LOS ANGELES ( AP ) — A U. S. government investigationThe U. S. Department of Homeland Security has exposed at least 53 separate burials at local U. S. federal boarding schools, and authorities expect more, according to a new report released Wednesday.
Initial findings from the investigation, which reviewed federally controlled cases, show that many children died in a boarding school, but authorities say that number is expected to reach thousands or tens of thousands as the investigation continues.
School in British Columbia.
The United States deliberately forced indigenous families to send their youth to school as part of an assimilation formula that has reached every corner of the country, according to the report. He revealed that the formula of the boarding school is “expansive”, composed of 408″. Federal Indian Boarding Schools” in 37 states and territories, adding 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawaii.
The creation of this formula is part of a broader policy of land grabbing by indigenous peoples to allow for U. S. expansion, according to the report. In this document, the government acknowledges that its policy of assimilation has caused loss of life, and intellectual health, land and wealth, tribal and circle relations, and indigenous languages, as well as the erosion of devout and cultural practices.
“When my maternal grandparents were 8 years old, they stole their parents’ culture and network and forced them to live in boarding schools until they were 13,” Haaland told reporters wednesday. “Many young people like them have never returned home. “
He said the Indians overcame their own traumas and pains to complete the report. “This is not new to us,” he said, pointing to other indigenous peoples who attended and spoke at the press conference.
The policy dates back to 1819, when Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act for financially devout organizations that ran schools to assimilate indigenous children.
After that, the federal government “incited or coerced” generations of young Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Hawaiians to attend boarding schools. Beginning in 1871, Congress passed a law ordering parents to send their children to school and legalized the Secretary of the Interior to deny rations to those who refused.
The families hid their children and the government sent police to capture them, according to the report. More than 150 treaties, signed under duress, included requirements for communities to send their children to school.
From its inception, the official purpose of the United States was to sever the cultural and economic ties of indigenous peoples with their land. expansion of the United States,” confirms the report.
The United States has used a dual policy of dispossession of land and school systems to separate indigenous peoples from their land and culture. It’s the cheapest and safest way to take indigenous lands to gain advantage from whites, the report says, recalling the 1969 case. Kennedy Report.
The policy expanded beyond boarding schools to include at least 1000 other federal and non-federal institutions, adding Native American day schools, sanatoriums, nursing homes, orphanages, and autonomous dormitories that also aimed to teach indigenous peoples.
The boarding schools were funded from the federal budget and the budget of U. S. -run tribes. USA Accepted as true with accounts of indigenous peoples’ economic benefits, according to the report.
The investigation found that the intentional removal of indigenous youth from their communities “was traumatic and violent. “They were sent to establishments that were run “rigidly and militarily with a strong emphasis on rustic vocational education. “
Schools have deployed “systematic methodologies of militarization and identity modification,” including renaming youth from indigenous names to English names, cutting hair, requiring uniforms, cultural and discouraging or preventative practices, and organizing young people in groups to carry out military exercises. The institutions also forced young people to do manual labor, in addition to sewing garments and agricultural production, according to the report.
If young people spoke their language or practiced their culture, they faced severe penalties, including solitary confinement, humiliation, flogging, food retention, flogging, slapping and handcuffs. The older young were forced to punish the younger ones. they were subjected to corporal punishment, adding lashes.
While the report accurately details how the youths died, it does describe the situations that can lead to death. documented.
According to the report, malnourished young people have been forced into commercial work. The report says federal reports on child deaths, adding the number and cause of death, are inconsistent.
In Southern California, the federal government ran an off-reserve boarding school called the Sherman Institute. Its cemetery houses more than 60 graves, most of them students.
Jean Keller, a historian who wrote an e-book about the Sherman Institute, told Al Jazeera that most of the children died from diseases such as typhoid fever, tuberculosis and the flu. a hammer thrown by young people on the playground, and another child killed when a bakery oven exploded.
Marsha Small, a researcher from North Cheyenne, inspected the Chemawa Indian School cemetery in Oregon with equipment and found 210 boarding school-related graves, most of them children. He said many died of cholera, flu and tuberculosis.
“They’re going to find out that there are more bodies than files,” Small told Al Jazeera. She thinks that because the government and churches had no respect for indigenous children, they probably didn’t count each and every death well. “It’s genocide,” she said.
According to the report, the tribes have varied personal tastes about the eventual repatriation of the remains, posing a challenge to the federal initiative. possibly it would be to identify them, according to the report.
Small told Al Jazeera that young people from other nations are buried side by side in Chemawa and that the tribe has other protocols: some may need to exhume the remains and take them home to bury them in their classic lands, while others may not need to touch them. the tombs at all.
“Our youth deserve to be found, our youth deserve to be brought home,” Deborah Parker, executive director of the National Coalition to Heal Native American Boarding Schools (NABS), said Wednesday. until the United States fully answers for the genocide committed against indigenous youth. ”
Parker told Al Jazeera that NABS has been collaborating a lot with the branch on the new report, it is also calling for a broader survey of boarding schools.
She is pushing Senate Bill 2907 and House Bill 5444 that would identify a Congressional Truth and Healing Commission to conduct a thorough investigation. While the federal initiative will read about its own archives, he said the commission will also extract archives from federal, state, hospital and parish archives and personal collections, expanding the scope. It would also collect testimonies from survivors and experts.
He called on Pope Francis to open Catholic Church records and apologize to survivors of local American residential schools, as he did to survivors in Canada. He added that President Joe Biden apologizes to survivors of residential schools on behalf of the U. S. government. In the U. S. , survivors owe reparations. ” Some of us have lost hope, that’s why we see suicides, alcoholism, abuse, self-abuse, because we’ve been forgotten for so long,” he told Al Jazeera.
The government has never given survivors the opportunity to share their stories, and the report recommends that it expand a platform for survivors to officially document their experiences.
Haaland announced Wednesday that the initiative will be rolled across the country as part of a year-long “Road to Healing” to allow survivors to contribute their stories to a permanent collection of oral history. saying.
The report also recommends that the branch approximate the number of tribal members accepted as true with the budget used to aid the boarding school formula and identify the teams that have won the budget. The Committee also recommends that the date between boarding schools and the foster parenting formula be examined.
The branch says it will produce an instant report with the places of burial sites marked or unmarked, and the names, ages and tribal affiliations of the youths buried there.
Haaland said he sees it as his duty and legacy to uncover the dark history of institutions. “The fact that she is here as First Secretary of the Indigenous Cabinet is a testament to the strength and determination of indigenous peoples,” she said.
“I’m here because my ancestors persevered,” he says in a trembling voice. “I stand on the shoulders of my grandmother and mother, and the work we will do with the Federal Residential Schools Initiative will have a transformative effect on generations to come.