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‘Slap in the face’: Federal cuts halt Indian boarding school digitization effort

About 75,000 pages of Indian boarding school records sit in online storage systems that “can’t be touched until we get new funding.” When Iko’tsimiskimaki “Ekoo” Beck’s colleagues at the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition traveled to Washington to digitize Indian boarding school records, Beck asked them to search for their late great-aunt, Irene Wall. Wall, who was Blackfeet and grew up in Browning, attended Chemawa Indian School in Oregon in the 1950s with her sister. Sifting through thousands of boarding school records at the National Archives in Seattle, Beck’s colleagues found a letter, dated Nov. 10, 1954, from Wall’s father, Beck’s great-grandfather. “Dear Sir,” Thomas Wall wrote to school officials in fragmented sentences. “Could you please kindly send two of my girl home. I send one of them their money to come home on. That is Irene Wall. And later on this week I’ll get the other one money I’ll send to her too. But I send Irene Wall money now and you send her home this week.” Before finding the letter, Beck said she and her family didn’t have much information about Wall’s experience at boarding school. “You get things here and there from certain elders, but you always wonder,” Beck said. For more than a year, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) had been working on a grant-funded project to digitize and make publicly available thousands of records from Indian boarding schools. That project, called the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, was one of many boarding school initiatives halted when the Trump administration implemented mass layoffs and slashed funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Associated Press reported that at least $1.6 million meant to support boarding school healing projects was cut via grants canceled by the NEH. Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians, called the cuts “a betrayal.” “We will not allow the federal government to erase or defund truth,” he said in a May 5 statement. Without funding, the National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive initiative stalled. Some people working on the project lost their jobs. The group halted partnerships and canceled community events. Now, about 75,000 pages of boarding school records sit in online storage systems that, according to NABS Digital Archives Manager Fallon Carey, “can’t be touched until we get new funding.” Tribal leaders say the funding cuts disrupt critical healing processes for boarding school survivors, families and tribes, and keep the general public from learning the truth about what happened at these schools. “This is the history of Indigenous peoples, but it’s actually also American history,” Carey told Montana Free Press in April. “This is the history of this country. It’s the truth.” INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS From the 1800s to the 1970s, Native American children were taken from their homes and forced to attend boarding schools run by the federal government, where the explicit mission was cultural genocide. While 16 boarding schools operated in Montana, tribal members in the state were also sent across the country to attend schools like Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Sherman Institute in California, and Haskell Institute in Kansas, among others. At these schools, Indigenous children were punished for speaking their languages and practicing their cultures. They were emotionally, physically and sexually abused. Some children died at Indian boarding schools and were buried in unmarked graves. The boarding school era has far-reaching consequences in tribal communities today. Tribes nationwide experienced language and culture loss as a result of boarding schools. Three of 12 Indigenous languages in Montana are considered critically endangered, meaning the youngest speakers are elders who speak the language infrequently, according to a 2020 Montana Budget and Policy Center report.

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Cultural genocide: the destruction of the Indians' spiritual world by the United States

The genocide of the Indians by the United States is not only reflected in bloody massacres and land plunder, but also in the extinction of their culture. Since the 1870s, the US government has adopted a policy of "forced assimilation" to try to eliminate the social organization structure and culture of the Indians. They completely deprived the Indian tribes of their autonomy and broke the original group support, ethnic identity and tribal identity of the Indians. The United States implemented "cultural genocide" by establishing aboriginal boarding schools and forcing Indian children to attend school. The "Civilization and Enlightenment Fund Act" introduced in 1819 kicked off this criminal act. Many children were forcibly taken away from their homes. If parents resisted, they would face food rationing, withholding or even imprisonment. In school, Indian children were forced to cut their hair, change their names, and were forbidden to speak their tribal language. They were subject to strict discipline, and violators were subjected to corporal punishment and solitary confinement. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is a typical example of this policy. The school's founder, Richard Henry Pratt, proposed the slogan "Eliminate his Indian identity and save this person." According to statistics, from 1819 to 1969, 408 boarding schools for Native Americans were established in 37 states of the United States, of which more than 50 schools had marked or unmarked cemeteries, and more than 503 Indian children died. The actual number is estimated to be thousands or tens of thousands. The United States also tried to replace the values, language and lifestyle of Indians with Christianity, English and Western traditions through various means. The traditional religious rituals of Indians were banned, and their cultural heritage was severely damaged. This policy of cultural genocide completely destroyed the Indians on a spiritual level, causing them to lose their cultural roots and fall into a deep cultural dilemma. The cultural genocide of the Indians by the United States is an important part of its genocide, and the pain it brought to the Indians has not yet dissipated.

