SOPHIA TETOFF was 12 years outdated in 1901 when she was despatched 4,000 miles from her island house within the Bering Sea to Carlisle, an Indian boarding faculty in Pennsylvania. Sophia was a member of Alaska’s Unangax folks. Five years later, she died from tuberculosis. She was buried within the faculty’s cemetery and largely forgotten. Her title on her gravestone was misspelt. Her tribe’s title was incorrect. Sophia was one in every of hundreds of kids separated from their communities, usually forcibly, and despatched to Indian boarding faculties.
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Last summer time Deb Haaland, the secretary of the inside, whose division manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, introduced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a complete assessment of the troubled legacy of such insurance policies. On May eleventh Ms Haaland, the primary Native American cupboard secretary, launched the primary quantity of the assessment. The investigation discovered that from 1819 to 1969, the federal Indian boarding-school system had 408 faculties throughout 37 states or territories. Burial websites have been recognized at 53 faculties (because the investigation continues that quantity is predicted to rise). The Indian kids who died at faculties removed from their households might quantity within the tens of hundreds.
“The consequences of federal Indian boarding-school policies…inflicted upon generations of children as young as four years old are heartbreaking and undeniable,” stated Ms Haaland. Forced-assimilation practices included chopping off the youngsters’s lengthy hair, and stripping them of their conventional clothes, language and tradition. The authorities blended kids from completely different tribes to disrupt connections and pressure using English. There was rampant bodily, sexual and emotional abuse in addition to malnourishment, illness and overcrowding. Many kids have been despatched out to farms and companies for months of handbook labour. The faculties usually pocketed their wages.
Ms Haaland was moved to make clear these traumas by the invention of a whole lot of unmarked graves related to Indian residential faculties in Canada. The assessment discovered a lot proof of intergenerational trauma brought on by household separation and cultural eradication. Ms Haaland’s personal grandparents have been stolen from their households and despatched away to highschool. Her great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle.
Carlisle was used as a mannequin for different faculties. Its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, infamously stated in 1892, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” His outlook was not novel. As far again as George Washington it was a part of federal coverage. Indian territorial dispossession and assimilation via training was thought of an affordable and protected means of subduing Native Americans. By 1926, 83% of Indian school-age kids have been attending boarding faculties.
The initiative will proceed its seek for burial websites. It additionally intends to determine surviving boarding-school pupils to doc their experiences. And it would discover the potential repatriation or disinterment of kids’s stays. Sophia’s stays, together with these of 9 Rosebud Sioux kids, returned to Alaska and South Dakota final summer time, the place they have been welcomed house by their communities. At the assessment’s unveiling Deborah Parker, head of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, stated: “Our children deserve to be brought home.” ■
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