Boarding schools physically separated children in the formative years of their lives from the influence of family and tribe. Many states also disproportionately removed children from homes and put them into non-Native foster homes. In 1978 The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) was passed. It is a federal law that seeks to keep Indian children with Indian families. It was passed in response to compelling evidence of the high number of Indian children that were being removed from their families by public and private agencies and placed in non-Indian families.
In my research I located 406 boarding schools in 31 states. NABS recently expanded on that research and launched an interactive digital map in partnership with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation with information and locations of 523 Indian boarding schools in the United States. They included Hawaiian schools. This three-year research project resulted in the largest list of U.S. Indian Boarding Schools ever compiled.
Between 1869 and the 1960s, 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.
The boarding school era represented a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide and human rights abuses. They rank somewhere between dungeons and death camps. They were overcrowded, understaffed, underfunded, operating with limited resources, places where diseases ran rampant.
The lasting legacy of boarding schools is Intergenerational Trauma and Historical Trauma which is collective emotional and psychological injury over a lifespan and across generations, resulting from the cataclysmic history of genocide. It is the legacy of numerous traumatic events a community experiences over generations. Over successive generations Native people have experienced traumatic assaults that have had enduring consequences for our families and communities. It is a legacy of Historical Unresolved Grief resulting from the historical trauma of genocide, grief that has not been expressed, acknowledged, and resolved. It is Disenfranchised Grief, grief that can’t be publicly mourned. An elder asked me, “Where and when do we tell our family that we have been sexually molested? At Thanksgiving dinner?” He implies that there was and still isn’t a good time and place to tell their stories. Many survivors I interviewed experience what is called Boarding School Syndrome, PTSD including recurring intrusive memories, nightmares flashbacks, detachment disorder, deficient knowledge of traditional culture and cultural skills. Trouble sleeping, poor anger management, deficient parenting skills, tendency to abuse alcohol or drugs.
I always end my presentations by speaking about what healing from boarding school trauma looks like. The survivors I interviewed said a return of their tribal language and spirituality, “Language is medicine,” I was told, “Culture is treatment.” Healing is complex and will be up to individuals, communities, and tribes. Of great hope is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s reintroduction of S. 1723, a bill to establish a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States. I call the US American Indian boarding school era America’s best kept secret.
Let the truth telling begin.
