The long road to Healing

Road to healing tour stop announced in Minnesota, Senator Warren Revives Indian Boarding School Legislation, survivors speak out, & US Army to return 5 Native American ancestors to their descendants.

Trigger warning, I will order the updates with the less triggering subjects first, and the more sensitive information will be after a warning.

‘Road to Healing’ Will Visit Boarding School Survivors in Minnesota on June 3- native news online

The Department of the Interior announced Friday that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) will travel to Mille Lacs County, Minnesota on Saturday, June 3, 2023 for the seventh stop on “The Road to Healing” tour.

Native News Online will be onsite for the June 3 event as part of its ongoing reporting project on Indian boarding schools and their effects on Native American families and communities.   

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Senator Warren Revives Indian Boarding School Legislation with Bipartisan Support- native news online

If passed, a 10-member commission of former Indian boarding school students and truth and healing experts, appointed by the president, would make recommendations “on actions that the Federal Government can take to adequately hold itself accountable for, and redress and heal, the historical and intergenerational trauma inflicted by the Indian Boarding School Policies,” the  bill says.

Recommendations would include: protecting unmarked graves, supporting repatriation, and stopping modern-day Indian child removal policies.

The commission would also be empowered to subpoena records from private entities, including churches, that operated schools or institutions intended to assimilate Native youth, as well as government records needed to locate and identify children who attended boarding schools, their tribal affiliations, and unmarked graves. The subpoena power would give the commission a powerful tool that is not available as part of the ongoing investigation of boarding schools by the Department of Interior.  

The commission would provide a report within three years of the legislation’s passage into law. 

A similar bill was first introduced in 2020 by then-Congresswoman Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), now the Secretary of the Interior. It was re-introduced last year by Sen. Warren, with the House version sponsored by Rep. Sharice Davids (D-KS), a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK), a member of the Chickasaw Nation. Last year, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held a hearing on the legislation, but the bill never moved out of committee.

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It is going to be extremely important to have Senate Bill #1723 passed. The resources will be paramount for the investigations going on across the country.

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Trigger warning: The information after this section contains sensitive subjects.

NO MORE SILENCE: BOARDING SCHOOL SURVIVOR ANITA YELLOWHAIR SHARES HER STORY, OVER 60 YEARS LATER- AZ PBS

It was 1950. Anita Yellowhair, of Arizona, was one of thousands of children taken from their home to one of more than 400 boarding schools in the U.S. where they would learn how to live the white man’s way – a way of life imposed onto Native Americans by white people that would strip them of their language, culture and identity in a government-sanctioned effort to assimilate them into Western culture.

Yellowhair, who is Navajo, spent 10 years of school at the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City, Utah.

It left its mark. On Yellowhair. On my mother. And on me, her granddaughter. For years I didn’t know the depths to her story but now I am telling it. Years of my grandmother’s silence, now given voice, with steps toward healing.

My grandmother is a boarding school survivor.

At the time she was sent away, she spoke Navajo. Only English was allowed to be spoken at the school, but she didn’t even know what that was.

When she did choose to speak in her Native language she was punished.

“You have to wash the toilet all night or sit down the hall with your hand against the wall, with your knees on the floor. That’s a torture,” Yellowhair said.

Experts on Native boarding schools said abuse – emotional, physical and sexual – was common.

“Federal Indian boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” according to an investigative report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Richard Henry Pratt, a former military officer and founder of Carlisle Indian School, described his philosophy of assimilation as “kill the Indian, save the man,” in an infamous speech delivered in 1892 during the National Conference of Charities and Correction in Denver.

The Smithsonian Institution said boarding schools, usually led by government officials or Christian missionaries, were established in the mid-19th century “to eliminate traditional American Indian ways of life and replace them with mainstream American culture.”

US Army to Return 5 Native Ancestors to Their Descendants This Fall- yahoo

Five Native American children who died more than a century ago at an Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania will be going home to their closest living relatives this September, the United States Office of Army Cemeteries announced in a federal notice on Thursday.

Those students include: Edward Upright, from the Spirit Lake Tribe in North Dakota; Amos LaFramboise, from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota; Beau Neal, from the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming; Edward Spott from the Puyallup Tribe in Washington; and Launy Shorty from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana.

The disinterment of the five Native students’ remains will begin on Sept. 11, according to the Army. It marks the sixth disinterment and transfer of Native ancestors since 2017

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This is where I leave you for now. Please support the work of the National Native American Boarding School Coalition here: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/