OFFICIAL REPORT — Genocide of Native US Indian Nations
Understanding The Brutal Origins of America
The US Government has released a 106-page Report (Volume 1) of the continuing Federal Indian Boarding Schools Initiative, ordered by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in June 2021.
The United States intentionally forced Indigenous families to send their children to school as part of an assimilation system that reached every corner of the country, according to the report.
Download the Full Report here.
Blind Truths — America’s Indigenous Boarding Schools | Fault Lines
Researchers located the records on 408 schools that received federal funding from 1819 to 1969, and another 89 schools that did not receive money from the government. About half the schools were run for the government by or supported by churches of various denominations. Many children were abused at the schools, and tens of thousands were never heard from again, activists and researchers say.
REPORT FINDINGS
The Report found and confirmed the earlier known facts:
1) Beginning in 1871, Congress passed laws ordering parents to send their children to school, and authorised the Interior Secretary to withhold rations from those who refused.
2) The official objective of the US was to sever cultural and economic ties of Indigenous people to their land.
3) The assimilation of Indian children through the Federal Indian boarding school system was intentional and part of that broader goal of Indian territorial dispossession for the expansion of the United States.
4) The boarding school system was “expansive”, consisting of 408 “federal Indian boarding schools” across 37 states and territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawaii.
5) The US used a twin policy of land dispossession and school systems to separate Indigenous people from their land and culture. This was the cheapest and safest way to take Indigenous land for the benefit of white people.
6) The US policy extended beyond boarding schools to include at least 1,000 other federal and non-federal institutions, including American Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories that also aimed to educate Indigenous people.
7) Boarding schools were supported by both federal money and funds obtained from tribal trust accounts intended maintained by the US for the benefit of Indigenous people.
8) The intentional removal of Indigenous children from their communities was described as “both traumatic and violent”. They were sent to institutions that were run in a “rigid military fashion with heavy emphasis on rustic vocational education”.
9) The schools deployed “systematic militarised and identity-alteration methodologies”, including renaming children from Indigenous to English names, cutting their hair short, requiring uniforms, discouraging or preventing religious and cultural practices, and organising children into units to perform military drills.
10)The institutions also forced children to perform manual labour, including sewing garments and agricultural production.
11) When the children spoke their language or practised their culture, they faced severe punishment, including solitary confinement, humiliation, flogging, withholding food, whipping, slapping, and cuffing. Older children were forced to punish younger children. When they ran away and were caught, they faced physical punishment including whipping.
In summary, “the federal policies that attempted to wipe out Native identity, language and culture continue to manifest in the pain tribal communities face today”.
Until this Report, the US government had yet to provide any true accounting of the legacy of the schools, which used education to change the culture so tribal land could be taken. Families were forced to send their children to the schools.
Similar official genocide had also happened In Canada, where the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation had earlier confirmed 215 children’s graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
THE BIG PICTURE IN THE US CONTEXT
Native American children were forcibly abducted from their homes and put into US Government-funded and Christian-run boarding schools from the mid 1800s into the 1950s. The US Government policy was designed to “civilise” indigenous Indians and to stamp out Native cultures in a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide.
In 1869, the US Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners (BIC), the forerunner of the current Board of Indian Affairs (BIA), which includes the federal boarding school policy. A key Goal was “to Christianize the Native tribes and eradicate their culture and religion, primarily through removal of the children from reservation settings”.
In these federal boarding schools, Native indigenous children were held in isolation and dormitory-like regimented settings where they were controlled, neglected, and abused. They were punished for speaking their native languages, banned from acting in any way representative of traditional indigenous or cultural practices, stripped of traditional indigenous cultural clothing, with hair and all behaviors with artifacts reflective of their cultures forbidden and removed.
The Native children were systematically inculcated with shame for being Indian, taught their traditions and cultures were evil and sinful, and their religions and their life habits ridiculed. Bottom line, they should be ashamed of being Native Americans through self-loathing and emotional disenfranchisement for their own indigenous Indian cultures.
Without emotional homes and communities support, the Native children were neglected psychologically and frequently abused physically and sexually. Generations of these children became the legacy of the federal boarding school policy. Those who did not starve or beaten to death and managed to survive the “education” ended up post-traumatic, deeply scarred human beings with stunted mental health, lacking emotional and physical skills, without their own indigenous culture and language practices as well as parenting skills, family love and relationships, and traditional community interaction skills.
