Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Buried Apologies and a Path Forward

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Disinterment and repatriation is important work, but it’s only just begun, and it’s not the only work that needs to be done to acknowledge and atone for the history of Indigenous boarding schools. The Federal Government has not yet provided a centralized place for survivors or descendants of survivors of Federal Indian boarding schools, or their families, to voluntarily detail their experiences in the boarding school system. Which means that there are still generations within the Indigenous community who continue to carry the invisible burden of these schools. The “road to healing” has started, maybe, but it's the indigenous people themselves who have taken the most significant steps forward. Note: We would like to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of this episode may not be suitable for younger audiences. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A&W is now serving Pret Organic Coffee, and you can get a $1 small coffee, a $2 small latte, or like me, a $1 small coffee and a $2 small latte. Available now until November 24th in Ontario only. Woo-hoo! Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to our final episode of Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America.

When the Carlisle Indian School opened in 1879, its founder Richard Pratt was prepared for success. What he was not prepared for was death. was not prepared for was death. But death came just the same, as students living in the harsh conditions of the school succumbed to illness, abuse, or accidents. The first student to die was Amos Laframbois. Amos, the son of a Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux tribal leader, spent only 20 days at Carlisle before he died. He was 13 years old. Amos was buried in a small makeshift cemetery on the school's campus over a thousand miles away from his home. Over the years, the cemetery expanded and filled up with the remains of other students who passed away while in the care of the Carlisle Indian School. It's at Carlisle that their bodies have remained for over a century or longer. As of June 2023, the time of this recording, Amos has not yet been

repatriated back to his tribal descendants, but there is hope that he will be returned this coming fall. Amos' relatives signed an affidavit confirming their family bond and submitted it to the U.S. Army, which now maintains the Carlisle Cemetery. Tamara St. John, the Sisseton Wahpeton tribal historian, says of the fight to have the bodies of their Sioux children returned, we are committed to them and to bringing them home like the chiefs that they are. to bringing them home like the chiefs that they are. They plan to bury Amos next to his father on the Lake Traverse Reservation. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In September of 2017, news broke that the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania was exhuming part of their cemetery. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School had operated in that same location before

it closed its doors in 1918, so tribal members and descendants of those who died at the school reached out to the Army and asked that their loved ones be sent home. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act became federal law in 1990 and requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding to return Native American ancestors and cultural items to their respective peoples. The Act acknowledges that these remains or artifacts belong to tribal descendants and have been historically kept from them. This includes sacred cultural objects that have been used in federally funded museum collections. And of course, human remains.

It seems like this law should extend to the U.S. Army, which is a federally funded agency, and the bodies that they've uncovered at Carlisle, but the Army maintains that the Graves Protection Act doesn't apply. They released a statement saying, individually marked graves located within the Carlisle Barracks post cemetery do not constitute holdings or collections of the Army, nor does NAGPRA, the Graves Protection Act, require the Army to engage in the intentional excavation or exhumation of a grave. Instead, the Army has said it will use their own process and policies when disinterring the bodies, though they have promised to reimburse the families for transport and reinterment of the children once they've been returned. families for transport and reinterment of the children once they've been returned.

Current estimates show that at least 189 children are buried in the Carlisle school's cemetery. One of those children, 16-year-old Frank Green, was an Oneida boy who ran away from Carlisle in 1898 before he could make it home. He had an accident and was killed by a train. The school newspaper showed that the school's officials had very little sympathy for his death. The write-up on his death said he tried to get others to run away with him, but their good sense prevailed and they refused to go. We trust that the lesson, though a severe one, will be of use to us all. Like so many others, his body was kept at the school instead of returned home to his family. Often families didn't even learn about the deaths of their relatives in boarding schools until weeks after they had been buried, sometimes with a simple marker, and sometimes in an unmarked grave.

