Dark History - 20: Secrets buried in unmarked graves: Residential Schools

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

In June of 2021, a bombshell investigation uncovered the bodies of 215 Indigenous children in unmarked graves on a Canadian school’s property. Wait. WHAT?! Yeah, they were students at something called a Residential School. And there were MANY of these in both Canada and the United States. Today, Bailey tells you about a horrifying program that resulted in thousands of deaths and even more missing children. Episode Advertisers Include: Wicked Clothes, Ship Station, Hunt A Killer and Stitch Fix US. Learn more during the podcast about special offers!  For 10% off go to Wickedclothes.com and use promo code DARKHISTORY.

Hi friends, how are you today? Welcome to my Dark History library. I hope you're having a wonderful day so far. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to my safe space. My therapy couch. Where I'm going to tell you all the dark secrets that have gone down throughout history. Oh, that was good. Because normally we call this a dark history library, but we should just call this a dark history therapy couch. Because bitch, we're gonna need it. We're gonna need it. Okay.

This is a safe space for all you curious cats out there, like myself, and you're like, hey, you know, history is actually really boring, but like, it's not. It's actually not boring. It's not boring. It could be really interesting, really intriguing, really fun, but like it's not. It's actually not boring. It's not boring. It could be really interesting, really intriguing, really fun, not fun, really dark, but we can learn together.

It's all about how it's presented. That's where I'm getting at. Anyway, so that's what we're doing today. We're talking about dark, mysterious, dramatic stories that maybe you didn't learn about in school, or at least I know I didn't. If anything, if this is more for me, I've been learning so much.

It's about me. That's kidding. Okay, I have like dark history book here. Let me open it up so I can go to this blank page where we're gonna talk about some real fucked up shit. Okay, just a little disclaimer. Today's story is really heavy. It's really heavy. There's no way to go around how Dark it is and I feel like all the stories are really dark, right? Okay, but this one's ongoing It's still probably going to be developing within The next year or so even who knows how long but just a little heads up So as of right now we're filming this in October So if anything that changes within the next month or so, as of right now in October, this is what we know.

This is what we've learned about this story. And it's dark. Okay, have I made that clear? Today, we're going to be talking about residential schools highly requested. Whenever I say that, I kind of feel like a DJ or something. Super requested song. It's not. But a lot of you have been asking really dark. I'm so sorry we're gonna talk about it, but hey, let's talk about it. Shall we? Great. Let's go back, back to the beginning. I just want a little bit of faith. Anyways, so we're gonna go back to the beginning. I just want Hillary to affane. Anyway, so we're going to go back to the 1800s. Yay, 1800s.

I mean, this is called dark history. 1800s. Great. Anyway, we talked about it in a couple episodes already, but there was this pretty popular idea during this time in America that the Native Americans were a quote unquote, problem that needed to be solved. Okay?

I know, I know. The general feeling at this time was that new Americans, the settlers, or like the colonizers, the people not originally from this land, well, they were trying to move west to start new lives and take over the land for themselves. But the problem they were having was that there were people already living there for hundreds of years at that. And they were saying like, hey, well the people who were living there, they're like, hey, this is our land.

How about not? Of course not that casual, but hello. So remember Andrew Jackson, the basalt guy? Well he called the whole situation quote the Indian problem and quote and he signed the Indian removal act Which forced lots of Native American tribes out of their homes and their land and some of you may remember when we talked about this in that freaking horrifying story the trail of tears remember that Yeah awful the government had forced people to walk hundreds of miles across lakes and mountains freaking horrifying story, the trail of tears. Remember that? Yeah, awful.

The government had forced people to walk hundreds of miles across lakes and mountains to their quote, new home that the government assigned to them, sent them to force them to go to this designated area. Some people will say they gave them this land thing and they're like, you can have it, scraps. So this land was completely a barren area that wasn't very livable.

So thanks, you know. Sadly, thousands would die along this journey. And when they got to the new land, they literally had to rebuild from nothing. Off wall. The trailer of tears was meant to weaken the people, get them out of the way. The colonizers didn't care how it was done.

