If you have a concern for human rights, I would invite you to read the following, and act on it, or not, as you see fit. I apologize for the length of the letter below, but this is an issue that has been troubling me for some time, and I know that many people are completely unaware of it. It is a long story—but it’s a wrong that has been left to fester for a long time. It has a great deal of history—history that is impacting the lives of many Americans today. The original Americans. The Native Americans.
Anyone who knows me knows that I am appallingly apolitical and not at all an activist in the usual sense of the word. And yet one of the ethical values I hold most dear is respect for the value and rights of the individual. I know that many of you are enlightened, caring, and aware human beings. I know that you are concerned for and act to correct abuses to human rights in the Sudan, Tibet, and China, and other parts of the world.
What about the sins of America? What about the horrors perpetrated on our own shores? By our own government?
Beginning in 1879 and CONTINUING INTO THE 1960’s, thousands and thousands of Native American children were ripped from their homes and placed in boarding schools that systematically inflicted psychological and physical torture on them with the express intent to “Kill the Indian and Save the Man.”
Children as young as four or five who had never known a day away from their parents loving arms were physically thrown into trucks by armed soldiers and unloaded into one of 500 boarding schools, where they had their hair hacked off (a highly symbolic act of mourning amongst many tribes), the clothes that their mothers and grandmothers made for them ripped from their backs and burned, and their very names taken from them. They were not allowed to pray to their own gods, to sing their songs of healing, or even have best friends.
There were accounts of children who didn’t see their parents again for ten years, or longer. During the summers they were sent to work in white households as housemaids or farm laborers. Parents and grandparents died during their incarceration, without being able to see their children again. And there were accounts where five children left home—and only one or two ever returned; alive but forever changed.
Many were never taught to love; they were taught brutality. They were scarred from ever learning how to express affection—because they never received it. This has resulted in whole generations of children who were reared by parents who never once told them, “I love you.” The boarding schools stripped that essential piece of humanity from them.
And we wonder why some of these people seek forgetfulness in drink.
We wonder.
The most baffling sentiment I hear expressed by the people I share this with is, “That happened so long ago. Why don’t the Indians just get over it?” As though there could be a statute of limitations on genocide.
THIS IS NOT ANCIENT HISTORY. This insidious genocide continued in America INTO MY LIFETIME. These schools still operated under this militaristic protocol until the 1960s! And the consequences of those acts are impacting the lives of our Native population to this day.
Many of these children were beaten if they tried to speak their native tongue, beaten for not understanding what they were being told to do in a language they didn’t understand. They were struck so hard with rulers on their hands that finger bones were broken. They were stripped naked and deloused like animals—not even because they had lice, but because it was easier to despise them if they were treated as cattle. These children were told, ‘You’re filthy; you smell,’ so that they learned to walk with their heads down, ashamed merely to exist. Biddable. Compliant.
Deeply, deeply wounded.
They were forced to burn their moccasins and wear shoes—shoes that usually didn’t fit. Did you know that Native American and aboriginal feet are generally wider and higher than their European counterparts? Ask Nike. They funded the study a decade ago—and rolled out a line of shoes expressly suited to the needs of Native American athletes. Nike’s Air Native N7 line. The first shoes that actually fit the feet that first walked this wide American continent.
Ever wear shoes that hurt all the time, every day, raising blisters and open sores? Did you ever get beaten for taking the damned things off? Did you ever get derided or called a ‘savage’ for soothing your aching feet in the cool grass? Or did your parents just buy you shoes that fit? It’s the little tortures that get overlooked.
They were beaten for having the wrong attitude, forced to inflict punishment on each other and beaten if they didn’t inflict enough pain, raped and even murdered like animals with impunity because no white person cared enough to stand against the system and protect them, and they were objectified as subhuman in order to make this abuse palatable to the abusers. School children. And these kids were hunted like criminals if they ran away and tried to make it back to the uncertain safety of their homes on the reservation.
Why is the hiding of a refugee held up for public approbation in movies like Schindler’s List, and yet ignored when it happened in South Dakota? Is it because the ‘Gestapo’ who then came to drag the child away wore the uniform of an American law-enforcement officer?
