TITLE: DOI Releases Final Report on the Traumatic Legacy of Indian Boarding Schools
https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/doi-releases-final-report-on-the-traumatic-legacy-of-indian-boarding-schools
EXCERPT: The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) today released its second — and final — report following a three-year investigation into the “traumatic and violent” legacy of Indian Boarding Schools that the U.S. government operated for a century and a half.
The 105-page report, penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community), builds on the first volume of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, published May 11, 2022. The initial report detailed for the first time an official list of Federal Indian boarding schools across to the United States, explained the policy justification the government used to establish those institutions, and detailed institutional conditions and the intergenerational impacts schools had on Indigenous People.
Today’s second volume of the investigation adds to previously-reported figures to paint an increasingly clearer picture of the Indian boarding school system: Between 1871 and 1969, the federal government paid more than $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars to fund the federal Indian boarding school system as well as other similar institutions. Of the 417 boarding schools across 37 states identified in the investigation, about half were run by a religious institution, and most “used the manual labor of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children to compensate for the poor conditions of school facilities and lack of financial support from the U.S. Government.”
At those schools, the investigation identified at least 18,624 students entered the system, and at least 973 students died while at school. The investigation also found that at least 74 school burial sites were associated with these institutions, though DOI expects that the number of students, student deaths, burial sites, and funds spent on the schools to be “far greater."
The DOI also identified more than 1,000 federal and non-federal institutions that didn’t fall under its definition of “federal Indian boarding school” but advanced the policy of assimilation. Those institutions — including Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories — worked similarly to assimilate Native youth into white society.
“Make no mistake, this was a concerted attempt to eradicate 'the Indian problem,' — to either assimilate or destroy Native peoples altogether,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Thankfully, the federal government failed. It failed to annihilate our languages, our traditions, our life ways. It failed to destroy us, because we are still here."
TITLE: Report calls for U.S. government to own up to abusive boarding school history
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2024/07/31/report-calls-for-us-government-to-own-up-to-abusive-boarding-school-history
EXCERPT: The latest report outlines a series of eight recommendations that appear to be guided, at least in part, by steps that Canada took in response to that country’s Indian residential school history, which closely mirrors the U.S.
Unlike the U.S., however, which has only recently recognized such a history existed, Canada began its work with an apology in 2006 before moving on to reparations and other substantive actions.
The U.S. commission would be patterned after the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created as part of the 2008 Indian Settlement Act. Canada eventually paid to residential school survivors more than $3 billion in reparations, which are notably absent from the U.S. initiative’s recommendations.
When asked about financial reparations, [Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan] Newland said, “During the Road to Healing tour when we were listening to survivors about their experiences and their families, they’re weren’t a lot of specific calls for compensation or damages to individuals. What we did hear a lot was about the need for real resources for community based healing, language revitalization and things we’ve highlighted in the report. There’s a lot of work to yet to be done. It’s important to turn these broad recommendations into concrete steps; that’s got to be the endeavor of our entire government.”
Haaland added, “There are trust and treaty obligations that our government made with tribes, and we need to uphold those."
The Canadian government also collected survivor stories, provided traditional and mainstream mental health supports, issued a government apology, collected and made boarding school records publicly available and helped locate unmarked graves of children who died and were buried at the schools.
The U.S. Indian boarding school system served as a model for Canada and operated far more schools, with 417 schools compared to 139 in Canada.
Haaland and Newland traveled the country on an historic “Road to Healing” tour, with 12 stops that provided Indigenous survivors the opportunity to share for the first time with the federal government their experiences in federal Indian boarding schools. Transcripts of the tour, which finished in late 2023, are available on the Federal Boarding School Initiative website.
The Interior Department also launched an oral history project documenting and making public experiences of generations of boarding school survivors. Funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is interviewing survivors for what will be a collection of first-person narratives that will be shared with the public.
“This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations – that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways,” said Newland. “It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
The report also states that the Department of the Interior is working with tribes to repatriate or protect human remains and funerary objects from Indian boarding schools sites located on U.S. government lands, and will do so under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The efforts will include remains at the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where nearly 180 students who died at the school are buried. The site is controlled by the U.S. Army.
The Land Back recommendation will also be ongoing, with calls for return to tribes of the Indian lands that the government provided to religious organizations and states for the purpose of building schools. In many cases, the lands were to have reverted back to tribal ownership if organizations stopped operating schools.
Churches and other organizations, however, continue to hold some of this land today long after boarding schools closed. In an independent investigation, ICT found that Catholic entities may continue to hold more than 10,000 acres of these lands.
The report also identifies 127 treaties made between the federal government and tribes in which boarding schools figure highly, and calls for the U.S. to make good on its promises in treaties and other legislation to provide quality education for Native Americans as well as essential Indigenous language preservation curriculum.
TITLE: Wounded Knee Medals of Honor come under scrutiny as massacre is revisited
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2024/08/01/wounded-knee-medal-of-honor-recipients-questioned/74618864007/
EXCERPT: On July 19, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the review by five experts to examine the actions of 20 soldiers involved in the fighting at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota on Dec. 29, 1890. Austin directed the panel to present him with recommendations by Oct. 15 on each medal awarded.
Austin’s order comes more than three decades after the U.S. Senate declared the battle to be a massacre. The Army killed as many as 375 Native American men, women and children, according to a 1990 Senate resolution. The review follows more recent attempts in Congress that have failed to garner enough support to force the military to account for Medals of Honor issued at Wounded Knee.
Austin’s order is especially significant in part because the Medal of Honor has become imbued over the years with a reverence bordering on the sacred, according to a senior Defense official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
“The Medal of Honor is much more than being in combat and doing well,” the official said. “The Medal of Honor goes to those who decide to do much, much more than fight. They display honor, gallantry – a word we don’t use every day. There’s a case to be made that there was no honor present at Wounded Knee that day. That’s why we need this review.”
In 1890, a government Indian Affairs agent misinterpreted a Lakota Sioux religious revival ceremony known as a “Ghost Dance” as a call for insurrection, according to a 2024 University of Oklahoma College of Law paper by Dwight Mears, an Army combat veteran and former professor at West Point.
President Benjamin Harrison ordered the Army to prevent an uprising in South Dakota. The Seventh Cavalry arrived at Wounded Knee Creek and sought to disarm the Lakota. A gun discharged during that attempt followed by bitter fighting.
The battle shifted to a ravine. It ended when soldiers fired cannons at Native Americans seeking shelter.
Allegations of non-combatant deaths soon emerged. Maj. Gen. Nelson Miles relieved the Seventh Cavalry commander and ordered an investigation. Miles wrote to his superiors and expressed his “strongest disapproval” over the killing of non-combatants.
In a private letter Miles wrote, “I have never heard of a more brutal, cold-blooded massacre than that at Wounded Knee.”
Mears cited the Army’s latest historical account of the day. The first shot fired might have been an accident, the result of a soldier trying to disarm a Lakota. “But whatever the source, it led to indiscriminate firing from soldiers and some return fire from the Lakota. In the ensuing action, many Lakota men, women and children sought to escape via ravines that cut through the area. The soldiers also employed artillery despite the presence of numerous noncombatants.”
When it was over, as many as 300 Lakota had been killed, including women and children, according to Army historians. There were 25 soldiers killed, some likely by friendly fire.
The Wounded Knee site became a place of remembrance for Native Americans, and the massacre a rallying cry in struggles for Native American rights, according to the Library of Congress.