It was just like, out of sight, out of mind, goodbye. But not everyone had this hatred towards any of Americans. So there was this group of people who wanted to get rid of Native Americans. And then there was this other group that wanted to help them thrive in New America. But only if they played by their rules. This group was known as the quote, Friends of the Indian. End quote. Now this was actually a movement fueled by rhetoric, religion, and sympathetic rich people. So in other words, they had ulterior motives, but to their face. Like they actually like their friends, but just backstabbing barbrost strikes again.

With this friends of the Indian movement, the idea was not to erase the indigenous people physically, but it was essentially to erase their culture. The friends of the Indians wanted to turn every native person into a quote, respectable American and fancy clothes with short hair who only speaks English. So none of the native people would be given a choice. It was, join us or get the hell out of here. These quote-unquote friends came up with a way that they could start grooming Native Americans to start acting the way they wanted them to. The friends came up with an idea of starting a special school.

Ooh. The friends came up with an idea of starting a special school. Ooh, which was actually a really popular back then, and most Americans supported that idea instead of killing them. They're like, yeah, you know, just send to the schools to kill them. That's great. That's nice. The government partnered with missions and local churches to create schools inside Native American territory to teach children to replace their tribal practices. And I guess if you're a traditional Christian person

from the 1800s, you think you're doing them a favor. And society believed that being Christian was the only way you could be a functioning member of American society. I roll. You know what, religion and money seems to be the root of all evil, huh? Great. Glad we figured it out. We solved the world's mysteries. Another thing

these early schools did was introduce native kids to what colonizers called the Habits and Arts of Civilization, which is basically just a way of saying that indigenous peoples behavior and art were not civilized. So in order to be civilized, they had to abandon their own languages and cultures. In other words, they wanted America to be on the same page and not have like a mumbo jumbo of different cultures and ideas. No. No.

Get in line. I think this would be called a whitewashing. Literally, it's whitewashing. Anyway, as you can imagine, there were mixed feelings about these schools in the native community. Many indigenous people were super suspicious of all of this, and they thought that they should never trust

the government because they had good reason. The government had already spent the last hundred years or so backstabbing them, so why should they believe them now? You wouldn't, you know? But some of the indigenous people were a little hopeful, like maybe it could be a good thing to just learn how to blend in a little bit because all the fighting was just getting everyone killed and it wasn't really solving anything. Plus a lot of them thought that by blending in, it could make it easier to negotiate with the colonizers. So you know that phrase, if you can't beat them, join them? It was like that kind of mentality for some people.

But honestly, it didn't really matter what anybody thought because the colonizers knew how effective it would be if they just erased the culture completely. Government and church officials would send police to native communities to make families send their kids to these schools. Now, this was usually accomplished with threats. So, Indigenous families would end up sending their kids voluntarily, no my sarcasm, voluntarily, because they didn't really have any other choice. And they helped that maybe at least they could like get a good meal and learn how to maneuver this new society to help their family somehow. They had no idea what to expect from these schools, but they didn't really have much to say

in the matter. Well, by the late 1800s, the schools started to shift from being church run to being run by the government, which when those two things merge, I mean nothing good can happen. They had big plans to make a whole bunch of these schools all over the country, but they wanted to start with one school and see how it went. You know, the little trial. Let's try it out and see what happens. And that, my friends, was called the Carlyle Industrial Indian School, which was in Pennsylvania. Now, this is a school that would set the bar for every other residential school in the world.

It's here that we start to see much more than just the racing of culture. But first, let's pause for an ad break. So the Carlisle Industrial Indian School, well, why was it made? Who made it? Well, this is Dush Kanu named Richard Henry Pratt. Now, Richie was born in 1840 in Rushford, New York. He was the oldest of three siblings, and his father would leave when he was a kid to take part in the California Gold Rush, but he ended up getting robbed and murdered while searching

for gold. LOL. That left Richie to support his mom and two younger brothers, which is a lot of pressure for a young man, you know, to solve sudden becoming the man of the household. He had to support his family, so he decided to join the military and fight in the Civil War for the Union. And just a little refresher, the Union, where against slavery, the Confederates were pro-slavery. So it sounds like he's kind of a good guy, but he's really not.

