This recognition is a great nativistSupport of the liberty and welfare of native peoples More progress.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland delivered devastating testimony Wednesday about the U.S. government’s decades-long policy of forcibly removing Native American children from their families and putting them into violent, far-away boarding schools intended to assimilate them into christian culture.
“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by forced family separation and cultural eradication—were inflicted on generations of children as young as 4 years old and are heartbreaking,” (…)
The report marks the first time in more than 200 years that the U.S. has formally reviewed or even acknowledged the scope and breadth of its former policies aimed at erasing Native American culture, language and people.
The Interior Department ran hundreds of these boarding schools from 1819 to 1969 all over the country. Tens of thousands of children endured extensive psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Some died. Others simply disappeared. The goal of these schools, as the founder of one of the flagship boarding schools, Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, put it in 1879, was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” (…)
The department’s review of federal records found that the government targeted the removal of Indigenous children as part of a broader effort to take land away from tribes. The report also found that the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 schools across 37 states or then-territories, including 21 in Alaska and seven in Hawaii. (…)
“Like all Native people, I am a product of these horrific assimilation-era policies,” Haaland said, choking up. “My grandparents were removed from their families to federal Indian boarding schools when they were only 8 years old and forced to live away from their parents … until they were 13 years old.” (…)