Boarding School

Native Boarding Schools Were Genocidal: Healing Starts With Truth

September 10, 2024 Abaki Beck, Truthout. Educate! Boarding School, colonization, Genocide, History, Indigenous History, Indigenous Rights

When I was in middle school, at a majority-white public school in Montana, I was given an assignment to interview a grandparent about their childhood. The questions were designed to help us better understand what we did and did not have in common with each other. When I interviewed my maternal grandmother, I asked her whether there was ever a bully at her school. Her answer surprised me; she said she was the bully. “I always had soap in my mouth,” she said, punished for “talking back” to her teachers—and punished for speaking her first language: Blackfeet. My grandmother was a student at the St. Ignatius Mission and School, a church-run, assimilationist boarding school on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana.

Leonard Peltier Shares His Indian Boarding School Story

June 3, 2022 Leonard Peltier, Native News Online. Educate! Boarding School, Education, Indigenous Rights, Leonard Peltier

My name is Leonard Peltier and I am 77 years old. I am a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. I am Anishanaabe and Dakota. I was taken to Wahpeton Indian School, an Indian boarding school, in Wahpeton, North Dakota when I was nine years old and did not leave until I was 12. This is my story. When I lost my grandfather in 1952, life changed forever. He was a good and kind man and he was my mentor and knew how to live off the land. But then he got pneumonia and did not survive. I will never forget watching him die from the foot of his bed. Even now, that sad memory comes back to me as I lay in my bunk at night in a federal penitentiary. About a year after my grandpa died, my grandma had to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to beg for help for her and me, my sister Betty Ann and cousin Pauline.

Effort To Put History Of Indian Boarding Schools Into Classrooms

February 20, 2022 Rachel Louise Just, Up North Live. Create! Boarding School, Education, indigenous, School Curriculum

Lansing, Michigan - An effort is underway in Lansing to encourage Michigan's Board of Education to ensure new generations of students would be taught about the history of Native American boarding schools. The history of the boarding schools would also focus on the atrocities committed at the schools. Sen. Wayne Schmidt, R-Travere City, introduced SB 876, which would encourage the curriculum for 8th-12th grades. “My response for that is very favorable. I’m glad to hear that. You know, it’s always good to be heard," said George Jeffrey Martin, Secretary, Gun Lake Tribal Council. “It’s the start of allowing us to tell the story. It’s not gonna be pleasant.” The proposed legislation was created with the input of Native American tribal leaders, who are more aware than anyone of the horrors committed in the boarding schools.

Why We Must Confront The History Of US Native Boarding Schools

June 18, 2021 Naomi Ishisaka, Seattle Times. Educate! Boarding School, Education, Indigenous Rights, Residential Schools

When Patricia Whitefoot learned about the remains of 215 children found in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, she was devastated. The children’s grave shocked the world, but for Whitefoot, the horror hit close to home. As members of the Yakama Nation in Central Washington, Whitefoot’s family experienced firsthand the trauma of the U.S. boarding school experience, where Native American children were ripped from their families and forced to reject Native language and culture. Whitefoot, who was raised by her maternal grandparents, said her grandmother told Whitefoot about having her mouth washed out with lye soap for speaking her native language at the Fort Simcoe Native boarding school in White Swan, Yakima County, in the early 1900s.

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