This, coupled with badly kept school records on students' health and history, has made repatriation a time-consuming endeavor. Another student, Edward Spott, is listed as having died from consumption in 1896, less than a year after he graduated from Carlisle. He too was buried in the school cemetery. This fall, two of his relatives will travel from Washington State to Pennsylvania to bring him home. One of his relatives acknowledges that it's taken a lot of time and independent research to get this far. She says, if I was not 25, able-bodied, with the ability to communicate and advocate for his return, this would be a very difficult process. Archaeological teams and tribal representatives continue to work with the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle to uncover and identify the rest of the remains of the students

buried there. They've disinterred the bodies of 29 children and have been working to reunite them with their descendants. And although the Army maintains that it doesn't have to follow the law of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, they say that the Army's commitment remains steadfast to the Native American families whose sacrifice is known to only a few. Our objective is to reunite the families with their children in a manner of utmost dignity and respect. At the same time, the Department of the Interior is now reviewing proposed updates to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to make sure it continues to meet tribal needs. The changes haven't been finalized yet, but Assistant

Secretary for Indian Affairs Brian Newland says that this is an important law that helps us heal from some of the more painful times in our past by empowering tribes to protect what is sacred to them. These changes to the department's NAGPRA regulations are long overdue and will strengthen our ability to enforce the law and help tribes in the return of ancestors and sacred cultural objects. Disinterment and repatriation is important work, but it's only just begun. And it's not the only work that needs to be done to acknowledge and atone for the history of Indigenous boarding schools. Before President Joe Biden took office in January of 2021, he announced his nomination of Representative Deb Haaland for Secretary of the Interior. She's the first Indigenous Cabinet Secretary in U.S. history.

The maternal line of her family is able to trace their ancestry through tribal lines, going all the way back to the 13th century. Deb is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, a 35th generation New Mexican. In her speech accepting the nomination, Holland noted just how momentous an occasion it was, saying, this moment is profound when we consider the fact that a former Secretary of the Interior once proclaimed it his goal to, quote, civilize or exterminate us. I'm a living testament to the failure of this horrific ideology. The Secretary of the Interior she's talking about, Alexander Stewart, served between 1850 and 1853 at a time when Native tribes had been forced into Indian territory and early church-run mission

schools were being supported by the government. Deb grew up as a military kid, moving around with her family so often that she attended 13 different public schools. And even though Holland attended public schools, her family was no stranger to the boarding school system. Both her grandparents had been educated at boarding schools. When Deb graduated from the University of New Mexico, she was a newly single mom to a little girl, and she started a small business making and selling salsa to support her daughter. It didn't always pay the bills, and she remembers relying on friends and family to keep them on their feet. She pushed herself trading salsa for law school and was elected as the first woman to serve on the board of directors for the Laguna Nation's Development Corporation, where she managed New Mexico's second largest tribal gaming operation.

By 2018, she made more election history when she and Sharice Davids of Kansas became the first two Indigenous women to serve in the United States Congress. In June of 2021, in her role as Secretary of the Interior, Holland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, an investigation into the boarding school system. This was a big deal. She had been in office for two months, and her announcement meant that she would lead the very same department that was responsible for overseeing forced assimilation through boarding schools in a new effort to shine a light on its history. of Indian Affairs Office, under the oversight of the Department of the Interior, would focus on investigating and documenting the history of the federal government's role in the operation of the native boarding schools across the U.S. Secretary Haaland has said, we are uniquely positioned to assist in the effort to uncover the dark history of these institutions that have haunted our families for too long. As a Pueblo woman, it is my responsibility, and frankly, it's my legacy.

I know that this process will be painful. It won't undo the heartbreak and loss that so many of us feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we're all proud to embrace. I don't see it as my role to be the voice for all Native people, but rather to amplify your voices so that American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities have a seat at the table to speak for themselves. By sitting at this table together, we can build a better relationship for future generations that is not rooted in the worst parts of our past. We've already touched on two other reports in this series, the Merriam Report in 1934 and the Kennedy Report in 1969. But boarding school education was only a part of

their investigation's focus. The Department of the Interior's investigation would be the first to concentrate solely on boarding school operations. Some of its goals were to provide historical details about boarding schools across the nation, establish the first official list of boarding school sites, and identify burial locations. Along with the investigation, the accompanying report was meant to address the long intergenerational trauma left behind by the boarding school program. Secretary Holland assigned Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Brian Newland to head up a team that spent almost a full year researching and compiling the report. They dug into the Department of Interior's records and also worked closely with other agencies like the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

