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Oct 20, 2023 · Of great hope is Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s reintroduction of S. 1723, a bill to establish a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States. I call the US ...
Mar 8, 2019 · Two hundred years ago, on March 3, 1819, the Civilization Fund Act ushered in an era of assimilationist policies, leading to the Indian boarding-school era, which lasted from 1860 to 1978.
Apr 18, 2019 · Boarding Schools left a dark legacy over many tribes in North America. Indian children faced assimilation, abuse, discrimination and ethnocide on a scale never seen. Regardless of the efforts to “civilize” Indian children, the spirit of the tribes would not be broken.
Oct 11, 2024 · They’ve come from the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. From the Ojibwe and Inupiaq. Smoke rises from bundles of sweetgrass, cedar and sage as they tell their stories of surviving Indian boarding schools. For some, the recounting is not new. They bring weathered black-and-white family photos to honor relatives lost.
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- HISTORY Vault: Native American History
Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
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—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.
From Comanche warriors to Navajo code talkers, learn more about Indigenous history.
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- Becky Little
The Canadian Indian residential school system [nb 1] was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. [ nb 2 ] The network was funded by the Canadian government 's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches .
Aug 28, 2021 · The government created these schools to assimilate American Indians into the dominant culture of the day - white American culture - says Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, professor and head of...