He's a villain here. Boo. So during the Civil War, there were some Native Americans who fought for the Confederacy because the land they lived on was in the South. And they thought that if they fought alongside the South and won the war, they would be able to get some of their land back. Well as wars go on, sometimes people are captured during the battle. And our guy Richard was given the job of overseeing the Native American prisoners of war. At this

time, he was considered to be pretty progressive in his views. I keep you Native Americans as equals who deserve the same rights as white people. Great, glad we agree here but wrong he thought Native Americans deserved rights only if they fit certain conditions your rules these conditions you ask well they had to act white and abandon their native culture Richard's motto wait till you hear this kill the Indian the man. I think that's a little fucked up. I don't know about you guys, but I don't think that's a good quote. Richard, I might want to rethink that one. So you can probably imagine this isn't gonna go so well if this guy's in charge. Yeah, it doesn't. This is dark history, welcome. Well, when he had some Native Americans

in captivity, he would teach them English and show them Western-style art. And everyone thought these classes were such a huge success. It ended up becoming kind of a spectacle. Like, people would travel from really far away to see these quote, civilized natives. Like it was a circus show of some sort. So people were coming out to see what Richard was doing, and two of those people were a couple of big-wig government types who saw the results of all this schooling, and they thought like, hey, this method of erasing native culture

is way more effective than any other method. They said, now this is their words. This is their word. They said these government people cost a million dollars to kill a native person in war, but it would only cost twelve hundred dollars to send them to school for eight years. We love a deal, huh? So they didn't care if they lived or died, they just wanted to do whatever saved them money. So Richard was able to get funding and was able to start an official boarding school. So in 1879, Richard opened up the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Before this, the church-run schools would be on the reservations where the kids would be a lot closer to their home. The Richard believed that the only way to fully change a person was to get them as far away from their homes as possible. So his new school had a system in place where the kids would be taken away as young as possible and then not allowed to head home until they were older. Usually this wasn't until they were in their 20s. So think about that gap for a second, family send their children, their little babies to the school, and then when their kid comes back there are full grown adults. And that's if they even come back at all. First of all, there were 147 students in the first year

Richard, Rand Carlisle, and somewhere as young as six years old, but most of them were teenagers, and they didn't all come from the same tribe either, and they had been taken from their homes from all over the country. One of the most well-known students in this first class was a boy who would later be known as Luther Standing Bear. But at this time, his name was Plenty Kill. Plenty Kill was raised in a traditional Lakota family

and was only 11 years old when his family was forced by the United States government to Indian territory. Now one day, a group of white people that he later described as sweet talkers showed up and gave his family an offer they just couldn't refuse. Do you want your son to succeed in America? You know, we have just the place for him

at the Carlow Indian School. He just made his own like it was Lollipop's in Rainbows. And nobody in his family was feeling too great about this, but Plenty Kills' father really wanted him to succeed and left the choice up to him. He told his son that no matter what he did, Lakota men always make the bravest choice. And that was when Plenty Kill realized that if he could be brave enough to succeed at school, he could come back home and help his family. So he went to the

Carlisle Indian School. After a long train ride, Plenty Kill ended up at the school to start his first day. The second he entered the school, the staff immediately began cutting his hair, taking all of his clothes and his belongings, and forcing him into clothes that looked like like a civil war uniform. This happened to all the other boys too. All the girls were put into those old school Victorian style dresses, and all of their long hair was cut off. And long hair has a lot of meaning to the indigenous people. And depending on what tribe you're talking about, it's different meanings.

But what I'm getting at is that the hair had such a bigger meaning to the people. And cutting it off, it's like a stab through the heart. We could talk about this forever, just hair alone, but we must carry on. I'm only saying that because like they cut off their hair may not sound like a big deal, but like hair is very important. That's what I'm getting at. You get it. Thank you.

The thought process behind this was if you can just physically remove all the things that make them feel comfortable as Native Americans, it'll be easier to break them down mentally. It's just one of the many ways they separate the kids from their culture so they could morph them into the people they wanted them to be. Tare them down and rebuild them how you want them to be. Oh, ad-break, beer-be. Welcome back. From here, the teachers at the school would take the kids one by one to a classroom, where

there was like a bunch of names written on a board in English. Each student was given a pointer stick and told to choose the name they liked the best on the board. And if I'm being real, these were all really basic Americanized names. Their names like Hugh, Timothy, John, Jacob, Jingleheimer, or Smith, you know, just Bob, just mayonnaise names. And no shade of that's your name. I love that for you, but you get it.

