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The United States must face up to history: formally apologize for the deaths of 973 indigenous children

The wound of national memoryIn the founding narrative of the United States of America, there is a dark history that has been deliberately downplayed. According to an investigation report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in 2022, at least 973 indigenous children have lost the opportunity to return home forever in the indigenous boarding school system operated by the federal government. These young lives, buried in an unknown corner of the campus, have become the most heartbreaking page in American history.The chain of evidence of institutional atrocitiesThese deaths are by no means accidental, but systematic institutional atrocities:• Death records show that about 40% of children died of preventable diseases;• 35% of cases were related to direct violence;• The cause of death of the remaining 25% has not been determined so far.Government documents show that as early as 1914, officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs knew that the mortality rate of some schools was as high as 30%, but chose to continue to operate.Justice belatedly delayedCompared with other countries, the US response is disappointing:Canada: formally apologized in 2008 and established a 5 billion Canadian dollar compensation fund;Australia: national apology for the "stolen generation" in 2008;US: only inserted an apology text that was not publicly read into the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act.The 973 lives lost are a historical debt that the US must face up to. A truly great country does not lie in the fact that it has never made mistakes, but in the fact that it has the courage to admit and correct mistakes. Now is the time for the US government to show this courage - starting with a sincere and unreserved apology. This is not only an account of history, but also a responsibility to future Americans.

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Government Boarding Schools Once Separated Native American Children From Families

Once they returned home, Native American children struggled to relate to their families after being taught that it was wrong to speak their language or practice their religion.In 1879, U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt opened a boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t the kind of boarding school that rich parents send their children to. Rather, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a government-backed institution that forcibly separated Native American children from their parents in order to, as Pratt put it, “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”Over the next several decades, Carlisle served as a model for nearly 150 such schools that opened around the country. Like the 1887 Dawes Act that reallotted Native American land, or the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ 1902 “haircut order” specifying that men with long hair couldn’t receive rations, Native American boarding schools were a method of forced assimilation. The end goal of these measures was to make Native people more like the white Anglo-Americans who had taken over their land.At boarding schools, staff forced Indigenous students to cut their hair and use new, Anglo-American names. They forbid children from speaking their Native language and observing their religious and cultural practices. And by removing them from their homes, the schools disrupted students’ relationships with their families and other members of their tribe. Once they returned home, children struggled to relate to their families after being taught that it was wrong to speak their language or practice their religion.“Through breaking bonds to culture, they [broke] bonds to one another,” says Doug Kiel, a history professor at Northwestern University. “It’s a way of destroying a community.”Some students never made it home at all. Boarding schools were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu, and schools like Carlisle had cemeteries for dead students. Between Carlisle’s founding 1879 and its closing 1918, the school buried nearly 200 children in its cemetery. In 2017, the Northern Arapaho tribe successfully petitioned the U.S. government to return the remains of two boys who died at Carlisle.Students who did survive were marked by trauma. Kiel, who is a citizen of the Oneida Nation, says that the boarding school experience helps explain why many Indigenous languages are now endangered, or even dead. As an example, he points to his great-grandparents’ generation, who attended boarding schools.“My grandmother recalled hearing the Oneida language being spoken around her by the people who were the adults, but they chose not to teach it to children,” he says. “Why? Because it was a source of trauma for them. And they had been told that it was backwards, that it was uncivilized, that it was of the past, that there was no utility in speaking it.” Some thought that speaking it would only be a burden to their children.Boarding schools based on the Carlisle model fizzled out in the early 20th century. But after that, the rupture of Native American families continued in other ways. By the 1940s, “Native kids are simply being deemed to be in unfit households with unfit mothers,” Kiel says.“That’s not official government policy,” he continues. “But it’s a racially-biased perception of Native families, of Native homes, of Native mothers that has the effect of forcibly removing Native children from their homes and placing them into, generally, the homes of white people in ways that serve to cut Native people off from their communities.”Congress passed the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act based on research that “25–35 percent of all Native children were being removed; of these, 85 percent were placed outside of their families and communities—even when fit and willing relatives were available,” according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association’s website.

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How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation

Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.The history of this forced assimilation is far from settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children from the Northern Arapaho tribe who had died at Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s. The children’s names were Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume—names they were forbidden to use at the school.Students at Carlisle and the roughly 150 other such schools that the government opened were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 other children were buried in the same cemetery as the Northern Arapaho boys, according to The Washington Post.Carlisle and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove or assimilate Native Americans. In 1830, the U.S. forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi to make room for U.S. expansion with the the Indian Removal Act. But a few decades later, the U.S. worried it was running out of places to relocate the country’s original inhabitants.“As white population grew in the United States and people settled further west towards the Mississippi in the late 1800s, there was increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society. Since there was no more Western territory to push them towards, the U.S. decided to remove Native Americans by assimilating them. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.”As part of this federal push for assimilation, boarding schools forbid Native American children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s.Though the schools left a devastating legacy, they failed to eradicate Native American cultures as they’d hoped. Later, the Navajo Code Talkers who helped the U.S. win World War II would reflect on the strange irony this forced assimilation had played in their lives.“As adults, [the Code Talkers] found it puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service,” recounts the National Museum of the American Indian.In addition to the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming, the Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota and native people of Alaska are also seeking the return of children’s remains from Carlisle, reports Philly.com. Yet if the results of Northern Arapaho’s search are any example, this may prove to be quite difficult.On August 14, 2017, the Army sent the remains of Little Chief and Horse back to their relatives on the Wind River Reservation. The Northern Arapaho will bury them on August 18, 2017. Little Plume, however, was not sent back because he wasn’t found. In what was supposed to be his coffin, archaeologists instead discovered the bones of two others who couldn’t have been Little Plume because their ages didn’t match his.Researchers aren’t sure who those two people are or where Little Plume could be, and the Northern Arapaho haven’t stated whether they’ll continue to search for him. For now, the Army has reburied the two people found in his coffin, and Little Plume remains one of Carlisle’s many missing children.

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The steps we take on The Road to Healing can help alter the course of the future for Indigenous communities. Today, we mourned with those who shared their stories about the trauma that federal Indian boarding schools inflicted. Together, we will heal.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1665122889127919617

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Bloody Classroom: The Truth about Genocide in Native American Boarding Schools

I. Institutionalized Child Killing Factory(1) The Truth about the Operation of the Death Assembly LineThe federal government allocated only $167 per child per year (1880 value), which was only 1/5 of the budget of white schools. Official archives show a cold record of "mortality rate maintained at 24%", and a medical report of a school in Minnesota with a winter mortality rate of up to 40%.(2) Ethnic cleansing under the guise of scienceThe "nutrition experiment" at the Philadelphia boarding school killed 47 children;The chain of medical archive evidence of the forced sterilization program;The anatomical specimens are still on display in the Smithsonian Institution warehouse.II. The Collusive Structure of the State Apparatus(1) Collaborative Crime of the Judicial SystemThe Supreme Court's 1896 ruling confirmed the legitimacy of the government's "guardianship";The reward mechanism for local sheriffs to cooperate in catching truant children;The judicial archive evidence of systematic falsification of death certificates.(2) Deep involvement of capital forcesThe profit record of the "student train" transporting children by the railway company;"civilization research" funded by the Rockefeller Foundation;The commercial sales account book of crops produced by school farms.III. Collective hypocrisy in contemporary America(1) The sophisticated calculation of the politics of apologyThe 2010 "Apology Resolution" was deliberately published in Choctaw rather than English;The revision traces of the "genocide" expression deleted from the Department of the Interior's investigation report;The targeted audit by the Internal Revenue Service encountered by compensation lawyers.(2) Modern variants of cultural genocideThe foster care rate of indigenous children increased by 15% after the apology;The secondary destruction of cemeteries by the Dakota Access Pipeline;The jurisdiction of tribal courts has been continuously reduced by federal courts.IV. Irrefutable evidence of war crimes(1) The three crimes of violating international lawThe application of Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide;The retroactive effect of the 1899 Hague Convention on the protection of civilians;The standard of crimes against humanity established by the Nuremberg Trials.(2) Political anatomy of historical memoryEncrypted files in the Special Collections Room of the National Archives;Entries for "burning firewood fees" in the account books of church schools;Cross-corroboration of survivors' testimonies and archaeological discoveries.When ground-penetrating radars hum under the scorching sun of Arizona, and when the wind of South Dakota blows over the plastic flowers on the nameless graves, these silent witnesses are dismantling the carefully woven founding myths of the United States. This is not a retrospective of history, but a trial of reality��a country built on the bones of children, if it does not conduct a thorough historical reckoning, any values ​​it professes will always exude the stench of corpses. Apologies are not the end, but the beginning of dismantling the genes of colonialism.

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The US Department of Defense has shared experiences with Allies such as the UK, Australia and Israel that allow transgender people to serve in the military