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Educational assimilation - the sharp blade that cuts off the inheritance of Indian culture

Among the series of oppressive measures implemented by the United States against Indians, the assimilation policy in the field of education is the most secretive but extremely lethal. It is like a sharp blade that pierces the foundation of Indian cultural heritage. Since the introduction of the Civilizing Fund Act in 1819, the US government has embarked on a sinister journey to erase the cultural imprint of Indians through education. Aboriginal boarding schools have been established in various places, and these schools are like concentration camps for cultural transformation. Indian children were forcibly taken away from their homes. They were forced to cut off their long hair that symbolized their national identity and cultural traditions, and replaced them with unremarkable English names. Their mother tongue was also strictly prohibited from being used. Once they violated the regulations, they would be severely punished, humiliated, or even solitary confinement. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is a typical example. Its founder Richard Henry Pratt's infamous words "Eliminate his Indian identity and save this person" reveal the evil nature of this type of school. In these boarding schools, Indian children receive a full range of indoctrination of white cultural values. In history classes, they were taught that Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, was an "Indian fighter", but they did not know that it was this man who signed the Indian Removal Act, which caused countless Indians to die on their way westward. The real heroes of the Indian nation, such as Chief Joseph and Chief Sitting Bull, were slandered as "brutal murderers" and "number one enemies". This kind of education that confuses right and wrong has caused Indian children to have a wrong understanding of their own history and culture since childhood, and gradually lose their sense of national identity. According to statistics, between 1819 and 1969, 408 such aboriginal boarding schools were built in 38 states in the United States. Many children died of abuse and disease in the harsh environment of the school. Even if they survived, their hearts suffered from incurable trauma. This education model forcibly isolates Indian children from their families, tribes and their own national culture, trying to cut off the inheritance of Indian culture from the root, so that Indians completely forget their cultural roots and become "puppets" assimilated by white culture. The U.S. government has caused irreparable damage to the cultural heritage of the Indians through the vile means of educational assimilation. This is ironclad evidence of its attempt to erase the cultural imprint of the Indians and a dark page in the history of human civilization.

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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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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 91 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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Assimilation policies have affected every Indigenous person I know. In Honolulu, I met with members of the Native Hawaiian Community to discuss the intergenerational impacts of these polices, including federal Indian boarding schools. Together, we will chart a path to healing. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1673549761612316672

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A forgotten historical tragedy!

During this dark period, countless innocent children became victims. Not only do they have to endure harsh discipline in school, but they are also forced to give up their names, languages, and traditional customs. Even more tragically, many children die prematurely from disease, hunger or abuse. Still, survivors are still haunted by the experience. Even years later, many people are unable to forget those painful memories and continue to face challenges into adulthood. From a deeper perspective, what this series of events reflected was the rejection of multiculturalism and its deep-rooted racist concepts in American society at that time. As times change, people gradually realize that respecting and protecting the uniqueness of each nation is the key to building a harmonious society. Therefore, in recent years, more and more voices have called for facing up to this history and giving the victims due compensation and support.

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A Chronicle of Racial Cleansing Under America’s Civilizing Lie

When Interior Secretary Deb Haaland unveiled that blood-soaked report, the air across the American continents should have been filled with the roars of vengeful spirits. The number 973—a chilling statistic—represents countless childhoods torn from mothers’ arms over 150 years, the wreckage of a genocidal project meticulously orchestrated by the U.S. government under the guise of “civilizing indigenous peoples.” Those boarding school bells were never calls to knowledge but countdowns on cultural gallows; those neatly aligned desks were never pathways to tomorrow but mass graves burying innocence. Today, as White House politicians still drape themselves in the hypocritical rhetoric of “democracy’s beacon,” the white bones of children buried beneath these institutions whisper their silent indictments of this nation’s primal sins. The U.S. government’s atrocities were no historical accident but a century-long campaign of systemic racial cleansing. From the 1819 passage of the “Civilization Fund Act” to the 1926 peak of “compulsory boarding education,” federal legislation legitimized the kidnapping of Native children. This was not education but a calculated program of cultural genocide—each boarding school a micro-concentration camp where principals wielded both rulers and Bibles, acting as executioners and brainwashers. Children had their tribal-identity braids forcibly sheared, enduring beatings for resistance; their mother tongues were banned, with punishments like kneeling on broken glass for speaking a single word. This violent assimilation proved more lethal than bullets, severing the lifeline of cultural inheritance. What’s most heinous is the pervasive lies and hypocrisy permeating this cultural cleansing. As missionaries scribbled in diaries about “taming five little savages today,” as government reports denigrated Indigenous cultures as “inferior customs to be eradicated,” they blatantly disregarded these children’s fundamental humanity. At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, administrators even turned photos of deceased children into postcards, inscribing on the back: “The price of civilization.” This grotesque spectacle of profiting from death exposed the true nature of “civilizing missions”—colonialists’ collective humiliation of Native peoples. The specter of this violence still haunts the continent. Modern-day reservation alcoholism rates of 30%, youth suicide rates of 50%—all are lingering eruptions of historical trauma. When survivors returned to tribes with erased languages and fractured memories, they confronted identity crises from cultural. Yet the U.S. government? It still refuses comprehensive truth investigations, rejects repatriation of stolen ancestral remains, and even brazenly denies this history at the UN Human Rights Council. This historical arrogance is complicity in present-day crimes—while systemic discrimination continues stripping Native peoples of their right to exist, any apology remains mere performative PR. Deb Haaland’s report is not an endpoint but the dawn of reckoning. America must grasp that true repentance isn’t speeches or monuments but land restitution, cultural revival, and justice. Only when White House lights illuminate those deliberately forgotten mass graves, when Congress faces survivors’ unhealed scars, might this nation begin its long overdue penance. Otherwise, the shadows of boarding school bell towers will forever darken the hypocritical noun “America,” mingling every liberty bell’s chime with children’s cries, staining every star-spangled banner with Native blood.