Plenty Kale was taken into this room and he was told he needed to pick a more dignified name, but there was just one big problem. He couldn't speak or read English. So he stared at the board and just pointed at a name he thought looked cool, that one. And the coolest one was Luther. And because they were basically forcing these poor kids into becoming white, he decided to honor the name of his father and he chose the last name, Standing Bear. So from this point on, he was now Luther Standing Bear. This is the way it went for all the students who ended up at Carlyle. After they were forced to choose a new name and wear these American looking clothes, they were put into classes where they studied English and other subjects, much to make them good little kids.

And after these classes, they would split the boys and girls up into job training. But not like whatever job you were interested in, of course not. They wanted to make sure they didn't get too educated, right? So they only trained them for low earning jobs. They had the boys learn about things like farming and making shoes and the girls will learn about cooking cleaning and laundry. Fine. So they wanted to teach them traditional European gender roles. If any of

the kids ever broke a rule, the discipline system was almost similar to the military. Boys and girls alike would all march single file to class and would have regular inspections under their beds to make sure they weren't hiding anything from their past lives. Like no photos or anything, nope, nothing. If you got caught, you had to do hard physical labor as punishment.

Those in charge viewed the kids as free labor when school was not in session, so during the summer they would call it job training, but they would actually just be personal servants for different families, or be forced to work in fields for local farmers. And to cover their asses, the school forced students to write letters to their families saying, how much of a wonderful time they were having. I love my life. I am living, laughing, loving so hard. Which is disturbing.

Is this not Munchausen Syndrome? What is it called? Munchausen Syndrome? Is this not that? This is that. This is like sick as abuse. Your abuser is making you write letters. Like, I'm doing amazing.

But because of things like these letters, the government and the general public thought like things were going super great. So they started to fund more of these schools to open up around the country. But unfortunately, it would turn out that Carlisle was my olds compared to like some of these new schools. Some of these other schools would abuse and neglect their students to the point that they were dying on campus and they wouldn't even bother to inform the families. Yeah, it's about to take a

really dark turn here. I mean this is already dark but we're going to take a left and to funky ass oopsie town. So from this point on, it's kind of a montage of misery. See, now that everyone had the green light to snatch up Native American children from their homes and get paid by the government to run a school, to train them essentially, now there were hundreds of schools popping up. So instead of going into specifics like Carfile,

let me just tell you some of the stuff that would happen within multiple schools. Oh, we just jump right into it. There was a lot of physical and sexual abuse all around step one, okay? Real talk, okay? Like this was a common theme, and it kind of pops up in everyone's experience when survivors share their stories.

It's just awful. There was one school in Michigan called Holy Childhood. Holy Childhood. Holy, holy childhood. Okay? Now you think it would be holy and safe and sacred. But instead, a survivor came out and talked about being able to hear other students getting beaten and raped at night.

Now that should make you very upset. Even if the abuse got reported, it almost never got investigated or punished. One student from the school said there was racism within racism, aka colorism. The kids who had lighter skin got better treatment. They got better clothes and they didn't get as abused as much. And this is on as much. They still got abused, but allegedly the darker skin

you had the worst you would be treated. At some schools, if you did something as simple as getting a math problem wrong, they would beat you and use your face to erase the chalkboard. I guess your racers weren't in the budget. Another former student said that violence between students was also encouraged to the point where they would have something called whipping lines, where they would just line up the good students, and they would use a whip to beat the bad ones.

Holy shit. Holy childhood. Oh, it makes sense. Holy childhood. Yeah, okay, I get it now. Oh, yeah. What the fuck? How could you do this? How could these people go to work, do this, and be able to just go home and like go to bed?

Like I'm gonna sleep peacefully. Like what is wrong? Are people like why? I got a lot of questions and honestly not that many answers. Okay, I'm just gonna list to you a bunch of bad shit. And there's like, all I wanna know is why. That's really it. Another problem with these schools is that medical care and food were also hard to combine. Many students later said sometimes all they would get for food was one sandwich per day. And that was only if you didn't misbehave.

