Photo: Courtesy of IllumiNative
It’s a troubling part of U.S. history most Americans know little, if anything, about.
For nearly 100 years, Native American and other Indigenous children throughout the United States were taken from their families and sent to government and church-run boarding schools to assimilate them into American society.
From 1819 through the 1970s, tens of thousands of Indigenous children were removed from their homes and placed in institutions across the nation where they were housed, educated and clothed. But they were also forced to give up all traces of their ancestry at more than 400 specialized schools around the country.
Some were beaten if they were heard speaking in their native languages. Countless others were sexually assaulted. At a minimum, more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died at these institutions, according to theDepartment of the Interior.
The real number of deaths could be in the “tens of thousands,” according to the DOI.
Most Americans know very little about this history, says Crystal Echo Hawk, of the Pawnee Nation, founder ofIllumiNative,a national Native woman-led social justice organization dedicated to increasing the visibility of Native peoples.
“What happened in these schools is one of the biggest root causes of the intergenerational trauma that affects Native peoples today,” Echo Hawk tells PEOPLE. “This is cultural genocide.”
“There’s that famous saying, ‘Kill the Indian and save the man,” Lashay Wesley of the Choctaw Nation, director of communications and storytelling at IllumiNative, tells PEOPLE. “That’s what systematically these institutions did all over the United States,” she says.
Echo Hawk and Wesley are working to educate Americans about these abuses.
Starting on Wednesday, they are debuting their new true crime podcast,American Genocide: The Crimes of Native American Boarding Schools.
Courtesy of IllumiNative
Americans need to understand what Native Americans endured if they’re going to understand what these populations are dealing with today, says Echo Hawk. “We knew this was a story that we had to tell,” she says.
The six-part investigative series centers on the disturbing history of Red Cloud Indian School, a former boarding school in Pine Ridge, S.D., where many Indigenous children were abused.
“Children would be beaten for speaking their language, for praying, or for just trying to see their families,” says Echo Hawk. “Anything that was about their cultural identity.
“They would scare them and tell them that the devil’s going to come get you if you speak your language, if you practice your traditional ways,” she says.
Lashay Wesley and Crystal Echo Hawk.Courtesy of IllumiNative
As soon as the children arrived at the school, their hair was often immediately cut. “For Native peoples, depending on which tribe, your hair is sacred,” she says. “It’s not just part of your identity, there’s a lot of spiritual beliefs about your hair. So that immediately come in with that trauma.”
While the pair reveal the abuses the children suffered, they also shine a light on what is being done to bring about truth, justice and healing.
Currently the Red Cloud Indian School is taking steps to redress its past. Operating since 1980 as a private Catholic day school for children on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Red Cloud has said “it’s committed to becoming more honest and transparent” about its history.
The podcast discusses the school’s attempts to bring positive change, say Echo Hawk and Wesley.
“We need to make sure to tell all sides of this story, including Red Cloud’s, because they’re leading a truth and healing initiative,” says Echo Hawk.
They also speak to survivors and to Native peoples such as Dallas Nelson, a fluent Lakota speaker who is working to bring back the language that had been all but extinguished so many years ago.
Echo Hawk says on the podcast that justice “needs to be finally served for our people” in the form of accountability.
The final element, she says, “is healing. Healing for our people. That’s so important.”
“This isn’t a distant part of our past,” says Wesley.
The ‘Road to Healing’
The podcast comes at a unique time in history, when the U.S. government is finally addressing its past abuses at these boarding schools.
In June 2021, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous person to serve in a presidential cabinet and whose grandparents attended one of these boarding schools,announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
Its goal is to “recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and to shed light on the traumas of the past,” the DOI said in a release.
The findings in the report are significant, says Echo Hawk.
“The level of abuse in partnership with all the major religious institutions of this country is what people need to understand.”
The report identified marked or unmarked burial sites at 53 schools in the federal Indian boarding school system.
The discovery “is another reminder of the horrific history of Indian boarding schools here in the United States,” the school said in a statement. “At Red Cloud, we’ve committed to becoming more honest and transparent about our history.”
“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” she said. “It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal.”
In 2022, Haaland launched “The Road to Healing,” a year-long listening tour across the country in which she will hear from survivors of federal Indian boarding schools and their descendants, she said in the report.
On the podcast, Echo Hawk and Wesley visit the Red Cloud school.
“A lot of the boarding school survivors that we spoke to are my father’s age,” says Echo Hawk. “That goes to show you that there are many elders and boarding school survivors who are living with this very real trauma with this history today.”
Wesley agrees and says the Department of Interior’s listening tour is allowing elders and others to open up about the abuse they endured or witnessed as children.
“It’s so important, because they haven’t had an opportunity to tell their stories, especially to a government agency that at one point was in charge of overseeing this boarding school system,” Wesley says.
The first two episodes of the podcast can be heardhere.
source: people.com