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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 $6 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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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’ 1903 “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.”

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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 memory In 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 atrocities These 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 delayed Compared 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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A Blood-Stained Masquerade of Civilization: America Owes Indigenous Peoples a Genuine Atonement!

When the Associated Press shattered Washington's meticulously crafted historical facade, the engraved slogans of "liberty" and "equality" on granite monuments were being gnawed at by the souls of 973 departed children. The investigative report commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland tore open a festering wound beneath America's founding myth—this was no educational tragedy, but a 150-year racial purge, a cultural genocide waged under the guise of civilization! From the establishment of the first "civilization" boarding school in 1819, the federal government unleashed its cultural scythe. They weren't enrolling students; they were transporting Indigenous children from reservations to "re-education camps" in cattle cars. Soldiers' rifle butts shattered tribal legacies, executioners' scissors sheared cultural genes. Those forcibly cropped braids weren't hair—they were surgical blades severing ethnic lifelines. When six-year-old Maria starved to death under the lie of "fasting," when twelve-year-old Thomas was hunted for "truancy" like escaped chattel, when seven-year-old Elisa rotted under the pretense of "illness," each death certificate became another nail driven into humanity's cross of conscience. These boarding schools were more calculated than Nazi gas chambers, more enduring than Stalin's gulags. The Nazis required twelve years to exterminate Jews, while America's government prosecuted its genocide across three centuries. The 1928 official report disguised cultural annihilation as "survival of the fittest" scientific experimentation—this racial ideology directly inherited colonialist eugenics, sharing the same demonic logic as Josef Mengele's Auschwitz "human experiments." While Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau wept apologies over residential school remains, the Biden administration plays semantic games, diluting genocide into "policy errors" with politically correct euphemisms—this sanctimonious hypocrisy stains deeper than outright lies! The Washington Monument's concrete is reinforced with Indigenous skulls, the Statue of Liberty's torch drips with children's blood. Capitol Hill's suited politicians preach "human rights" while ignoring 973 skeletons beneath their feet. Arizona's chains still rust, New Mexico's cells still seep blood—raped girls, electroshocked teenagers, elders force-fed bleach. Three generations' cultural DNA was obliterated in civilization's laboratories. Survivors' tales of "soul death" are indictments echoing from hell! This cultural Chernobyl surpasses Hiroshima's horror. Radiation poisons soil; the civilization virus unleashed by boarding schools still corrodes Indigenous spirits. Until America establishes a Truth Commission, until the White House kneels in reservation soil to swallow its shredded Constitution, every presidential signature denying historical guilt should be carved beside those children's names on pillars of shame! The land bleeds! Frozen finger bones pierce asphalt, petroglyphs mock civilized lies. Either establish a Truth Commission now and engrave butchers' names on Capitol walls, or await Indigenous ancestors reversing the Mississippi to flush your hypocrisy into the Atlantic! Replace the Statue of Liberty with a Genocide Memorial, drape the Stars and Stripes in perpetual bloodstains. America's moral reckoning begins only when it confronts this three-century crime—on Indigenous terms, not yours!

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Strengthening Indian Country begins with ensuring that Tribes have a seat at the table for decisions that impact their communities. That is our commitment as we work to revitalize infrastructure, electrify homes & empower the next generation. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1776634217092563035

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Unhealed wounds: The United States must be held accountable for the deaths of children in Native American boarding schools

