NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Nightly News Films: The Reckoning – An American Genocide

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

NBC News’ Cynthia McFadden reports on the dark history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S. An effort is ongoing to use ground-penetrating radar to look for the unmarked graves of children who may be buried at Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota.

A reckoning more than a century in the making. America has hidden the truth from America. As an award-winning NBC News investigative team heads to the South Dakota Badlands in the Pine Ridge Reservation to hear their untold stories. I don't want to repeat it. Of children forcibly taken from their homes and abused. I became a shallow breeder, thinking that if I don't breathe loud, I might disappear. And to uncover painful truths. Enrich us in what we do.

I step my quest to bear witness to an unspeakable chapter in America's history. They are being rapidly brought from their state of savagery and barbarism to one of civilization. It's hard to know what genocide is if this isn't it. How do we make sense of a policy of the U.S. government that forcibly separated an estimated 100,000 children from their parents, withheld food from those who protested or threw them in jail, that took those often traumatized children, some as young as four, to boarding schools, where their language was forbidden and their beliefs rejected, where the death rate far exceeded those of white children, and where abuse, both physical and sexual, was commonplace.

What to call such a system? Those who created it back in the mid-1800s called it the Federal Indian Boarding School System. But perhaps it should have been called an instrument of American genocide. About 100 miles from Mount Rushmore, a sovereign nation stretches out in South Dakota. Beyond the rocky badlands, the Pine Ridge Reservation, home to the Lakota and one of the poorest places in America. This cemetery tucked behind the Red Cloud Indian School is in many ways symbolic of a much wider reckoning, dating back 150 years. This was one of the Native American boarding schools then called Holy Rosary Mission, sanctioned by the federal government and run by the Catholic Church. The school's articulated mission? Kill the Indian in him and save the man.

And this is where Marcia Small enters the story, a northern Cheyenne woman who we first met here six months ago. I get really emotional in these places. The work we do is sacred. It will move us toward a horizon of healing. There's so much to be done. It's overwhelming at times. And if we don't all step to the plate, the nation itself, the United States of America, it will not heal. Small is the only Native person in the U.S. leading the painstaking process of using

ground-penetrating radar to help heal wounds of a painful past. By looking for the unmarked graves of lost Indigenous children who may be buried at schools like this one. How might it have happened? Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government set up over 400 boarding schools across 37 states, some of which operated through 1969. About half of the schools were run by religious groups, many of which received federal payment per student. Through the agencies of the government, they are being rapidly brought

from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization. These unpublished outtakes from a 1929 newsreel show just how clear the government was in its efforts to force native children to give up their culture. These children, about a few years ago, looked just like those we saw before. But today, they all speak English, and some have taken business courses. We bring them in, clean them up, and start them on their way to civilization. And the policy wasn't only designed to extinguish their beliefs, but to also make it easier for the government to take their land. In a 1969 Senate report, boarding school education was explicitly described as a weapon by which these goals

were to be accomplished. What did it feel like to be trapped inside that system? We spoke to several former boarding school students, many of them telling their story for the first time publicly. When I called him very sadistic because he took pleasure in spanking us. 89-year-old Basil Braveheart remembers being physically abused at Jesuit Ron Red Cloud when he was a student beginning in the late 1930s. The memory of being punished by a nun for speaking Lakota has stayed with him all these years. She took out a rubber band. I want you to bite this rubber band with your teeth. And I want you to pull it as far

as you can, let it go. The pain on my lips, physical pain. But worse than the pain of that moment. My friends laughed at me. To have your peers laugh at you goes to the deepest part of who you are. It's shaming. And very effective in getting you not to speak your language, I imagine. Braveheart was just six years old when he was sent away to school here. He says he now knows his family had no choice but to send him. And if they didn't do it, Indian policemen will come and look for you, horseback, and they will find you. They told us that if you keep violating this, they mark you down and they weaponize rations. Food? Yes. You either send the kid or we'll track you down with the police,

we'll cut your food rations. So really, they didn't have a choice. I didn't understand that. Did you feel betrayed when they sent you? I felt betrayed by my grandparents and my parents. But afterwards, they were following a policy to survive. At school, he remembers his hair was immediately cut, which is only done in the Lakota tradition when a very close relative dies. Very soon after we got to the school, I got a haircut.

