Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools
For about 100 years, the U.S. government supported a system of boarding schools where more than 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native children were stripped of their culture, their languages, and their religions and forced to assimilate to white customs.
That policy, which continued until the 1960s, has continued affects on native communities today, says a bill filed this week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M.
The United States has never fully accounted for the harms caused by the schools, the lawmakers said. Their bill, which has attracted a bipartisan list of cosponsors, would form a "Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy" to compile records and oral accounts of what happened in at 367 Indian boarding schools across 30 states. Those schools educated children as young as five years old and sometimes forced them into labor in white communities far from their homes, advocacy groups say, but many records of their practices have been lost or destroyed.
"The Indian Boarding School Policy was adopted by the United States Government to strip American Indian and Alaska Native children of their indigenous identities, beliefs, and traditional languages to assimilate them into White American culture through federally funded Christian-run schools, which had the effect of cultural genocide," the bill says.
An early model for those off-site boarding schools was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Penn., where founder Gen. Richard Pratt operated under the motto "kill the Indian in him, and save the man." Education Week included the Carlisle school in a previous series on Indian education. A timeline shows an archival photo of long-haired students when they first arrived at CONTINUE READING: Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools - Politics K-12 - Education Week