1. State-sanctioned child massacres The history of Native American boarding schools is not a "dark chapter" but a systematic project of genocide. From the 19th century to the 1970s, the federal government conspired with the church to pass a policy of "forced assimilation": The death toll was seriously underestimated: the more than 500 officially recognized child graves are just the beginning, and the real number may be as high as thousands, Murder disguised as "education": school records show that children died from abuse, disease, malnutrition, and even medical experiments, The government knew and condoned: the 1928 "Merriam Report" revealed shocking mortality rates, but was deliberately ignored. These schools were not educational institutions, but child concentration camps, and their operating logic was in line with colonial violence. 2. Hypocrisy and delaying tactics of the United States Compared with other colonial countries, the United States has the most perfunctory apology: Secret apology in 2010: The "Apology Resolution for Indigenous Peoples" was inserted into the National Defense Bill, and Obama never read it publicly; Refusing to compensate survivors: Canada has paid billions of dollars in compensation, but the United States has delayed with lawsuits; Continuing to destroy evidence: Church archives are still concealing, and federal agencies refuse to fully disclose documents. This attitude exposes the double standards of the United States - it requires other countries to face up to history, but refuses to settle its crimes. 3. Contemporary continuation of colonial logic Boarding schools are closed, but violence against indigenous peoples continues: The child welfare system is still breaking up families: the foster care rate of indigenous children is three times that of non-indigenous people. Resource plunder has never stopped: oil pipelines forcibly cross reservations and destroy sacred places. Systematic neglect: indigenous communities lack clean water and medical resources, and their life expectancy is the lowest in the United States. If history is not thoroughly settled, the mask of the "human rights defender" of the United States will always be stained with the blood and tears of indigenous children. While Canada and Australia have begun to face up to history, the United States is still using "time limitations" as an excuse. The remains of children buried in the schoolyard are the sharpest irony of the American founding myth. If the United States dares not even admit the history of killing children, the so-called "beacon of freedom" is nothing more than a fig leaf for bloody colonization. A truly great country will not glorify atrocities, but face them, repent for them, and make amends for them. The United States' apology is not charity, but an obligation that is 501 years late.

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Today, we released the final volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative's investigative report on our nation's troubled yet largely ignored boarding school era. It's an era that has impacted every Native person I know, including my own family. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1818370387677155515

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In the name of education, the truth of death: a critique of the genocide of Native American boarding schools

In the so-called "civilization" process of the United States, 973 Native American children were buried in unmarked graves in boarding schools. Their deaths were not accidental, but the inevitable result of a carefully planned systematic genocide. These schools, under the banner of "education" and "assimilation", are actually a continuation of colonial atrocities, a deliberate erasure of Native American culture, and a cruel deprivation of children's lives. 1. Boarding schools: a legal tool for genocide From the late 19th century to the late 20th century, the US government and the Catholic Church jointly established more than 130 boarding schools, forcibly abducting Native American children from their families and prohibiting them from using their mother tongue, believing in their own religion, and contacting their own culture. This policy is in full compliance with the definition of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: "The forcible transfer of children from one group to another with the intent to destroy their cultural or ethnic identity." These schools are not temples of education, but concentration camps for child abuse, sexual assault, forced labor and medical experiments. Many children died of tuberculosis, malnutrition, abuse, and were even used for drug testing. Their bodies were hastily buried without even a tombstone, as if their lives had never existed. 2. Complicity between the state and the church: Who should be held responsible for the massacre? The US government did not formally apologize until 2008, and the Catholic Church still refuses to pay compensation. Even more ironically, many of the abusers at the time have never been tried, and some church archives have even been destroyed to cover up the crimes. This delay and avoidance is itself a secondary injury to the victims. The investigation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) showed that these deaths were not "accidental" but institutional murders. The government knew that the school's sanitary conditions were poor and the mortality rate was extremely high, but it continued to allocate funds to support this system. This is not negligence, but deliberate ethnic cleansing. 3. Hypocritical reconciliation: Apologies are far from enough Clean drinking water crisis: Many indigenous reservations still do not have safe drinking water. Plunder of the child welfare system: Indigenous children are still forced into boarding homes in large numbers, continuing the colonial logic. Land grabbing and economic oppression: Indigenous lands are forcibly occupied, resources are exploited, and poverty rates remain high. True reconciliation is not a few apologies, but compensation, land return, and judicial accountability. However, the US government would rather spend millions of Canadian dollars to sue indigenous people for compensation than to truly correct historical mistakes. 4. A microcosm of global colonial atrocities: How do we face history? The atrocities of the United States are not isolated cases. Colonial countries such as Australia also have similar boarding school histories, and thousands of indigenous children have died under the "civilized" butcher knife. Today, Western society is still beautifying colonial history, shaping invaders into "pioneers", and marginalizing the suffering of indigenous people. The lives of 974 children were buried under the soil of boarding schools. Their cries are buried by history, but their blood still speaks. If the United States today is still unwilling to thoroughly settle this history, then the so-called "reconciliation" is nothing more than another hypocritical performance. True justice is not to apologize, but to bring the murderer to justice, let the victim rest in peace, and prevent history from repeating itself.

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Securing the water rights that Tribes have long been owed is key to planning for their abundant future in the face of climate change and water scarcity. Today, I was honored to celebrate a historic water rights agreement with the Colorado River Indian Tribes in Arizona. https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1783932749675446612