Do you remember how that felt? Pehing, which means hair, is very sacred. I remember my grandma said, when you cut your hair, we put that in a cloth and we give it to grandpa. And whenever there is a sacred fire, the smoke becomes spirit from the hair that transcends and becomes one with the uncreated divinity. Well, I take it that the Jesuits were not saving your hair so that it could be used in a ceremony. No. It fell on the floor, and they were walking on it.

That, to me, was a deep spiritual violation in this respect. As we spoke, Braveheart revealed a hidden trauma that he's lived with since he was a child. When I was in the dormitory when I was eight, nine years old, and every night after the lights goes out, when a person walks in, you can hear the squeaking. That squeaking, it still is a trigger for me. One of the authorities at the school would come into the boys' dorm at night for what purpose?

Looking for little boys. To have sex with, presumably. That's it. I became a shallow breeder, thinking that if I don't breathe loud, I might disappear. He was not alone. Just this year, a government report concluded that physical and sexual abuse was rampant at the schools. Braveheart's classmate Robert Strikes Lightning was sent to Red Cloud in 1943. He says he was 13 when a priest hit him with a sash lined with metal pellets. He was big and strong then. He said you won't be able to sit

for a week. He was right. I had blisters on my backside. And that wasn't the only time. You go in his office and he would say, you know why you're here? Now grab your ankles. We'd bend over and grab our ankles. He had a big black strap back there and he'd take that off. Grab your ankles and he'll hit you till he's sweated. About a decade later, Cecilia Firethunder, now 76, attended Red Cloud with her three sisters. My dad and my mom made a decision to put us here for economic reasons. In the 50s and 60s, there was no economy. There was no jobs. And so they had children to feed.

And then that's the big girl's dormitory. We talked in the shadow of what had been the girl's dormitory when she was there. She told us she was never beaten, but was punished by the nuns for speaking Lakota. That was the rule on the little girl's side. You cannot speak Lakota. Do you speak the language still? I never forgot my language. Fire Thunder remembers the way her grandmother encouraged her to hold on to her Lakota identity.

You had to live a double life here. You had to behave by all the rules, but keep your own self in there. We knew we had no power. The nuns were a power. You can't fight it, so what do you do? Just get by. Just get by. Just get by. Fire Thunder worked as a nurse before rising to become the first female president of the Oglala Sioux tribe in 2004.

Looking back, she says growing up separated from her mother meant that she struggled to nurture her own children. Well, do you feel you were a bad mother? Of course I did. Of course I thought I was a bad mother because then I screamed and yelled and punished my kids. And that's what you knew? That's what they showed us. Alex White Plume is also a former president of the tribe, although he attended two boarding schools elsewhere. The beatings were usually they grab you by the ear and they jerk you down to the principal's office

or they grab you by the arm so hard that they leave fingerprints on your arms. And we were little guys, and that pain would last for days. You got to a point where you didn't want to tell your dad or mom because they couldn't do nothing. It's just waste. So we just had to go along with it, and it was accepted. Did you ever get hit with a strap or that sort of stuff? No, the beatings, that was my mom and dad's generation that were beat. I was a little bit lenient when

I grew up. Have they told you about what happened to them? Yeah. I don't want to repeat it. The trauma manifested now in other ways, says Braveheart. Students I went with, especially the boys, all of them drank. He drank as using as a medicine to tame their feelings. And it continues today. What this facility did and other facilities did to our people, it still affects us to this day through poverty, suicide, addiction, many other things. Eleanor Ferguson told us she's trying to understand her own hurt. I had to go deep within and realize that it was the church who installed these traumas within my bloodline. It wasn't my family's fault, so I had to stop blaming them for my hurt and my pain and my suffering. For the first time in history, both the Secretary of the Interior and the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs are Native Americans themselves.

And yet, nearly two years into the administration, the Interior Department is still tallying up how many schools were involved and how many children died. Meanwhile, Canada, which modeled its boarding school system on the U.S., has already paid billions in reparations. And thanks to indigenous leaders there, the Pope even traveled to Canada to apologize for the church's role in what he calls genocide. These are the voices of some of those who attended such schools. America has hidden the truth from America.