If you did something wrong, and you were gonna give me any food, you're never gonna give me any food. You're gonna be punished by not eating. And if you were injured or sick, you just kinda like had a hope or pray it went away. Because they weren't gonna help you out with that. Mm-hmm. There was also a lot of disease outbreaks at these schools

because of the terrible conditions. For example, in 1899, there was a measles outbreak at one of these places and so many kids got sick. There were nine deaths in a 10-day period. And when the kids died, the healthy ones lay put them to work and forced them to build a coffin. Well, the combination of no food, medical neglect, and abuse that students experienced would unfortunately lead to deaths for a lot of these children. When a child died, the parents would sometimes only hear about it after they'd been buried in the school cemetery, and often times the graves weren't even marked, so they couldn't say goodbye.

Also, how many schools do you know have their own cemetery? Okay, I don't think they included that and there were little brochure about the school. A total bonus, we have our own cemetery. Would you send your kid? No, you would not. You wouldn't. And since these graves were unmarked,

they barely kept records of the deaths. So today we just have estimates based on records they did keep and the personal accounts from former students. But let's pause for a minute and break really quick before yeah let's do that BRB. Oh eventually the truth about what is going on in these schools starts to get back to the indigenous tribes all over the country right and the government starting to get some backlash. And not everyone was going to just give up their kids

now that they actually knew was happening. Parents started reaching out to their kids at school, writing them letters and encouraging them to run away, get away, just get out of there. There was a group of Hopi people who just flat out, refused to send their children to the schools. So the government then passed a law that said they were required to attend these schools

and they could not resist. The government would withhold funds for the reservations and send police to their land to remove them by force if they didn't comply. The Hopi people fought back and 19 of them were arrested and sent to prison. Now, when they came back from prison, they found that their kids were sent to the schools behind their backs.

America wasn't the only country who was opening these awful schools. There are indigenous people in Canada known as First Nations, and these schools in Canada are the ones that made the news earlier this year in 2021. It may be hard to imagine but some of these Canadian schools were even worse than the ones in

the US. Fun fact, did you know that race car spelled backwards is race car? Yeah, do it, it is. How does that work? I don't know, but it does. Look, I just feel like a little break from all the darkness would be nice before we get into some more of the darkness. So here's another fun fact. You lose up to 30% of your taste buds during a flight. The more you know. Do do do do do. Okay, let's give that to the story. Look, you just need like little breaks from time to time to like break up the dark shit.

Yeah, that's good for you. In 1879, a Canadian man named Nicholas Daven went out and visited some of the boarding schools in the United States and he was like, wow! I love what you did with the place! Wow! So this guy Nicholas would take the American system and bring it to Canada pretty much all on his own, which nobody asked him to.

The way everything went down in Canada kind of mirrors how it went down in the United States. One difference was that they didn't call them boarding schools. They called them residential schools because they lived there. It's the residents. Residential school, you know, cool. And the other key difference was that attendance at these residential schools were required by law. Oh my god, by law. It wasn't forced like in the United States, which is still bad. It was a straight-up law. Canada had this law, the Indian Act that said, if you don't send your child to a residential school, you're gonna go to prison. Much like the American system, though, these schools were rampant,

with stories of physical violence, forced removal from homes, sexual abuse, and basically any other form of trauma that exists. I mean, this is like scratching the surface. It's like real. All of it's real. I did it. Students were given numbers in place of their names. Numbers. They erased their identity down to their freaking name. Nons and priests would hit students with large straps,

small whips, beaver, snare wire, boards, books, rulers, yardsticks, fists, and open hands. So basically whatever the hell was near them, point blank period, these people of God, hello, we are judging. Sometimes, students were locked away in the basement for hours as punishment. For food, they were forced fed porridge,

spoiled fish, and rancid horse meat that made students real sick to the point of vomiting on their plates. But that's not all, because some survivors said that they would then be forced to eat it. Yeah. When like researching this story or telling it to you right now, it's easy to like distance yourself from it because it's like, oh, you're just kind of like, you're hearing it. But it's real. Like, that's, this is ehh! And through it all, kids from these schools all over Canada were going missing.

