Ep. 87 Residential Schools: How the US Government Forced Indigenous Children to Give Up Their Identities

Starting in the 1800s, the US government forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of indigenous children from their homes and sent them to boarding schools hundreds of miles away where they ruthlessly tried to destroy all traces of their culture, to assimilate them into white society. Upon arrival, their hair was cut off, their names were changed, and they were regularly beaten for speaking their native languages. At these schools, children faced hard labor, starvation, physical and sexual abuse, and even death. In recent years, hundreds of bodies have been discovered in unmarked graves at the sites of these old schools across the country but estimates of the dead reach into the thousands if not tens of thousands. The US government did this, and then it conveniently forgot about it until very recently, like a couple weeks ago recent. Let’s fix that.

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Sources: 

• The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
• Administration for Children and Families "Healing from the Trauma of Federal Residential Indian Boarding Schools"
• US Department of the Interior "Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative"
• National Museum of the American Indian "Struggling with Cultural Repression"
• New York Times "The Native American Boarding School System"
• Associated Press "President Biden to apologize for 150 year Indian boarding school policy"
• NPR "Federal Indian boarding schools still exist, but what's inside may be surprising"
• PBS "Boarding school history 'a sin on our soul,' Biden says in historic apology to Native communities"
• Time Magazine "The History of Native American Boarding Schools Is Even More Complicated than a New Report Reveals"