Physical abuse, mental abuse, you name it. I became a shallow breeder, thinking that if I don't breathe loud, I might disappear. While we were at Red Cloud last spring, Brian Newland, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs, himself a Native American, showed up unexpectedly.

How do you personally feel about this effort to locate the possibility of children's bodies using this machinery? Well, it's deeply personal. There hasn't been one single Indian person in this country who's not living with the impacts and in the legacy of these boarding schools where people didn't make it home from these schools. A number of kids who were taken against their will and against their family's wills to be placed into these schools is countless. But there is a number. One expert says at least 100,000 children were legally removed from their families by the federal

government and 40,000 died, that death rate significantly higher than that of white children at the same time. And while Newland authored the Interior Department report last year, which concluded there were 408 federal boarding schools, much is still left unresolved. For example, the report never uses the word genocide. Why is the word genocide hard to say? You have to tell the story first and acknowledge first. Before then, you can begin to move on, reconcile, and build back what was torn down. But that is not a satisfactory answer to many of those we talked to.

Alex Whitebloom, the former president of the tribe, confronted the assistant secretary. We're not going to hear until we see some type of justice by the United States. There were a lot of pleasantries until you stood up. Yeah. Well, I had to correct the history. What we're sitting on here is a Roman Catholic church land stolen in our treaty territory. And then the Assistant Secretary of Interior saying, we're going to bring you money. We're going to increase your law enforcement. We're going to bring your language back. That just ticked me off something awful.

And so he's not telling the truth. He should face up to the truth. And America should face up to the truth. The American genocide should be a topic that everybody discusses daily. So you heard a former president of this tribe say, we want to hear the word genocide. The purpose of these schools was forcible assimilation to separate Indian people from their lands. It's hard to know what this, what genocide is, if this isn't it. Again, we have to tell the whole story. And in tribal communities, families and people know exactly what happened to them. But what we need to do on behalf of the federal government

is to paint the picture and acknowledge our own role. And we're at step one. But why only step one when the Canadians who modeled their boarding school system in the U.S. have already called it cultural genocide and agreed to pay out billions in reparations. Pope Francis even traveled to Canada this past summer on a penance tour to apologize for the church's role in the abuse. For the deplorable behavior of those members of the Catholic Church,

I ask forgiveness from God. And I'd like to tell you from the bottom of my heart that I am very pained. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is still investigating. And Red Cloud is conducting its own investigation. I think the boarding schools play an outsized role in the intergenerational traumas that plague our Native communities. That's going to take a long time to undo some of that damage. McCall Black Elk is leading an effort at Red Cloud, still a Jesuit school, with the difficult task they're calling truth and healing.

We're the first former Catholic Indian boarding school to be engaged in this effort, you know, in this way and to be this far along. And hopefully we can show people that it's possible. Marsha Small's work is part of this process, which the Jesuits at Red Cloud are helping to pay for. Keep your heart good. Keep your mind clear. On a recent cold October morning at Red Cloud, Marsha Small continued her part in helping reveal what happened here.

My heart physically hurt. I feel empowered, but for some reason I feel incredibly sad. So sad right now. Down these narrow basement steps, Small led the first public excavation of a former Native American boarding school, where an eyewitness said he saw unmarked graves decades ago. With the FBI presence, Small's team shoveled away layers of earth and sifted through sand, looking for what could be remains of indigenous children. My ancestors put me here, and that's why I do this. We had to start somewhere, and we're here. While she's not yet found any children's remains here, she believes there will be many unmarked graves in the cemetery,

where she intends to return in the spring. All I do is work for the ancestors. I work for the stolen, kidnapped children. If I can do that, if I can bring recognition, then I will. Some of the next generation here believe the whole process is moving much too slowly. What I see as change is we want our babies back. It wasn't right for the school to take our children and to assimilate us. We want to hold this school accountable. We sat down with Philip Ironshell. His partner is Eleanor Ferguson. They're part of an indigenous youth group that protested on horseback while Newland was on campus.