And nobody in the Canadian government ever really cared to find them. Just like in the American schools, there are a lot of stories of medical neglect too. There are multiple reports from former students of kids dying. One guy said his brother got sick and he hadn't seen him for a while and then finally a nurse told him like hey you should go see him soon because like he's probably on the outs and she brought him to his bed at the nurse's office and he said he didn't even recognize him. He said, he didn't even recognize him. Just so sick. The brother Sally shortly died after.

There are so many awful, awful things that happen to these children. And I don't want to ruin anyone's day. I feel like I already did ruin your day by going into some graphic detail, but there's like so much more. But I will list provided links in the description box below. There are a ton of first hand survivor accounts if you were looking for more stories,

but the staff of these residential schools were absolute monsters. Ma, stars. This was built on the same foundation as the American schools. Break down their culture, treat them like animals until they start acting like true Americans, or Canadians, or whatever the hell that means. In 1926, back in the United States, over 80% of indigenous children had been sent to these schools. 80% are you listening 80%? There was a bunch of laws passed over the years that changed the way that government ran these schools and slowly more and more of them would start shutting down in favor of opening something called day schools on native reservations instead.

They're basically the same thing as the Carlisle model, military stuff, and all, except you got to go home at the end of the day. Yay! At least you're supposed to be stoked, I guess. At least you get to go home. First, let's pause for an ad break. Hi, welcome back. It wasn't until 1975 that the U.S. Congress passed an act that granted tribes the ability to

take over any government programs that were put on them. But the responsibility came a complete cut of federal funding to the schools, so most of them ended up shutting down. Something similar happened in Canada, and most schools were shutting down by the 1970s there too. But that is, oh, but if you do the math cause 1970, 2020, that's not only 50 years ago. You guys, 50 years ago. What's, do you know something that's over 50 years old? Catch up, catch up, over 50 years old. Mom, sorry mom, over 50 years old.

Grant, like, that's not that long ago. Disneyland is over 50 years old. Disneyland is over 50 years old. Disneyland is over 50 years old. That's fucked up. With the schools in Canada finally closing, more and more people started to speak up about what happened there. As a result, a group called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, was formed in 2008 and they started to do some investigating. The schools did not do a good job of keeping track of what happened to its students since so many died or just went missing.

So the TRC would interview former students to try and piece together what exactly happened. Over the years, the TRC would identify over 4,000 children who had died of disease or accidents at the school, but had no documentation of their death. The TRC requested the 1.5 million that it would take to fund the search for these children, but the government said, uh, that price tag is too high.

Now, so the TRC self-funded investigation into Camloop School, where they would uncover 215 bodies in an unmarked grave, and now this just happened this past June 2021 June 2021 215 bodies in unmarked grace. And not even like just bodies, it was like all children. So this led to even more searches, which brought the estimated number of missing children up to 5,000 kids. This isn't even a final number either, because they are still actively searching today. So this number is expected to just keep increasing. Ah!

I know, isn't that just, what is this world? What's the meaning of life, anyone? Why are we here? Why are we doing this? What is this about? Why did this happen? Who allowed this? What the hell? More than likely, this is also the case with the American schools. There is one called the Haskell Indian School that has a hundred and two student graves, with at least

500 other students whose graves are unaccounted for. They were either buried in unmarked graves, or their bodies were handed off to their families, but let's be real. They really didn't like transporting bodies. The schools are like, it's not in the budget. Yeah. Both the United States government and Canadian government have since recognized and apologized

for the horrors of these schools, but that's pretty far from enough. Yeah, look, sometimes you think they only apologize because they got caught, you know? That's how it feels a lot of times and it's like It whatever sure whatever what do you do about it? They need to do something about it is what they really need to do anyways I mentioned the TRC in Canada is doing good work finding the truth buried in these unmarked graves

And the United States there has been an official investigation that's been launched into the Native American boarding schools to identify the locations of students graves and finally giving families closure. A final report is supposed to be due in April of 2022. I feel like forever away. Many Native communities still feel the effects of this traumatic history. Hello. Hi. Hi, yes. Hello.

