The US Indian Boarding School Apology

My grandmother survived Wrangell Institute, and these are my thoughts.

I spent most of the weekend on threads working out my thoughts, and here they are:

The emotional whiplash that has transpired for me since Friday is astounding. I took the weekend to process the multiple reactions my body had to witnessing a historical event that I never thought I’d live to see. The scope and scale of the damage is truly daunting, and the current investigations have only scratched the surface. I suspect there will be a lot of reactions to the news. I will continue to focus on equipping you all with resources on the history. Hearing Deb speak did bring me to tears, her work deserves to be honored. As well as the many amazing people working to investigate and bring relatives home from the graveyards.

My mind and thoughts are filled with the experiences of elders and tribal members who have been working to find family, in some cases for decades:

For the last 57 years, Hadden and her late mother, Mary Jones, have been searching for their lost aunt. Jones began the search in 1967 by writing to Indian boarding schools across the country in a search propelled by a lone detail from her own mother: that Aunt Mary died at boarding school.

It took another three decades to slowly piece together historic records — including Kininnook’s student ID, death announcement and newspaper clippings about her on-campus funeral — to place her among the more than 200 students buried at the Carlisle Main Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania, Hadden said.

But she was lost once more when Hadden visited Carlisle in 1984 in search of Kininnook’s headstone and instead found another grim reality: When the U.S. Army took over Carlisle in 1918 and moved the cemetery nine years later, the identities of several deceased got lost in the shuffle. The Army reburied those 14 people, who researchers presume to be Native children by matching historic cemetery plot maps to current ones, under headstones marked “UNKNOWN.”

Mary Kininnook is one of them.

Hadden said she and her brother were initially told their great-aunt would come home in the 2020 disinterment cycle with the help of forensic anthropologists. Since her great aunt is one of two non-infant girls missing headstones — the other was 17 years old — forensic anthropologists could deduce identities based on pre-pubescent bone structure, she said. But the return process was delayed due to the pandemic, and Hadden said she hasn’t heard from Office of Army Cemeteries officials since. The Office of Army Cemeteries did not respond to a request for comment.

You may have heard of the protesters who interrupted Biden during the apology.

I maintain that the protesters were all correct in their actions. To apologize for one genocide while funding another is hypocrisy. The apology also is coming before changed behavior. The US Army is still refusing to give back some of our ancestors. Our people haven’t come home yet. The system is still taking our children. The fight isn’t over.

That being said, these apologies put the power in our hands now, and we have to be ready to use it. The public needs to support the ongoing investigations, many of which are happening at state and local levels. Federal legislation is being worked on now: HR7227 and s1723. I have petitions to support them.

Personally, I don’t know how to react to the scale of grief that comes with official record acknowledging the Indian boarding school era. Yes, the apology was historic. And it was too late. I do respect and hold space for all reactions to this. Be it anger or joy. We can’t allow our bodies to hold the unprocessed emotions anymore. I grieve my grandmother, who didn’t live to hear those words, and my heart breaks for the relatives who are still in the graveyards. But I can also see beyond a shadow of a doubt that the dam holding the history back is breaking.

This weekend, more than one notable apology took place.

On Saturday, the navy formally apologized for an attack they made on Angoon, a Tlingit village, in 1882.

It was Oct. 26, 1882, in Angoon, a Tlingit village of about 420 people in the southeastern Alaska panhandle. Now, 142 years later, the perpetrator of the bombardment — the U.S. Navy —has apologized.

Rear Adm. Mark Sucato, the commander of the Navy's northwest region, issued the apology during an at-times emotional ceremony Saturday, the anniversary of the atrocity. "The Navy recognizes the pain and suffering inflicted upon the Tlingit people, and we acknowledge these wrongful actions resulted in the loss of life, the loss of resources, the loss of culture, and created and inflicted intergenerational trauma on these clans," he said during the ceremony, which was livestreamed from Angoon. "The Navy takes the significance of this action very, very seriously and knows an apology is long overdue."

While the rebuilt Angoon received $90,000 in a settlement with the Department of Interior in 1973, village leaders have for decades sought an apology as well, beginning each yearly remembrance by asking three times, "Is there anyone here from the Navy to apologize?"

"You can imagine the generations of people that have died since 1882 that have wondered what had happened, why it happened, and wanted an apology of some sort, because in our minds, we didn't do anything wrong," said Daniel Johnson Jr., a tribal head in Angoon.

The attack was one of a series of conflicts between the American military and Alaska Natives in the years after the U.S. bought the territory from Russia in 1867. The U.S. Navy issued an apology last month for destroying the nearby village of Kake in 1869, and the Army has indicated that it plans to apologize for shelling Wrangell, also in southeast Alaska, that year, though no date has been set.

@akn.n8v.lz attended the ceremony:

Packing again…

I am also preparing for another trip back to Alaska in a few weeks to help my dad. Thank you to the folks who are helping fund this! You are making this work for me entirely possible. This will be my third trip this year to help my dad, and I imagine there will be more trips in the future.

My previous trips:

I will keep you all posted and share the journey with you along the way! Thank you again for your continued support; being dedicated to learning and sharing history has made a measured impact. I truly never thought I’d see this day, but there is an unfathomable amount that is yet to come out; brace yourselves.

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