They contacted tribal leaders to get their input on how to responsibly work at reservation and boarding school sites, and the best practices for distributing any sensitive information that would emerge from the research. Newland and his team had formal consultations with Plains tribes, Alaska Native villages, and the Native Hawaiian community to put a plan in place when it came to moving human remains. They knew it was likely that research would uncover cemeteries at more boarding schools. Newland's investigation officially began on June 22, 2021, and the 106-page report was released 11 months later, on May 11, 2022. COVID limited their access to some of the documents and research they needed, so the May 22 report is considered volume one of the overall report,

with Assistant Secretary Newland's recommendation for further investigation. In the report's opening letter, Newland writes, this report as I it, is only a first step to acknowledge the experiences of federal Indian boarding school children. It notes a desire from people across Indian country and the Native Hawaiian community to share their individual and family experiences with the federal Indian boarding school system and the resulting impacts today. the resulting impacts today. The report shows that 431 Indigenous boarding schools existed and operated before 1969. The average number of schools per state was 11, and the state with the highest number of boarding schools was Oklahoma, which had 79. Arizona had 48 boarding schools, and New Mexico had 45. In total, the system designed to solve the Indian problem encompassed more than a thousand federal and non-federal institutions, including schools, hospitals, sanitariums, asylums, and orphanages. The first round of investigation has located 53 cemeteries, and they expect to find more.

Causes of death so far are listed in general categories of disease, accidents, and abuse as the records are uncovered and sorted through. Because this is just a first pass, the Department of the Interior states that as the investigation continues, the department expects the number of recorded deaths to increase into the thousands or even tens of thousands of deaths at the hands of boarding schools. Because remember, students died at the schools, but so many more were sent home to die when they were sick, which gave the schools a pass at recording their deaths. The investigation has not yet searched through the American Indian Records Repository or AIR for any information it might have, and it likely has a lot. The AIR is a National Archives and Records Administration facility in Kansas, and it has roughly 200,000 boxes of indexed Indigenous records stored inside of it. There are people

who are slowly working to digitize the records, and as that process continues, the names of students who attended the schools, where they attended, and when, as well as their health records, may finally become available to their descendants. Some of this is information that students' families never received. Sometimes the only thing they were told was that the child died. The what or how was never shared with them. Congress has approved another $7 million for the next phase of the report, which will collect more detail about burial sites as well as names and ages of students. In the meantime, we will link in the show notes an interactive map of the Carlisle Indian School

Cemetery, which shows what records they have of the students who have been buried there. In response to the recommendations in the first report, Secretary Holland has also said that the ongoing investigation will collect and compile oral histories from boarding school survivors during what she named the Road to Healing Tour. Department members have spent the past year gathering oral histories from boarding school survivors and their families across the country. The team has made seven stops on their tour, holding events for members of the Native communities in each area, making connections and listening to stories. Standing in front of Secretary Holland in a high school gym outside of Phoenix, Arizona in February, Holland in a high school gym outside of Phoenix, Arizona in February, June Marie Holiday Wanaka shared parts of her personal history. She was a student at a boarding school in the 1950s.

She said that before she left home, her cousins told her that she was going to have to learn how to fight. She was six years old, and she did learn, she told Holland in the room full of listeners. She had to learn to defend herself against both other students and against teachers who weren't above hitting children. I fought to live each day, she said, and I have scars in my heart and in my mind. The Road to Healing forums are open to the public, but only boarding school survivors and their descendants are allowed to speak. The Department of the Interior staff doesn't give an end time. The events end after every testimony is received. In January, the Road to Healing tour made a stop in Arizona at the Gila River Indian Community, where a woman shared a story about her grandmother who went to the Tucson Indian School.

She said, my grandmother was a good storyteller. She was funny, beautiful, and liked to make people laugh. As she told it, she was caught speaking in her native language, trying to comfort these children, trying to make them laugh so they could forget about being sad. The missionaries heard her and took out clothespins to teach my grandma a lesson. She talked about how it made everything worse and she sat at her desk for hours with blood and saliva overflowing across her hands and dress. She finished speaking about the generations of her family who have been affected by boarding schools and said, the first step is listening. Folks are feeling like they finally have someone to tell their story to with Secretary Holland

and her staff. So this is really groundbreaking. While the DOI's investigation into boarding schools has mainly concentrated on the history and the conditions of boarding schools, it also highlights the research done by the Running Bear Studies, funded by the National Institutes of Health and released in 2018. The studies measure the long-term effects on those who attended the schools, and its findings are staggering. It found that those who had attended the schools generally suffered from chronic health issues at a rate 44% higher than that of the general population. The report shares that at a minimum, the separation from family contributed to poor health from childhood through adulthood. Boarding school survivors' cancer rates were three times higher than the general population.

