Living as I do within the historic boundaries of the Lake Traverse Reservation, I've met people who lived through the end of the Native American boarding school era--and heard friends and neighbors' stories of family members, some of whom didn't survive the experience.
One friend in nearby West Central Minnesota was snatched off the Cheyenne River reservation into a boarding school in Pierre early in the 1970s, when he was still primary school age.
The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate is still working to bring Amos LaFramboise and Edward Upright back to their famiied and community; LaFramboise was the first Native child to die at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. (There's a GoFundMe page for Repatriation from Carlisle Indian School Cemetery set up by SWO tribal archivist and historian Tamara St. John to cover "costs associated with the travel and other aspects of the gatherings that will be taking place when they are brought home September 15th to 19th next month").
Worth your time to learn more about the movement to address this painful legacy? An article published Thursday:
Biden administration, advocates ramp up efforts to address Indian boarding schools’ painful legacy in Minnesota and other states
By Ada Radelat, MinnPostWASHINGTON — Time spent at an Indian boarding school in South Dakota led to decades of struggles for Shakopee resident George McCauley, one of thousands of Native American youth who attended the schools.
Unlike other Indian youth who were coerced to leave or seized from their families so they could be assimilated into white American culture, McCauley, a member of Nebraska’s Omaha tribe, chose to attend the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota. His reservation had no high school, and at age 15 his only other choice was attending an all-white school in the next town where he felt he would not be welcomed.
But McCauley says the boarding school failed to provide what he needed at a crucial time in his life. He recalled being summoned to the principal’s office one day, where he was given a slip telling him to go to his dorm room. The dorm supervisor then came by and said, “I have some bad news to tell you: Your mom died last night.”
“There was no kind of nurturing, there was no way for me to grieve,” McCauley said. “It took me 50 years to realize I had some serious abandonment issues.”
McCauley said he was spared the brutal physical, mental and even sexual abuse that Indian children were subjected to since the institutions were established in the mid-19th century — a brother-in-law from South Dakota experienced physical abuse at a school. But he says he still has trauma that is intergenerational, that has affected his relationship with his daughters.
McCauley, 71, belongs to the last generation of Indian boarding school students. While experiences vary, the survivors all share a painful legacy. And there’s an urgency to capture their stories before it’s too late.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit headquartered in Minneapolis, is among the groups seeking to collect survivor stories and educate the public about how and why the federal government removed Indian children from their homes and communities — and the lasting impact the campaign had on Indigenous people across the U.S.
The coalition has been trying to collect information about the boarding schools from the federal government and the religious organizations that also ran boarding schools.
“The way the children were treated could be classified as genocide,” said Samuel Torres, the coalition’s deputy CEO.
Torres said federal government archives have been accessible and contain reams of information, but there’s still a lot of research that must be done, especially regarding the church-run schools.
“Some Christian churches have met us with open arms,” Torres said. But others have not. Still, Torres doesn’t “want to name names.”
Yet the frustration is palpable.
“We still don’t know where about 60% of the boarding schools were,” he said.
Without that knowledge, the history of those schools and their impact on Native Americans is incomplete, said Torres, whose organization is digitizing thousands of pages of records. “And we know that this (missing) material needs to be out there for the public,” he said.
The coalition estimates that at least 24 boarding schools existed in Minnesota. It is still seeking to verify the location of others in the state.
A member of the Nahua tribe, Torres said the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition moved from Colorado to Minneapolis “because we find that Minnesota and the Twin Cities are unique, with many beautiful expressions of the urban Indian experience.”
“We see (the state) very much as a central place,” Torres said, in part because it is home to many tribes and to many Native Americans from other states in the Midwest.
McCauley said he came to Minnesota in 1971 because he impulsively changed a train ticket that was to take him back to his reservation in Nebraska.
He was homeless and lived on the streets, eventually becoming an alcoholic, he said, adding that a poor education was partly to blame for his struggles.
“They weren’t there to educate you,” he said of his boarding school’s teachers and administrators. “I graduated high school in 1971 with a 10th grade education.”
McCauley overcame his addiction and is proud he’s been sober for 47 years. But he is still grappling with the past.
“The trauma that we experienced is still felt today,” he said.
To help in its efforts to document and create a digital archive of a little-known chapter in American history, the coalition and other Indian advocates have looked toward Canada and to what the neighbor to the north has done to reconcile itself with its past.
In 2008, Canada approved legislation that created the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It gathered about 7,000 statements from residential school survivors and in 2015 released a scathing report that concluded the school system amounted to cultural genocide.
Then, in 2021, the discovery of 200 graves — believed to belong to mostly children — on the site of a former boarding school at Kamloops, British Columbia, touched off an effort that resulted in the identification of thousands of unmarked graves on the grounds of former residential schools.
Efforts to heal the trauma
The U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee, on a bipartisan basis, approved a bill in May modeled on the Canadian legislation. It would help unearth the documents needed to fully tell the story of the boarding schools and “develop recommendations for the federal government to acknowledge and heal the historical and intergenerational trauma caused by the Indian Boarding School Policies.”
Introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, the bill is co-sponsored by about two dozen Democrats, including Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, and several Republicans.
The legislation would establish a 10-member bipartisan commission whose members would be appointed by the White House and leaders of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.
The commission would be helped in its investigation and documentation of assimilation policies at Indian boarding schools by advisory boards composed of the survivors of those schools, their family members, other Native Americans – and a member from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The commission would develop recommendations for the federal government to acknowledge and heal what it says is the “ongoing historical and intergenerational trauma passed down in Native families and communities and provide a forum for survivors to speak about these human rights violations.”
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