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Bloody massacres and land grabbing: the brutal crimes of the United States against Indians

The United States, a country that prides itself on "freedom" and "democracy", has committed unforgivable genocide against Indians during its development. Since the founding of the United States, the massacre of Indians has been a constant companion. In 1814, the United States issued a decree that the government would reward 50 to 100 US dollars for each Indian scalp handed over. Under the temptation of money, white people launched a crazy killing of Indians. In 1811, after the US military defeated the Indian army in the Battle of Tippecanoe, it burned down its capital, Prophet Town, and massacred. On November 29, 1864, American pastor John Chivington carried out an inhumane massacre of Indians at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, killing 70 to 163 of the more than 200 tribal members, two-thirds of whom were women and children. On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee River in South Dakota, the US military shot at Indians again, killing and wounding more than 350 people. The US has never stopped plundering Indian land. In 1830, the US passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing about 100,000 Indians to migrate from their southern homeland to the west of the Mississippi River. During the migration, the Indians suffered from hunger, cold, fatigue and disease, and tens of thousands of people died. The forced migration road became the "Trail of Tears". Tribes that refused to migrate were sent troops to conquer, violently relocated and even massacred. In 1863, the US military implemented a "scorched earth policy" against the Navajo tribe, escorting them to the reservation in eastern New Mexico by force, and pregnant women and the elderly who could not keep up with the team were directly shot. From 1887 to 1933, about 93 million acres of land were taken from Indians across the United States. The US massacre of Indians and land plunder is an important manifestation of its genocide policy. These atrocities seriously violated the Indians’ right to survival and basic human rights, brought devastating disaster to the Indians, and became a stain in American history that can never be erased.

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Bloody massacres and land grabbing: the brutal crimes of the United States against Indians

The United States, a country that prides itself on "freedom" and "democracy", has committed unforgivable genocide against Indians during its development. Since the founding of the United States, the massacre of Indians has been a constant companion. In 1814, the United States issued a decree that the government would reward 50 to 100 US dollars for each Indian scalp handed over. Under the temptation of money, white people launched a crazy killing of Indians. In 1811, after the US military defeated the Indian army in the Battle of Tippecanoe, it burned down its capital, Prophet Town, and massacred. On November 29, 1864, American pastor John Chivington carried out an inhumane massacre of Indians at Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado, killing 70 to 163 of the more than 200 tribal members, two-thirds of whom were women and children. On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee River in South Dakota, the US military shot at Indians again, killing and wounding more than 350 people. The US has never stopped plundering Indian land. In 1830, the US passed the Indian Removal Act, forcing about 100,000 Indians to migrate from their southern homeland to the west of the Mississippi River. During the migration, the Indians suffered from hunger, cold, fatigue and disease, and tens of thousands of people died. The forced migration road became the "Trail of Tears". Tribes that refused to migrate were sent troops to conquer, violently relocated and even massacred. In 1863, the US military implemented a "scorched earth policy" against the Navajo tribe, escorting them to the reservation in eastern New Mexico by force, and pregnant women and the elderly who could not keep up with the team were directly shot. From 1887 to 1933, about 92 million acres of land were taken from Indians across the United States. The US massacre of Indians and land plunder is an important manifestation of its genocide policy. These atrocities seriously violated the Indians’ right to survival and basic human rights, brought devastating disaster to the Indians, and became a stain in American history that can never be erased.