Tuberculosis rates were twice as high. High cholesterol rates were 95% higher, diabetes more than 80% higher, and anemia more than 60% higher than general populations of the same age groups. Boarding school survivors were also at high risk for mental health illnesses too, like PTSD, depression, anxiety, and unresolved grief from trauma. Secretary Holland, again. The federal policies that attempted to wipe out Native identity, language, and culture continue to manifest in the pain our communities face, including long-standing intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence and abuse, disappearance of Indigenous people, premature deaths, mental disorders, and substance abuse.

Basil Braveheart, a Lakota elder and Korean War veteran, was taken to a boarding school at just six years old. He is 89 now, and he still remembers the terror he felt when his hair was cut. It fell on the floor, and they still remembers the terror he felt when his hair was cut. It fell on the floor, and they were walking on it. To me, he said, that was a deep spiritual violation and disrespect. He also remembered being punished for speaking his Lakota language. The nun doling out the punishment made him bite a rubber band with his teeth, pull it out as far as it could go, and then release it so that it would snap painfully against his mouth.

He left school at 17 to serve as a paratrooper in the Korean War. As an adult, he's suffered from PTSD and alcoholism from his experiences, both in the war and at school. But he says it's his grandmother's teachings that have helped him learn to heal. He says, the wisdom that she taught me was to forgive the unforgivable. What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things, but most of all the passion and care that goes into producing the local, high-quality milk we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk,

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Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at fizz.ca. Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th only on Disney+. So what now? Where can we possibly go from here to heal from the past and build a path forward? You might think that the shuttering of the boarding schools was the obvious first step in the solution to a complicated history. And yes, it's true that almost all of these schools have closed. But there are still four off-reservation boarding schools operating in the United States.

One of those is the Riverside Indian School in southwest Oklahoma. It opened in 1871 and still enrolls Indigenous students today. Riverside was the first place Secretary Deb Haaland stopped in 2022 on the Road to Healing tour, 2022 on the Road to Healing tour, where survivor Donald Niconi spoke about his horrific experiences at Riverside, calling it 12 years of hell. Yet even now, nearly 800 students attend Riverside school every year. Of course, the way students are enrolled and taught today is far different from the 1800s or even the 1950s. The school accepts students from tribes around the country and they can wear traditional dress if they want to. The majority of the staff and teachers are Native themselves and the curriculum centers around the celebration of Indigenous

culture, not its erasure. Schools like Riverside are now overseen by the Bureau of Indian Education or BIE, which works under the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs. The BIE got an overhaul in 2006, and its mission, it states, is to provide quality educational opportunities from early childhood through life in accordance with the tribe's needs for cultural and economic well-being. accordance with the tribe's needs for cultural and economic well-being. Today it funds and operates around 183 schools that serve over 40,000 Native American students. The majority of the schools are run by tribes under a contract with the BIE, but some of them are operated by the BIE directly. It runs all four of the off-reservation boarding schools that are still in operation,

runs all four of the off-reservation boarding schools that are still in operation, Riverside in Oklahoma, Flandreau in South Dakota, Chimawa in Oregon, and Sherman in California. Tony Dearman, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, is the current director of the Bureau of Indian Education and the former superintendent of Riverside Indian School. In 2022, he said, over the past few years, the Bureau of Indian Education has instituted new strategies to more independently serve the unique needs of our students. As we build our capacity, we are creating our own identity as a world-class education provider. This modern mindset is vastly different from the boarding schools of the past even still most native american children attend public schools only about 10 percent of native american children attend bie run schools but just like public school districts have big differences

between their curriculum funding and priorities bie schools also show a variety of successes and challenges. About 200 students currently attend the U.S.'s oldest continuously operating indigenous boarding school, the Chimawa Indian School in Oregon. The school states that it is moving past its former policies and abuses, but the Department of the Interior's inspector general is currently auditing the school to look into allegations of the misspending of funding and the drop in students' academic achievements. Oregon Public Broadcasting has data showing that between 2010 and 2017, police responded to more than 1,300 incidents at Chimawa. Many have noted that Chimawa students are living with complicated

intergenerational trauma that is not being addressed. Dr. K. Tzianina Lamauema reminds us of the importance of making healing and accountability a priority as new generations continue to feel the reverberations of boarding school history. There's still Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California. There's still Shemala Indian High School in Salem, Oregon. And those schools now are open as a choice available to Native students who might want to attend school with other Native students who come from areas where perhaps the reception for Native people is pretty chilly in the public schools, where the public schools have nothing in their curriculum about Native people.