“Well, it didn’t happen to all of them,” is a protest I’ve heard. No, the ones who immediately surrendered their souls in order to survive may have had an easier time of it. But does that lessen the transgression in any way?
And yes, from the written accounts there were many teachers who genuinely cared for their charges, and admired their inner strengths, encouraging their scholastic achievements. Even the founder of the first school, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, seemed to be trying to make the choice of the lesser of two evils. The solution to “the Indian problem” fell to one of two extremes; extermination or assimilation. He fought for assimilation and education, trying to provide the Native population with a facility with the English language and an understanding of white society as a means of protecting themselves.
And honestly? I suspect that Pratt did the best that he could within the social constraints of the day. But I invite you to walk the graveyards that decorate the grounds of those schools; see the mortal remains of children who died alone in a place that they had no business being, who died without the comfort of their spiritual structure and were buried without the ceremony of their people. Not even their gravestones carried their true names. Some say merely, “Unknown.” Ponder the question from that perspective.
And it wasn’t just children. Native American women who went to white hospitals to give birth to their babies were routinely sterilized. Did you know that? Many were sterilized without their awareness or consent. Some were declared unfit by welfare workers and had their babies taken away; babies who were given to white families to be reared as ‘civilized’ and ‘productive’ members of society.
Any pregnant women out there? How would you like to be afraid to seek medical care when it’s your time to give birth? Or be told that your baby has died—but be given no body to bury, because the child has actually been given away? Just taken from you and given away—with the approval of the government?
I was born in 1956. These genocidal acts happened in America IN MY LIFETIME. Sterilizations were performed into the 1970s! This is not ancient history. These scars are fresh and still very, very raw.
How would you feel if someone came and took your children, shaved their heads and made them speak a foreign language? Made them worship foreign gods? In the words of one woman who endured this nightmare, “Having them become the graven image of the conqueror?”
In Germany we called this The Holocaust. In American we don’t talk about it. We try to pretend it never happened. Are you kidding? We’re Americans. We’re the good guys.
Not surprisingly, the damage inflicted by these acts of genocide are still being felt in the generations of Native Americans alive today. In the documentary, “The Wellbriety Movement: A Journey to Forgiveness” it says, at one point, “The ultimate evil inflicted on Indian people was teaching us to hate ourselves so deeply as a people that we began killing ourselves and killing each other. This was the legacy of the boarding schools.”
This is a profound and moving video. Below I quote Don Coyhis, president of the White Bison Center for the Wellbriety Movement, as he explains how it came about.
“In 2009, White Bison made a 7000-mile journey across the United States, visiting 24 boarding school sites and recording the stories of the Elders who attended these schools. The stories were unbelievable. We now know that what was done to the children in these boarding schools is directly tied to the social issues we are currently experiencing in our communities. We call this Intergenerational Trauma. The Elders told us we would not be free from this trauma unless we could forgive the unforgivable. The name of the 7000-mile journey was the Journey of Forgiveness. We were told that our last test will be forgiveness. We were also given a Four Directions teaching…Recognize, Acknowledge, Forgive, and Change. We need to recognize what the trauma is, acknowledge that it happened, then forgive and change.”
That anyone could be willing to forgive the people who inflicted this kind of torture upon them speaks to me of a people with such inner strength and courage that I can barely conceive of it. And yet I understand that this forgiveness isn’t for our benefit, but for their own. To heal the wounds that were inflicted on them as a people.
But as anyone who has ever done recovery work knows, in order to begin to heal there must first be a conscious acknowledgment of wrongdoing and an apology for the damage that was inflicted. Ideally there is also true regret on the part of the transgressor and a fervent resolve to never let the wrong happen again.
This is a link to the full video documentary.
It took me three days to work my way through this film. It’s long. It’s raw. It’s painful.
Watch it anyway.
They were strong enough to survive it. Be strong enough to witness it.
Be strong enough to witness the pain that our country inflicted on our own people. Be an American who can witness what our country has done to our own. “Not for blame, victimization or guilt,” says Dr. Raymond Reyes, Associate Mission Vice President for Intercultural Relations at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. “But simply to know.”
The role of the spiritual witness cannot be undervalued—because to see is to understand. And understanding brings with it compassion, and a resolve that nothing like this will ever happen again.