The US Congress had empowered the BIC with the legal authority to remove or coerce the removal of Native American children from their families for placement in boarding schools run by the government and Christian churches. The boarding school policy shifted from direct genocidal murder of indigenous Indian people to the “less hideous” and “more humane” genocidal policy with the same outcome of cultural genocide — the systematic destruction of indigenous Indian communities through the removal and reprogramming of their children. Parents were threatened with the loss of provisions and starvation or even jail for preventing the forced removal and “education” of their children at the federal boarding schools.
In the US Government-funded, Christian Church-run boarding schools, the fundamental principle was to teach Native Americans to reject their tribal indigenous Indian culture and adapt to white society, so as “to kill the Indian, in order to save the man.” This white supremacist racist policy initiative mandated and justified the removal of children from family and community, voluntarily when possible, and by coercion if necessary.
Prevalent mortality from the widespread abuses drove many Native children to escape from their boarding schools. Those captured were punished by physical restraints, torture, beatings and isolation in dark cellars with unlighted and poorly ventilated outbuildings designed as jail cells. At one Carlisle Indian School alone, there were 1,842 desertions and nearly 500 deaths from 1883–to 1918.
There were some 500 boarding schools in 18 states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin. As recent as 1973, there were still 60,000 American Indian children in these federal boarding schools outside Indian Reservation lands.
The US genocide of Native Indians resulted in the death of millions. In California alone, the genocide of the indigenous Native people from 1846–to 1873 reduced their population from 150,000 to around 30,000, according to the book “An America Genocide” by Benjamin Madle, who meticulously narrated the various US Government’s systematic and brutal campaigns to slaughter and enslave the Native people in California. Similar happenings occurred throughout the US.
From 1492 to before the 20th Century, the total death toll of Indigenous People has been conservatively estimated to be about 13 million due to the legacy of colonialism, racism, and genocide. It is unknown however how many were due to widespread malnutrition and starvation, as well as the pernicious effects of forced labour, alcoholism, declining fertility, despair, demoralization, and other factors.
SURVIVING GENOCIDE — LAMENTATIONS OF CHILDREN
Children in the Meadows and Wetlands
There are children in the meadows and wetlands,
Native children ran there to hide;
When teachers pulled and butchered their hair
When teachers stole their medicine bags
When teachers collected their moccasins
When teachers dressed them in strange clothes
When teachers beat them with boards and belts
When teachers starved them for being bad Indians,
The children ran to the meadows and wetlands.
There are children in the meadows and wetlands,
Hostages who were taken to Haskell
Who never saw their families again
Who never saw nine or eleven or tomorrow
Who didn’t make it home for summer vacations
Who couldn’t stop whooping and coughing
Who couldn’t learn English fast enough
Who wouldn’t fall to their knees often enough.
They ran ’til they fell in the meadows and wetlands.
There are children in the meadows and wetlands,
Hostages who were taken to Chilocco;
Where they ran from teachers’ fists and boots
Where they ran from bounty-hunters cages
Where they ran from high collars and hard shoes
Where they ran from lye soap in their mouths
Where they ran from day and night
Where they ran until wolves outran them,
Their teeth are in the meadows and wetlands.
There are children in the meadows and wetlands,
Hostages who were taken to Carlisle
Who got to build the school buildings
Who got Christian burials without coffins
Who got a mass grave with their friends
Who got plowed under for a football field
Who got embedded in concrete for the stadium
Who got to be the practice site for the Washington Redskins
Because they ran to the meadows and wetlands.
There are children in the meadows and wetlands,
Native children ran there to hide.
You can see their clothes in museums
You can see their pipe bags at the opera
You can see bands marching on their hallowed ground
You can see mascots dancing over their dead bodies
You can imagine their hair long and beautiful again
Safe from teachers and scissors at last;
These children in the meadows and wetlands.
© Native American Rights Fund (NARF) Review
Poem written by Suzan Shown Harjo, member of the Cheyenne/Muskogee Tribe who is an Activist for American Native Peoples
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