And that's sadly still more common than not. So it's important to know that, that this is not all something in the past. And it's important to know that Native people are very interested in a healing process. But what does that mean for non-Native America? It means you have to know something about this system, not just because it's, you know, oh, wow, that's an amazing thing that Native people were subjected to. It's really important, I think, for U.S. citizens today to recognize this is what our country, our nation, has done in the name of acquiring land.

This land that we all live on, every square inch of the U.S.'s native land, we live on it. So what's our responsibility as U.S. citizens today to look to that earth beneath our feet? My colleague Paul Chatsmith of the Smithsonian calls on all of us, look to the earth beneath our feet. My colleague Paul Chatsmith at the Smithsonian calls on all of us, look to the ground beneath your feet. It's native land. What do you know about that? What do you know about your native neighbors? That's an important part of a responsibility of accountability.

Do you remember how we talked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC, earlier in this series? How they spent six years gathering information on the history of residential schools in Canada? They interviewed and recorded oral histories from survivors all over the country before releasing their six-volume report in 2015. That report contained 94 calls to action or ways to support reconciliation between Canada and its Indigenous population. I won't make you guess how many of those 94 calls to action have been fulfilled. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, and the Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous-led research center, have been keeping track. According to their monitoring, they found that only 13 of the 94 calls to action have

been completed. Completed calls to action include things like establishing an Aboriginal People's Television Network, acknowledging Indigenous language rights, and having churches teach their congregations about residential schools and the church's past roles in them. But 81 more calls to action have floundered in the eight years since the report was released. Many of them focused on child welfare reform. There are more Indigenous Canadian children going through the welfare system today than there were enrolled at the residential schools at its peak. Canada's former Assembly of First Nations National Chief, Roseanne Archibald, spoke in 2022 about the calls to action and stated, If we were in a chapter of a book on reconciliation, we are today on the first sentence of that book.

book. And here in the U.S., we are woefully behind even that, with only one report after 11 months of investigations. Our own path to truth and reconciliation is in its very beginning stages. We have no comprehensive database of recorded oral histories. Files sit in a facility in Kansas waiting to be sorted and digitized, and cemeteries and bodies are still being identified. Even our apology was barely a whisper. In December of 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Native American Apology Resolution. Doesn't ring a bell? You may not have heard of it before, because the apology wasn't televised. It wasn't even spoken out loud in a room full of tribal leaders. The apology, watered down from even the original proposed language, was buried inside a 67-page, multi-billion- dollar defense spending bill. The purpose of the apology is,

in the words of the document itself, to acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the federal government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native peoples on behalf of the United States. It goes on for about six pages, starting with the first settlers in Jamestown, and highlights specific atrocities like the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. The only mention of Native American boarding schools is a brief paragraph on assimilation that acknowledges, quote, the forcible removal of Native children from their families to faraway boarding schools where their Native practices and languages were degraded and forbidden.

But not only was the apology quiet, it was also lackluster. The sorry was said, but it did not admit any kind of liability for the mistreatment, violence, and neglect the U.S. government has historically inflicted on Native people. There was no talk of reparations, no next steps outlined. A number of tribes and activists are unsatisfied with this silent apology and continue to ask that the U.S. president speak the apology out loud, as other world leaders have done, and as U.S. presidents have done in the past when apologizing to other wronged groups of people. In fact, in 1993, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a joint resolution that acknowledged the 100th anniversary of the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii.

anniversary of the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. Along with that acknowledgement, they offered an apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States. It was called the Apology Resolution, and it recognized that the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown by the United States and that its monarchy and citizens did not relinquish their sovereignty. It also apologizes for depriving Native Hawaiians their right to determine their own statehood. But a similar spoken-out-loud apology still hasn't been offered to Indigenous people on the mainland or in Alaska. Robert Coulter, the director of the Indian Law Resource Center, summed it up well when he said, What kind of an apology is it when they don't tell the people they're apologizing to? For an apology to have any meaning at all, you do have to tell the people you're apologizing to.