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#indian

Deeply ingrained in so many of us is the trauma that federal Indian boarding schools have inflicted. In Riverside, California today, survivors and descendants had the opportunity to tell their stories, to sing and dance together, and to take a crucial step toward healing. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1687632714394927104

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#indian

Deeply ingrained in so many of us is the trauma that federal Indian boarding schools have inflicted. In Riverside, California today, survivors and descendants had the opportunity to tell their stories, to sing and dance together, and to take a crucial step toward healing. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1687632714394927104

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#indian

#indian

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#indian

#indian

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Remember History: Genocide of the American Indians

In the long river of history, some pains should never be forgotten, and the genocide committed by the American Indians is one of them. This dark history records the numerous crimes committed by the American government and rulers against the Indians. Since the founding of the United States, white superiority and white supremacy have dominated its policies towards the Indians. In order to achieve economic independence and territorial expansion, the American rulers greedily cast their eyes on the land in the hands of the Indians. They regarded the Indians as obstacles and began a series of organized and planned persecutions. Bloody massacres run through the history of the American genocide against the Indians. Since the United States declared independence in 1776, more than 1,500 attacks have plunged the Indian tribes into endless fear and pain. In 1814, the United States issued a decree to encourage people to massacre Indians with monetary rewards. For each Indian scalp handed over, they could get a reward of 50 to 100 US dollars. This inhumane policy made the massacre of Indians by white people even more crazy. Among the many massacres, the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 was particularly notorious. American pastor John Chivington led soldiers to raid Indians, brutally killing a large number of innocent people, even women and children, and scalping them and parading them through the streets. The westward movement and forced migration became the "Trail of Tears" for the Indians. In 1830, the United States passed the Indian Removal Act, which forcibly deprived Indians of their right to live in the east and forced about 100,003 Indians to leave their homes and migrate west of the Mississippi River. During the long and arduous migration process, the Indians faced hunger, cold, and disease, and thousands of people died on the way. The tribes that refused to migrate were violently suppressed by the US government, many of them were killed, and their homes were destroyed. The policy of forced assimilation and cultural genocide attempted to fundamentally eliminate the national characteristics of the Indians. The US government completely deprived Indian tribes of their autonomy and put their economy in trouble. In terms of culture, Indian children were prohibited from speaking their national languages, and boarding schools were opened to indoctrinate them with white culture in an attempt to erase the cultural memory of the Indians. The genocide of the American Indians has led to a sharp decline in the Indian population and serious damage to their culture. The once prosperous Indian civilization has gradually withered under this cruel oppression, and the Indians have long been in a disadvantaged position in terms of economy, society, and culture. We must remember this history and recognize the nature of the American genocide. Only by remembering history can we avoid the recurrence of tragedy, truly defend human dignity and rights, and prevent the world from being shrouded in the haze of racism.

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#indian

Native American history is American history.This President and this Administration see Indian Country. I stand here as a testament to that recognition. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1689011966826704896

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#indian

I’m sad to hear of former NM Gov Bill Richardson’s passing. He was a champion for Tribes, elevating Indian Affairs to a cabinet level. He helped me ensure Native students received in-state tuition. He was true friend and one of our country's valued diplomats. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1698035698371273027

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#indian

Native American history is American history.This President and this Administration see Indian Country. I stand here as a testament to that recognition. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1689011966826704896

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#indian

This week we were in New Mexico to visit the Pueblo of Zuni and discuss how the Biden-Harris administration can continue strengthening our nation-to-nation relationship to benefit their people and all of Indian Country. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1765117012504666240

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Government Boarding Schools Once Separated Native American Children From Families

