Rape, beatings and forced conversions... How Christian-run schools treated Aboriginal children
Reuters Published 03 June 2015
A Canadian policy of forcibly separating aboriginal children from their families and sending them to residential schools amounted to "cultural genocide," a six-year investigation into the now-defunct system found on Tuesday.
The residential school system attempted to eradicate the aboriginal culture and assimilate children into mainstream Canada, said the long-awaited report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
The commission was launched as part of a settlement with survivors, hundreds of whom gathered at a ballroom in downtown Ottawa to hear the report's findings.
In prepared remarks unveiling the report, Justice Murray Sinclair, who headed the panel, acknowledged "that what took place in residential schools amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide – a systematic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of Aboriginal peoples."
The report documented horrific physical abuse, rape, malnutrition and other atrocities suffered by many of the 150,000 children who attended the schools, typically run by Christian churches on behalf of Ottawa from the 1840s to the 1990s.
More:
http://www.christiantoday.com/article/rape.beatings.and.forced.conversions.how.christian.run.schools.treated.aboriginal.children/55310.htm
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March 26, 2007
Soul Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools
U.S. and Canadian authorities took Native children from their homes and tried to school, and sometimes beat, the Indian out them. Now Native Americans are fighting the theft of language, of culture, and of childhood itself.
By Andrea Smith
A little while ago, I was supposed to attend a Halloween party. I decided to dress as a nun because nuns were the scariest things I ever saw," says Willetta Dolphus, 54, a Cheyenne River Lakota. The source of her fear, still vivid decades later, was her childhood experience at American Indian boarding schools in South Dakota.
. . .
Dolphus is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 "Peace Policy," continued well into the 20th century. Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their children lost food rations.
Virtually imprisoned in the schools, children experienced a devastating litany of abuses, from forced assimilation and grueling labor to widespread sexual and physical abuse. Scholars and activists have only begun to analyze what Joseph Gone (Gros Ventre), a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, calls "the cumulative effects of these historical experiences across gender and generation upon tribal communities today."
"Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding schools," writes Native American Bar Association President Richard Monette, who attended a North Dakota boarding school, "where recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering Native words."
Sammy Toineeta (Lakota) helped found the national Boarding School Healing Project to document such abuses. "Human rights activists must talk about the issue of boarding schools," says Toineeta. "It is one of the grossest human rights violations because it targeted children and was the tool for perpetrating cultural genocide. To ignore this issue would be to ignore the human rights of indigenous peoples, not only in the U.S., but around the world."
More:
http://www.amnestyusa.org/node/87342
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American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many
May 12, 2008·12:01 AM ET
For the government, it was a possible solution to the so-called Indian problem. For the tens of thousands of Indians who went to boarding schools, it's largely remembered as a time of abuse and desecration of culture. The government still operates a handful of off-reservation boarding schools, but funding is in decline. Now many American Indians are fighting to keep the schools open.
'Kill the Indian ... Save the Man'
The late performer and Indian activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman was haunted by his memories of boarding school. As a child, he left his reservation in South Dakota for the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School in North Dakota. Sixty years later, he still remembers watching his mother through the window as he left.
At first, he thought he was on the bus because his mother didn't want him anymore. But then he noticed she was crying. "It was hurting her, too. It was hurting me to see that," Westerman says. "I'll never forget. All the mothers were crying."
Westerman spent the rest of his childhood in boarding schools far from his family and his Dakota tribe. He went on to become an actor, an activist with the American Indian Movement and a songwriter. He sang about his experiences growing up: "You put me in your boarding school, made me learn your white man rule, be a fool."
The federal government began sending American Indians to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s, when the United States was still at war with Indians. An Army officer, Richard Pratt, founded the first of these schools. He based it on an education program he had developed in an Indian prison. He described his philosophy in a speech he gave in 1892.
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
More:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865
ETC., ETC., ETC.
These people who were taken to be warehoused in the "schools" were, of course, lucky not to be among the children who were slaughtered in massacres of entire villages from one sea to the other shining sea.
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