We Will Never Learn

Finally, finally, the story of the Native American boarding schools in the U.S. has been sprung open by the discovery of the buried remains of more than a hundred children at a residential boarding school in Canada.

The Native families of the children taken away forcibly who never came back have always known, but fear has silenced them. The many calls for social justice ignited by the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of some scholars and researchers have encouraged the children and grandchildren of those taken away to begin to speak. But since so many graves have been buried under construction, including here in Albuquerque where a fast food chain has been allowed to build an outlet over a “forgotten” children’s graveyard, it will take years and much diligence to find the names of the boys and girls who died, where they are buried, and perhaps return their remains to their families—who always knew there was a child who never came back.

Our first Native Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, from Laguna Pueblo, has made April 2022 the deadline for her department, once in charge of the nation’s boarding schools, to begin research—but the Federal government has not allocated any funds.

The Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy staffed 100 of these institutions with nuns and priests, some now faced with accusations of physical and sexual abuse, has yet to come forward with a recognition of its role and responsibility.

But we must also face the fact that these boarding schools were not only the result of our congenital, deep-rooted racism but of our belief in our military.

The first Native American boarding school was founded by Richard Pratt, a U.S. Army lieutenant, who invented the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man”—or woman, or child. All these institutions used military discipline, marching the children from one place to another; a survivor here spoke with pride of having learned to march “real well.” He went on, of course, to enlist.

The massive land grab that followed, encouraging white settlers to seize lands in the west that had belonged to the tribes for millennia, had as its accompaniment the destruction of their children. As one commentator on KUNM’s “Native America Calling” noted today, we teach the story of Ann Frank, but not the story of the destruction of Native children.

Boarding schools based on Pratt’s dictum, removing children from their families, their language and their traditions, subjecting children as young as six to unpaid labor building sewer lines in small Western towns, had enrolled eighty percent of Native American children in the U.S. by 1926. Of these, thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves due to disease, starvation, maltreatment and overwork. One girl remembered that she depended for survival on windfall apples, and punishment was severe. Some managed to run away; a white woman who taught art at one of these schools in the 1950’s remembers being surprised that some of her students were so angry.

Anger, despair and their legacy—drug and alcohol abuse—undermine Native communities to this day. But with the extraordinary resilience that made it possible for some boarding victims to survive, their offspring continue to fight for the hidden records of all those children’s deaths and the forgotten sites of their graves.

How small are our sufferings, compared, how puny our complaints.

In New Mexico Debra Haaland kunm Native America Calling