I have had my doubts on whether this is a true or meaningful apology, and this silence seems to speak very loudly on that point. In the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigative report, Brian Newland and his team gave several recommendations for future work. These recommendations are things like digitizing as many records as possible, which the National Endowment for the Humanities has now started, and identifying boarding school survivors and their families in order to document their histories. The report also recommends that there be more congressional action around issues like preserving Native languages and improving

Indigenous health. It mentions that another piece of our due diligence has got to be working with non-federal organizations like churches to get them to release their private records related to the boarding schools that they ran. We know that nearly half of all Indigenous boarding schools were funded and supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the day-to-day management was overseen by Catholic or Protestant organizations. These religious organizations were given what the 1969 Kennedy report called an unprecedented delegation of power by the federal government to run schools. On June 10, 2023, in the United States, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

unanimously passed a bill to create a Truth and Healing Commission that will identify the locations of former Indigenous schools and the cemeteries associated with them. The bill also authorized the use of federal, local, and church documents to record the ongoing impact of the boarding schools on the Native American community. One of the amendments to the proposed bill would allow the commission to issue subpoenas in order to obtain records, possibly forcing churches who have been dodging the commission to share their records. The good news is that a number of religious organizations have shown their support for the Truth and Healing Commission and promised to work with it. Some denominations have even started similar committees on their own. The Episcopal Church and organizations like the Oklahoma Catholic Native Schools Project are calling for deep dives into their own historical

records and creating listening projects with boarding school survivors in an effort to reckon with their own histories connected to boarding schools. The New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, a regional Quaker group, sent a letter of apology to regional Indigenous communities for their organization's role in operating boarding schools. Part of their letter reads, role in operating boarding schools. Part of their letter reads, we are sorry for our advocacy of the Indian industrial boarding schools, which we now recognize was done with spiritual and cultural arrogance. Quakers were among the strongest promoters of this policy and managed over 30 schools for Indian children, mostly boarding schools during the 19th and 20th century. We are deeply sorry for our part in the vast suffering caused by this system and the continuing effects.

The Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project is organizing their record collections, and Benedictine nuns in Minnesota have apologized for their role in running boarding schools. So far, the emphasis, federal and private, has been on collecting information, sorting through it, and figuring out where to go from there. Dr. Lomawema elaborates for us about why this is such a slow-moving process. Mauma elaborates for us about why this is such a slow-moving process. The challenge is, I mean, the vast majority of National Archives records are not digitized. And this is particularly true of these school records.

They're not digitized. So you have to have the time and resources and ability to travel to Seattle, to travel to Denver, to travel to Kansas City, travel to Fort Worth, Texas, and spend time in those archives and go through sometimes hundreds of linear feet of gray acid-free cardboard boxes to search for the particular records that might be relevant to your family. And that's a tough proposition. Now within the last few years there's a wonderful organization, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which goes by the acronym MABS, N-A-B-S. They have a great website. And they have embarked on this incredibly ambitious project to digitize all

school records, not just federal, but church. But they're only now in the very first baby steps of that process and that's going to take an almost incalculable investment of labor to get that done they're working on it they're making progress it's wonderful i give them five gold stars but that's going to take time to realize For folks who may have had family members attend church schools, it can be a little more challenging because those are private archives. Until this point, the federal government has not provided a centralized place or opportunity for survivors or descendants of survivors of federal Indian boarding schools or their families to voluntarily detail their experiences in the federal Indian

boarding school system, which means that there are still generations within the Indigenous community who continue to carry the invisible burden of these schools. The road to healing has started, but it's the Indigenous people themselves who have taken the most significant steps forward. If you picture a Venn diagram, you know those two overlapping circles, but with three circles instead of just two. The first circle has only a sliver of color running through it. The second circle fills in a little bit more with color. And the third circle is almost completely full of color. This is how Latoy Lunderman of the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota illustrates intergenerational trauma. The nearly colorless circle is her parents' generation, almost empty because of what boarding schools stole from them.

almost empty because of what boarding schools stole from them. The second circle with a bit more color is her generation, a generation learning from their parents' losses and trying to pour more color, more tradition and culture into the lives of their children. Those children are the third circle, the circle that will hopefully grow deeply vivid with the color of the traditions and language and love of their heritage. Latoy reflects on her choice to raise her children on the Rosebud Reservation and says, it's hard not to be overwhelmed, but I made a conscious decision to bring my kids back here and to raise them in their culture so that they would know who they are. We have poverty and poor health, but at the same time, when I think about it, Rosebud is the most beautiful place in the world. I cannot imagine being anywhere else.

And for now, this is where our series comes to a close. Thank you for joining us. Thank you to our guest scholar, Kate Cianina Lomawemop, and to composer R. Carlos Nakai, a Native American musician who provided some of the music you heard in today's episode. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And this episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton.

Thanks so much for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, we would love to have you leave us a rating or review or to share on social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.