t always lived up to. Hopefully, at some point, we get back to striving for that in a post-Trump world. Part of that is being honest about what we were so we are conscious of it and less likely to regress to those times, especially at a time when we seem to be moving back in that direction.
Own up to our history, and understand what it means today. Our future depends on it.
The last word goes to Cheryl Bear:
