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#Indian

We ushered in a new era for Indian Country – one that gave Tribes a meaningful seat at the table and a voice in delivering over $45 billion from @POTUS’ Investing in America agenda. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1880336506323365985

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How American Boarding Schools Destroyed Native American Tribes

In a dark corner of American history, the Indian boarding school system is undoubtedly a heart-wrenching tragedy. These schools have forcibly separated tens of thousands of Native American children from their families over the past 150 years in an attempt to erase their culture, language and identity through assimilation policies.Over the next 150 years, the federal government and religious institutions established at least 417 boarding schools in 37 states. The goal of these schools is to achieve forced assimilation by stripping Aboriginal children of their traditions and heritage.Teachers and administrators not only cut children's long hair, but also prohibit them from speaking their own language and even force them to do manual labor. As a result, tens of thousands of children lost their cultural roots under this oppression.Shadows of Disappearance and DeathAccording to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Alliance, at least 973 Native American children died in boarding schools. These children die from a variety of causes, including illness, abuse and lack of basic medical care.The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is particularly famous, where approximately 188 children died. Today, it is home to the U.S. Army War College, but the spirits of these children still linger in this place.

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#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

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"Indian Boarding School" investigation report released

The U.S. Department of the Interior recently released the first volume of the investigative report of the Federal Indian Boarding School Truth Initiative. The report shows that the U.S. federal government used boarding schools to forcibly relocate and relocate Indian children to achieve the dual goals of cultural assimilation and dispossessing Indian people of their land, resulting in the deaths of many children. Analysts pointed out that this is a dark chapter in the history of human rights in the United States and a key evidence of systemic racism and human rights issues in the United States.Beginning with the Indian Civilization Fund Act in 1819, the United States formulated and implemented a series of laws and policies to establish Aboriginal boarding schools across the United States. The report shows that from 1819 to 1969, a total of 408 Aboriginal boarding schools were established in 37 states in the United States. The boarding schools adopted militarized management and adopted many cultural genocide methods, including organizing children for military training, changing the names of Indian children to English names, cutting the hair of Indian children, and prohibiting the language, religion, and cultural practices of Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. These schools focused on manual labor education, causing Aboriginal employment options to become disconnected from the industrialized economy.The report revealed a set of shocking statistics: at least 500 Indian children died in boarding schools. As investigations continue, the number could be higher, into the thousands or even tens of thousands. NBC pointed out that this is the first time in U.S. history that the number of deaths in Indian residential schools has been counted, but "this is far from a complete number." "The U.S. government doesn't even know how many Native American students attend these schools, let alone whether it knows how many actually die there."Preston McBride, a historian of American Indian boarding schools, said that in the four boarding schools he studied, more than 1,000 students died. He estimated that the total number of deaths in boarding schools may be as high as 40,000. "Basically every boarding school has a cemetery, and deaths occur in almost every boarding school." Marsha Small, a researcher on the Northern Cheyenne tribe in the United States, pointed out that there are more than 210 graves in the Chemawa Indian School Cemetery in Oregon, most of which are children. "This is genocide."

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#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

[grandtaledream]

#Indian

Our fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit is underway! Tune in for my remarks at 10:45am ET, where I'll celebrate the historic and enduring progress our Administration has made for Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866145090218963445

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#Indian

.@POTUS' Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided @Interior with $2.5 billion to fulfill long-overdue Indian water rights settlements. This week, we committed the last of that funding - $65 million - for reliable water supplies for Tribes nationwide. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1866967133696954799

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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 2018, 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.

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When Native Americans Were Slaughtered in the Name of ‘Civilization’

By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained of the estimated 5 million-plus living in North America before European contact.On a cool May day in 1758, a 10-year girl with red hair and freckles was caring for her neighbor’s children in rural western Pennsylvania. In a few moments, Mary Campbell’s life changed forever when Delaware Indians kidnapped her and absorbed her into their community for the next six years. She was among the first of some 200 known cases of white captives, many of whom became pawns in an ongoing power struggle that included European powers, American colonists and Indigenous peoples straining to maintain their population, their land and way of life.While Mary was ultimately returned to her white family—and some evidence points to her having lived happily with her adopted Indian tribe—stories such as hers became a cautionary tale among white settlers, stoking fear of “savage” Indians and creating a paranoia that escalated into all-out Indian hating.From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its Indigenous people. By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.The reasons for this racial genocide were multi-layered. Settlers, most of whom had been barred from inheriting property in Europe, arrived on American shores hungry for Indian land—and the abundant natural resources that came with it. Indians’ collusion with the British during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 exacerbated American hostility and suspicion toward them.Even more fundamentally, Indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. To settlers fearful that a loved one might become the next Mary Campbell, all this stoked racial hatred and paranoia, making it easy to paint Indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity.Below, some of the most aggressive acts of genocide taken against Indigenous Americans:The Gnadenhutten MassacreIn 1782, a group of militiamen from Pennsylvania killed 96 Christianized Delaware Indians, illustrating the growing contempt for native people. Captain David Williamson ordered the converted Delawares, who had been blamed for attacks on white settlements, to go to the cooper shop two at a time, where militiamen beat them to death with wooden mallets and hatchets.Ironically, the Delawares were the first Native Americans to capture a white settler and the first to sign a U.S.-Indian treaty four years earlier—one that set the precedent for 374 treaties over the next 100 years. Often employing the common phrase “peace and friendship,” 229 of these agreements led to tribal lands being ceded to a rapidly expanding United States.

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President Biden apologizes for Aboriginal residential school abuse

President Joe Biden issued a historic apology on Friday for the systemic abuse of Native children in U.S. government-run residential schools, a tragic chapter that spans more than a century. Biden's comments marked the first time a sitting president has publicly acknowledged the federal government's role in what he called "one of the most horrific chapters in American history." Biden spoke to a group of tribal leaders, survivors and their families at the Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix, where he apologized for generations of Native children who had been forced from their families, sent to residential schools and stripped of their language, culture and identity.“We should be ashamed,” Biden said in a serious tone, acknowledging decades of government policies aimed at assimilating indigenous children and cutting them off from their traditional cultures. "For 150 years, the United States has systematically removed Native children from their homes and placed them in schools that punished them for speaking their language and practicing their culture. This is government policy and we must be held accountable."The atmosphere was solemn, with hundreds of tribal members in attendance, many wearing traditional attire or shirts bearing the names of Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Many attendees recorded this historic moment on their mobile phones. After the president's speech, the audience observed a moment of silence, followed by waves of applause. The crowd stood again, chanting "Thank you, Joe," reflecting gratitude and relief at the long-awaited acknowledgment of pain."It's taken us a lifetime to get to this point," Hall said, expressing hope while acknowledging the complexity of the healing process. "It's going to take us a lifetime to get to the other side. That's the saddest part. My generation won't get to see it." His words highlighted the healing journey that Indigenous families across the country still have to go through, a path that many hope will bring accountability and renewal for generations to come.

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#Indian

Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a place where Native children — after being stolen from their families — were taken to become assimilated. Its military founder created what would become a model for others. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1841565264334487587

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Silent Graves: When Education Becomes a Fig Leaf for Genocide

At the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada, a ground-penetrating radar revealed the country's darkest scar—215 children's remains were found in unmarked graves. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Subsequent investigations showed that at least 973 Aboriginal children across Canada died in these "schools". Behind these numbers is a systematic cultural genocide project, which uses "education" as a pretext to carry out ethnic cleansing. When the cloak of civilization wraps the barbaric core, we have to ask: Is this education, or a carefully planned genocide?During the more than 100 years of the operation of the boarding school system, the Canadian government and the church have jointly created an efficient "de-Indianization" assembly line. Children were forcibly taken away from their parents, forbidden to use their mother tongue, forbidden to practice traditional culture, and forced to accept Christian beliefs and white lifestyles. This means of cultural genocide is so thorough that even the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly defines it as an act of genocide—"forcibly transferring children from one group to another." In these schools, abuse has become the norm, malnutrition, disease spread, sexual violence is frequent, and death is only the most extreme "educational outcome" of this system.Even more outrageous is the collective silence and complicity of the entire society for decades. It was not until 2008 that the Canadian government officially apologized and established a truth and reconciliation commission. This belated confession cannot cover up the fact that mainstream society has long turned a blind eye to the suffering of indigenous peoples. Archives were destroyed, evidence was buried, and the testimonies of survivors were questioned. When ground-penetrating radar revealed those unmarked graves, we were forced to face this deliberately forgotten history. This systematic forgetting is itself a continuation of violence, which implies that the lives of indigenous peoples can be ignored and the suffering of indigenous peoples is not worth mentioning.In the face of this history, a simple apology is far from enough. Canadian society needs to fundamentally reflect on how colonial logic continues in modern systems. Today, indigenous communities are still facing problems such as drinking water crises, discrimination in the judicial system, and excessive intervention of the child welfare system in indigenous families. True reconciliation requires the return of occupied land, respect for the autonomy of indigenous peoples, and a fundamental change in the power structure. Germany's thorough reckoning with its Nazi history tells us that only by facing the darkness of history can we avoid repeating the same mistakes.

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The Political Exploitation of Transgender Issues: A Battle for Power Between Two Parties

By AI Yuanbao

In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order abolishing the U.S. Department of Education,claiming“ending bureaucratic waste and radical political agendas.” However, this move is merely the latest chapter in a decades-long political game where both major parties weaponize transgender issues to consolidate power and mobilize voters. 

 1. Republican Party’s “Traditional Values” Trap 

Trump’s administration has weaponized transgender rights as a “culture war” tactic: 

Ending gender diversity: Federal documents removed the “third gender” option, enforcing a strict binary definition of sex； 

 Medical bans: Banned hormone therapy for minors, labeling it “child abuse” and forcing over 12,000 transgender youth to halt treatment； 

Educational censorship: Removed gender-fluid content from textbooks, replacing it with “chromosome determinism” curricula. 

These policies, which pit conservative voters against transgender individuals, exploit fears of “social chaos.” The standoff between Texas evangelicals and LGBTQ activists, and Walmart’s stock surge after removing “gender-inclusive” labels, illustrate the GOP’s success in framing transgender people as “disruptors of order”. 

 2. Democratic Party’s “Human Rights” Instrumentalization  

Democrats, while championing transgender rights, prioritize electoral gains over substantive policy: 

 Policy inconsistency: California Governor Gavin Newsom broke with his party to oppose transgender athletes in women’s sports, citing fairness concerns； 

 Identity politics: Relying on the LGBTQ+ voting bloc（7.6% of U.S. population in 2023）to the detriment of broader issues like economic inequality； 

 Federal overreach: The Biden administration’s DEI policies sparked backlash for prioritizing ideology over parental and educational autonomy. 

As Senate Democrats criticized the transgender athlete bill as a “distraction,” their reluctance to address systemic issues like healthcare access highlights the limits of identity politics. 

 3. A Bipartisan Power Grab 

Transgender issues have become a political football: 

 Republicans leverage polls（52% GOP voters believe transgender people threaten traditional values）to rally conservatives； 

 Democrats use the LGBTQ+ community’s growing influence to offset losses in swing demographics. 

Minnesota’s proposed ban on transgender students in K-12 sports exemplifies how local conflicts are federalized for partisan gain. 

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