Hello. Several say that there are full-blown native languages that died out because so many kids were forced to speak English and forget their native tongue. Survivors of these schools would struggle with PTSD throughout their whole life and do you freaking blame them? No, and some experts say this is one of the reasons we see high levels of abuse in areas where there are a lot of survivors But some survivors say that the worst part was self-hatred They were taught to hate their heritage, hate their skin color, and hate their old family. That can lead to feeling like, I don't know, maybe you don't belong anywhere.

And then how this toxic snowball effect on your whole life. I wish there was like a, I wish there was better conclusions to these stories. They're never satisfying, you know? Like, in 1904, Richard Pratt, I wish I could tell you like, as graphic as this is, I'm sorry, Jesus, please forgive me, like I wish it was like burned at the stake. I wish I could say that, you know, like burned at the stake and then we just took over and like, mmmm, but not, anyways, 1904, Richard Pratt retired from working at the school, and I'm surprised he wasn't murdered to be quite honest, and the school ended up closing down in 1918. Richard

spent the rest of his life doubling down on two things that seemed pretty conflicting. The first is that he truly believed Native Americans deserved equal rights to other Americans. But then he also believed that all of their cultures and beliefs needed to disappear. Remember his motto, kill the Indian, save the man, and it upbecoming the entire point of the schools that Carlisle inspired. And as we now know, many of the schools he inspired took that saying literally more literally than he did. Honestly, the legacy of Richard and Carlisle is pretty simple.

He may have claimed to be an advocate for Native Americans, but he is directly responsible for cultural genocide felt by indigenous people all over the world. I'm telling you, this is my therapy couch because we need to vent, we need to talk it out, we need to work this out because this is heavy, okay? And I only have so much time here on this little podcast situation. And again, this is just like a little fraction of what so many experienced.

And what's more sad or embarrassing to admit was my dumbass over here was thinking like, this happened a long time ago. A long time ago, like, right? We've resolved it since then. And it's like, nah a long time ago. A long time ago, like right, we've resolved it since then. And it's like, eh, not so much. I mean, earlier this year, earlier this year, the conversation around these schools

has been brought back to light because they found all those unmarked graves of children. And for me personally, I had no idea this was a thing. I mean, what the fuck? What the fuck? Like, I didn't know. Look, I know, I'm not alone out there and if I didn't know, maybe you didn't know, and now we know. So what do we do with this information? Now we're asking the right questions. I'm not sure. I don't have any answers, okay? And I'm not here to act like I know what the hell we're supposed to do, right?

What I can do is list links in the description box where we can learn, we can further learn more and find ways to support in uncovering the truth and finding these missing children. These unmarked graves, uncovering everything, hold the government as responsible. Look, unfortunately again, this barely scratches the surface. But hey, look. History sucks ass. Okay, our ancestors probably participated in some really terrible shit.

Does that mean your terrible shit? No. But if we be honest about history, then we can do better. So let's stop whitewashing everything and just be honest. America, you suck ass sometimes, okay? But we don't have to suck ass in the future. We can do and be better unless you like sucking ass. I'm not very good at motivational speeches and I didn't know how to end this honestly. Did I motivate you? Okay, let me close this dark ass book that has nothing but bad news. Is that some am I right? Damn book. Anyhow, well everyone, thank you for

learning with me today. Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions. We're trying to get the whole story because we deserve that as people, do we not? Now, I'd love to hear your reactions to this story, so hop on over on social media and use the hashtag dark history, so I can follow along to what you're saying. You can also join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday, after the podcast airs and also catch murder mystery makeup which drops on Mondays. Thank you so much, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day, you make it choices, and

I'll talk to you guys next week. Bye! Dark History is an Audioboom original. This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Jr. McNelie from Three Arts, Fanny Bodry, and Claire Turner from Wilhouse DNA, and my dog, St. Producer, Lexi Kiven, Dariel Christon, and Spencer Strassmore. Research provided by Tisha Dunston, writers, Jed Bukow, Michael ObersBurst, Joey Skavuzo, and me, Bailey Serian. A big thank you to our historical consultant, Dr. Ragnona Wheeler, associate professor of indigenous studies, University of Saskatchewan.

And also, I'm your host, Bailey Serian. Don't forget to check out the links down below. Sarian! Don't forget to check out the links down below.