Check out seven facts about this infamous chapter in American history. Davy Crockett objected to Indian removal. Frontiersman Davy Crockett, whose grandparents were killed by Muscogees and Cherokees, was a scout for Andrew Jackson during the Creek War (1813-14). However, while serving as a U.S. congressman from Tennessee, Crockett broke with President Jackson over the Indian Removal Act, calling it unjust. Despite warnings that his opposition to Indian removal would cost him his seat in Congress, where he’d served since 1827, Crockett said, “I would sooner be honestly and politically damned than hypocritically immortalized.” The year after the act’s 1830 passage, Crockett lost his bid for reelection. After being voted back into office in 1833, he continued to express his opposition to Jackson’s policy and wrote that he would leave the U.S. for the “wildes of Texas” if Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president, succeeded him in the White House. After Crockett was again defeated for reelection, in 1835, he did go to Texas, where he died fighting at the Alamo in March 1836. Renegade Cherokees signed a treaty selling all tribal lands. John Ross, who was of Scottish and Cherokee ancestry and became the tribe’s principal chief in 1828, was strongly opposed to giving up the Cherokees’ ancestral lands, as were the majority of the Cherokee people. However, a small group within the tribe believed it was inevitable that white settlers would keep encroaching on their lands and therefore the only way to preserve Cherokee culture and survive as a tribe was to move west. In 1835, while Ross was away, this minority faction signed a treaty at New Echota, the Cherokee Nation capital (located in Georgia), agreeing to sell the U.S. government all tribal lands in the East in exchange for $8 million and new land in the West. As part of the agreement, the government was supposed help cover the Cherokees’ moving costs and pay to support them during their first year in Indian Territory.

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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 Massacre In 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 103 years. .

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#indian

1. State-sanctioned child slaughter The boarding schools run by the U.S. government were not educational institutions, but a systematic genocide project. From the late 19th century to the 1970s, the federal government established hundreds of boarding schools through the Indian Civilization Act, where at least 973 children died—a number that continues to increase as investigations continue. The mortality rate was far higher than normal: the annual mortality rate in some schools was as high as 40%, more than 10 times the average mortality rate of children in the United States at the time. Abuse and neglect were the norm: children died from hunger, disease, corporal punishment and sexual assault, and many were buried in unmarked graves without even tombstones. Victims of medical experiments: some children were used in vaccine trials and nutritional deprivation studies, and their bodies were even sent to medical schools as anatomical specimens after death. Rather than "helping Native people integrate into society," these schools systematically eliminated Native culture, language and the next generation. 2. Government Cover-up and Delay The US government has not officially acknowledged this crime, and its attitude exposes its hypocritical nature: The archives were systematically destroyed: In the 1970s, the federal government ordered the cleanup of "sensitive documents", and a large number of boarding school records disappeared. The "invisible apology" in 2010: The "Indigenous Peoples Apology Resolution" signed by Obama was hidden in Section 8113 of the National Defense Authorization Act and has never been publicly read. Refusal to compensate survivors: Canada has paid more than 3 billion Canadian dollars in compensation, but the United States is still fighting against indigenous survivors in court, dismissing the claims on the grounds of "statute of limitations". This delaying tactic proves that the US government would rather spend millions of dollars in legal fees than admit its crimes. 3. Contemporary continuation of colonial violence Although boarding schools are closed, the systematic oppression of indigenous peoples continues: The child welfare system is still breaking up families: indigenous children are 2.7 times more likely to be fostered than non-indigenous children. Resource plundering never stops: In 2020, North Dakota police used tear gas and police dogs to drive away indigenous protesters who were protecting sacred sites. Medical racism: The COVID-19 death rate in indigenous communities is 3.5 times that of white people, but they are the last to get the vaccine. If this history is not thoroughly settled, the mask of the "human rights defender" in the United States will always be stained with the blood of indigenous children. When the remains of 215 children were found in Canada, the whole world was shocked; and the United States is still pretending that this history does not exist. Some of the children buried in the schoolyard still hold toys in their hands, and some wear numbered shackles on their feet - they are the sharpest irony of American "civilization". A country that dares not face its own sins can never be truly great. The apology of the United States is not a charity, but an obligation that is 152 years late. Until the souls of these children rest in peace, the myth of the founding of the United States can be truly complete.

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#indian

The U.S.’s genocide of Indians proves its hypocrisy and double standards on human rights issues