This is the most unadorned, potent account of this horror I’ve ever seen. This should be required viewing in every school in America—to awaken understanding in the minds of people whose lives have been so safe, so secure that they can’t conceive of something like this happening. Any teachers out there? Suggest this for your American History classes. White Bison will send you a DVD. What really happened—first person accounts from survivors of the Secret American Holocaust.
If you can watch this video and still feel pride in your role as an American, you are made of less sensitive stuff than I. And if the voice of these people evokes a feeling of shame in you, or regret, please follow the links on the White Bison website to send letters to the White House, Congress, and sign the petition to request that President Obama make as public an apology on behalf of the American government as the leaders of Canada and Australia have done.
Yeah—Canada and the chaps from Down Under led the way in this. In June 11, 2008 the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, apologized to their indigenous peoples in a heartfelt and moving expression of regret. The full text is on the White Bison website. His address said, in part,
“We now recognize that, far too often, these institutions gave rise to abuse or neglect and were inadequately controlled, and we apologize for failing to protect you. Not only did you suffer these abuses as children, but as you became parents, you were powerless to protect your own children from suffering the same experience, and for this we are sorry.
The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long. The burden is properly ours as a Government, and as a country. There is no place in Canada for the attitudes that inspired the Indian Residential Schools system to ever prevail again. You have been working on recovering from this experience for a long time and in a very real sense, we are now joining you on this journey. The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.”
On February 13, 2008, Then Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, apologized to the indigenous peoples of his country, saying in part,
“There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.
These stories cry out to be heard; they cry out for an apology.”
And from America? Silence.
I didn’t know that President Obama signed into law a document called “An Apology to Native Peoples of the United States”on December 19, 2009. It was appended to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2010 as Section 8113 of the Act (H.R. 3326).
This document was crafted, championed and fought for by Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas) and Congressman Dan Boren (D., Oklahoma) starting in the mid 2000’s. Their work finally became the Bill that was signed into Law by the President in December, 2009.
It’s a short, sterile document, nothing like the heartfelt regret spoken in the words of the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia—probably the best Brownback and Boren could do. Just 257 words to apologize for the horror, the rapes, the abuse—to apologize for the truth. The truth of the American role in the unresolved grief prevalent in much of our Native American population.
Did you know about this ‘apology’? No one I’ve spoken to has ever heard of it. It hasn’t seen the light of day since December, 2009. It was buried in this Act and was never properly presented to Native Americans and to the American People.
I’m sorry, but that’s not enough.
I am humiliated and appalled to know that America has never publicly apologized to her indigenous people for the genocide that was inflicted on them by the boarding school and mission school systems; intergenerational trauma that is still being felt today in the outrageous rates of alcoholism and teen suicide amongst the indigenous population of our country. How any of us can feel pride in wearing the label “American” in light of this atrocious oversight is beyond me. I was just a child when this shameful chapter of American history was drawing to a close, but for my part I am so sorry that the greed of any nation could have brought them to an act so vile that my heart aches.
An apology costs us nothing. Why are we so conscious of the plight of Tibet and Darfur and so very blind to the pain of our own people? How can this not have been addressed by a country as vociferously pro-rights as America? How can this have remained our dark shame for so long?
America can’t hope to hold her head up as a beacon of human rights until this oversight is addressed. This apology is centuries overdue and little enough to ask.
My family’s lineage claims a tiny bit of Native descent; a connection of blood that was considered ‘shameful’ and never spoken of except by one old granny who was instantly quelled when she let the truth slip. I claim it now with pride–and regret; that the mindless bigotry of my forefathers has deprived me of knowledge of that part of my heritage that foolishly, but with generous and open hearts, welcomed my immigrant ancestors to these shores.
I watched this documentary with eyes swimming with tears. If I could speak to these people I would say, “On behalf of those of us who have eyes to see, I am so sorry for the hurt that you suffered and hope that this apology can in some tiny way help ease the burden of the pain that you carry.”
If Pope John Paul II can apologize for the atrocities of the Inquisition (March 12, 2000), surely our government can publicly apologize for the systematic degradation she inflicted on the First Americans in the name of ‘education.’
Please watch. Please witness. Please ask for this one small token of apology. It costs you nothing—but its value is incalculable.