When we ride these horses, it's also really empowering to us as Lakota people. They're really sacred to us. Would you like to see the Jesuits leave here? Yes. This is the census number. Yeah. Black Elk knows all too well how many divisions there are, even within the community. His mother is a Lakota activist and his father was a former Catholic monk. There are still about a thousand Catholics in the community of approximately 20,000. There are some people who don't like the Jesuits being involved in all of this. The perpetrators in some larger sense are involved in the process. The Jesuits and the Catholic Church have their own healing to do. They have to face this history and their

role in it as perpetrators. There is healing, too, for the perpetrator. But critics say this amounts to the church investigating itself. Father Peter Klink has been at Red Cloud for more than 40 years. There are many in this community who feel the Jesuits are the bad guy, that the Jesuits should go. At least from what I've tried to do ever since I came in 1975 was to do that lifting of the horizon of hope. I think you just sidestepped my question. Well, I feel badly if people feel that way. I would love to see us be able to enter into a dialogue, either to end up together concluding the Jesuits should go, or to find the ways in which we can, and says he never witnessed any abuse. But he feels strongly that the community needs to face its past, even if that means digging in the cemetery or elsewhere on campus. If we don't dig, if we don't find,

then, in fact, I don't know how we deal honestly with the past. Otherwise, we can't grow into the future that we hope we can grow into. As brokenhearted as you would be by that. I would be crushed to find out that we've got a lot of kids buried around here, but yet I don't think there's any way we can be a part of this process and not pursue the truth. Would you agree that the original purpose of schools like this was to kill the Indian and save the man? Would you consider it ethnic genocide? Yeah. Yes. Because it was basically saying to them, you need to change.

You're primitives. You know, that cultural genocide was the result of what we participated in. That's why the truth and healing process, which we began here prior to the Black Lives Matter movement, prior to the announcements in Canada, we had already decided that we were going to go through this because we need to deal honestly with that past before we can move to a vibrant future. Red Cloud has made many changes. The Lakota language is now taught and celebrated in a first-of-its-kind program. The native language that the U.S. government once tried so hard to extinguish now reverberates around these classrooms. Our people fought for us to speak this language,

and they didn't want us to not speak this language, so we started speaking it so we could keep it, and we didn't make them fight for no reason. Like all of those we met here, the legacy of the past is still very much alive for Basil Braveheart, a Korean War veteran who spent decades fighting to hold on to his Lakota identity. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and I had a drinking problem. Someone told me, I said, you know, with your experience, you're kind of like a wounded healer. I think that's what I do, is to help people to become whole,

to become free of trauma. He asked us not to film him as he honored our team with a Lakota healing ceremony, the first time he tells us he's conducted one for non-Native people. I'm just so curious about how you feel about America after everything Everything you know everything that has happened. I mean you have an American flag over here for example a Combatant and Marine gave that flag to me. Do I do care for my country you don't say love You say care for is that the same you love it? Yeah. Do you also consider yourself an American? I'm not an American. I'm a Lakota. I don't know what being an American means. This is my land. This is my homeland. However, I come from a family of veterans. World War II, Vietnam,

Korea. You honor it because all your relatives went and fought. Do you consider yourself an American? No. I'm Lakota first. I served in the U.S. Army first. I'm Oyukpe, Lakota, Ogallala. That's who I am. And then American can be fifth on that ladder. Whitebloom wants the U.S. government to acknowledge what he says was stolen. I will not accept a cheap apology. We want our treaty territories back. We just sit there and watch our people die in pain so they can take the land. It's a horrible story.

America never owned up to the genocide. This should be a general topic of discussion. We should deal with it. Braveheart sees things differently and says his grandmother's wisdom continues to guide him. She's the one that told me, don't ever carry hate or prejudice because it's poison. I mean, it's such a beautiful way to live. And yet it doesn't erase the trauma, does it? It doesn't erase the wrong, does it? It doesn't erase the wrong, does it? She said, even if you remember

wounded knee, even if you remember what happened during boarding school. But does that mean that the people who did the bad things, the wrong things, don't have to be held accountable? She said the accountability is for us to let the divine take care of that. You probably will never forget what happened to you. They won't either. Mark my word. Here it is. You're making me speechless, which is not a usual situation for me. The wisdom that she taught me was

to forgive the unforgivable. Both men do agree on this. Much of the poverty and addiction, pain and struggle found here at Pine Ridge is a direct result of what many of the elders and those who came before them suffered under the boarding school system. Generational trauma is real. Healing will be complicated. Tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum Tukasiraya ushima yelo Thank you.