20,000 Native Children Died at America’s Indian Boarding Schools

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Shannon O'Loughlin

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Shannon O'Loughlin is the Executive Director and attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs, and she is also a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

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One of the things that I got out of this recent obsession with American Indian culture and these stories was realizing how little I knew about the history of this country. You know, you might know, you might have a basic understanding of what happened that you learned in school. It's real peripheral. You know, it's very surface. And then upon reading these books, it made me realize like, what happened here? Like this, what happened here over the course of a couple hundred years is almost unprecedented in history. Like that this nation was conquered by all these invaders that just kept coming in, kept changing the rules, kept breaking treaties, making treaties, breaking treaties, wiping people out, calling things battles when they were really just massacres of women and children. I mean, there's some horrendous, horrendous stories of the justification of these massacres that were no different than any other horrific barbarian slaughter that you might have heard about in history that's looked down upon. But for years in this country, they were taught as if they were actual battles. I mean, the history of this country with regards to the tribes and the American settlers and the soldiers is terrifying. It's terrifying that this just happened a couple of hundred years ago and that people are capable of these things and that the ancestors of these people are just roaming around today. And that's what this country was founded on. This country was founded on massacres. Right. And that policy has been studied by folks like Adolf Hitler and was even included. He talked about studying how the U.S. treated American Indians in his book, Mein Kampf. Really? Yes. But it wasn't just the battles. There have been many different types of battles that we consider warfare, though it hasn't been done with guns and legal battles. Exactly. I mean, since the 1600s, Europeans have been trying to educate us and assimilate us and civilize us and have passed laws once the United States became a new country in the 1800s, passed laws to take our children and move them far away and punish them if they spoke their language, cut their hair, put them in these schools that were military-based. And they studied academics in the morning and then they did trade in the afternoon and those trades were to help pay for the schools. So they were basically indentured servants, slave labor, making sure that the school could have enough funds to pay for their own education. And the boarding school history in the United States and Canada has horrendous, horrendous stories. And these schools were funded by the U.S. federal government. And the association and other groups are trying to get the United States to release records of who were the children in these schools. We think there were about 500 boarding schools across the United States and about at least 20,000 children that we can figure out were killed, were died in these schools. Jesus. Yeah. So there's the Carlisle... Some of this work has been done at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which is now owned by the Army Corps, Army Corps of Engineers. And there are some tribes that are trying to repatriate their children that are in graves there and bring them back home. So this has been a process all over the country trying to figure out, you know, who these children were, where they belong, and to bring them home. And it's been a really difficult process for the organizations and health. How did so many of them die? Disease. Not being fed, working too much. All those things that could kill a child. And all these things, there's records of all these different children and the places they stay. No. No? Folks that are doing this work have not been able to find all the records. And like I said, the federal government probably doesn't have the records. It probably has mismanaged a lot of the records regarding these boarding schools. And there were different times, there have been different eras of Indian policy where the federal government was like, oh, wait, this isn't working. Let's get out of this business of teaching Indians. Let's give it to the churches and let them do it for a while. And then it would come back into the federal government. But the churches would have it. And of course, we've heard all of the horrible things that different churches have done to children. And there are still many boarding school survivors today that can tell those stories of abuse, sexual and physical, and who still live with that today. There's an organization called the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition that is really working on these kind of issues and are pulling together the stories and are also working with survivors to try to heal from that trauma that's not just theirs, but it's this intergenerational historic trauma that has been with our communities for a couple hundred years now. So there are a lot of stories like that. And again, this is U.S. federal policy. While the U.S. was building the reservation system and putting tribes kind of in these blockades, if you did not send your child to school, you weren't given rations. You weren't given your food. If you practiced your culture, you could be killed for practicing your culture using your language. Because this was the assimilation policy of the day and this happened, I would say 1850, 1870s through the 1920s, there was this horrific period of federal Indian policy of trying to do away with language, communal type living, cultural practices and religion. So this isn't just gun warfare. This has been a continuing policy that even affects us today. So it was gun warfare until they got the Indians to move into the reservation and then it was basically an annihilation of the culture. Right. And it meets all the definitions of genocide from international law.