Of Our Past and Other Hard Truths

“My name is Andrew Windyboy. I’m a Chippewa Cree. I did two boarding schools, one in Wahpeton Indian School in Wahpeton, North Dakota and the other one is Flandreau Indian School in Flandreau, South Dakota… They took me to the boarding school where I wasn’t allowed to talk my native tongue or practice my native ways. Numerous times they put on this big old white, big huge white cone. They put it on there, it said ‘dunce.’ I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know English. They put it on me, made me wear it all over. Kids laughed at me. (They) took me away from all of that and punished me for talking… It was my first language. I didn’t know any other language. And when I would talk, it came out, Cree would come out. Whenever I talked I would get hit. I got hit so much I lost my tongue, lost my native tongue…They beat me every day. Beat me badly.

“I hope someday somebody will hear me…”

Call it what it is: genocide. Does that feel too strong? Maybe we think that genocide belongs to other people, far away, over oceans and back through time. What if I told you the US and Canada had a goal to assimilate or exterminate all Indigenous people? Officer Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, said,  “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Assimilate. Or Exterminate. 

And they did. Residential school workers in the US and Canada hid abuse and deaths, but Indigenous people knew. This isn’t trauma porn. But I will be using first-hand accounts, so this is a trigger warning for abuse, rape, death.

Darlene Whitehead said, “…it was the residential “schools” that constituted the death camps of the Canadian Holocaust, and within their walls nearly one-half of all aboriginal children sent there by law died, or disappeared, according to the government’s own statistics.”

A Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (one of two) said that children were malnourished, beaten and abused as part of a system that it called “cultural genocide.” Eldon Yellowhorn (Piikani Nation) saw the architectural drawings for residential schools, saw space set aside for cemeteries. “They were planning for death.”

Genocide: the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially of a particular ethnic group, with the aim of destroying the group. “Kill the Indian…” Assimilate. Or exterminate.

‘But it was so long ago!’ I hear some saying. Not that long ago. The first Residential school opened in 1860 on the Yakima reservation in Washington. In 1891, Congress enacted a compulsory attendance law, enabling government agents to forcibly remove children from their homes, often without saying goodbye to parents. When families refused to send their children, the government responded by arresting the parents and withholding rations and supplies. By 1926, more than 80% of all Indigenous school-age children had been forced to attend boarding schools. In 1973 alone, an estimated 60,000 Indigenous children were enrolled in residential schools run by the federal government or religious organizations, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The last government-controlled residential school closed in 1996. The stories I share are from people now living. Surely people who reenact handcart pulls from the 1800s would hold their government responsible for killing children in our lifetime. If it had been your child, how far would you push for answers and amends?  

Death was all around the children. Tim Gaigo (Nanwica Kciji; Oglala Lakota) tweeted, “When I was a student (prisoner) at the Holy Rosary Indian Mission one of my friends “Bozo” Richards died from an ear infection. Roch Red Elk and I were assigned by Father Edwards to dig his grave at the old Mission cemetery. We had a pick and a shovel. It was my turn to be in the grave with the pick and we were about 5 feet down when my pick hit something and I pulled it up over my head and there was a tiny skull stuck on it. We had dug into an unmarked grave where a small child had been buried.”

Ruth Roulette (Long Plain First Nation) arrived at a boarding school when she was 6. On her first day, a nun silently handed her a pencil and paper and, when she didn’t respond quickly enough, punched her in the face. “There was blood everywhere. I didn’t know what I did wrong. I just cried and cried, and then I had to clean up all the blood.”

Tim Gaigo says, “I was beaten with a leather strap from my ankles up to my back (for attempting to run away). I can remember how the ex-sergeant (turned priest), would still wear his army boots under his robe…he almost beat me to death. A few years later…my little sister was raped.”

Saa Hiil Thut, survivor of Kamloops Residential school, remembers teenage boys too afraid to make a sound. “The violence there was paramilitary, and it was controlled with great strictness. Punishment was the way they kept silence and kept order.” He says, “It is that place where I started to hear the word stupid Indian, drunken Indian, lazy Indian…and I know that part of it was…the government of the day wanted to dehumanize us and to assimilate us and to rub us out.”

Food was scarce or inedible. Children would eat and throw up, then be forced to eat their own vomit. Hunger, hand-in-hand with humiliation, echoed through the hallways. The pain was the point. The trauma was the point. Genocide. 

Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) tweeted, “The deaths of stolen children mattered long before the numbers started adding up in such horrific amounts. Remember this. Greater numbers don’t change the fundamental tragedy that none of these children should have died away from loved ones. None should have been abused. NONE.” But the numbers are huge. 

Ground-penetrating radar shows 182 shallow, unmarked graves near the St. Eugene’s Mission School, where children from the Ktunaxa and ?aqam nations were forced to attend.

Underneath what is now a city park on Brandon Residential School grounds, at least 100 graves lie marked only with a single plaque: Indian children burial ground. They had names. They had hopes and fears. They had food they liked and food they hated. They had parents and grandparents who loved them, mourned them, hungered for their return. 

Jasper Joseph cried as he remembered his cousins, killed by lethal injection at Nanaimo Indian Hospital in 1944. While Diné code talkers helped the US free people from gas chambers, our governments were killing their children in residential schools. The languages we forbade were the very ones that saved our troops.

The damage done is generational, community-wide, and, I believe, infects us all. Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart describes historical trauma as “…the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land and vital aspects of culture.”

In addition to the emotional damage, Indigenous nations faced other losses: the loss of future  elders and leaders, the loss of language and stories, the loss of memories that could have been made. Children, even those who survived, lost their communities and often faced lifetimes of health problems related to their experiences. All of this faces us as we try to repair the damage. 

While Canada has been wrestling with its past, the United States is just starting to investigate on a large scale. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) directed the department to compile a report of available historical records related to the US Federal residential schools, including known cemeteries or potential grave sites. She said, “I am a product of these horrific assimilation policies. My maternal grandparents were stolen from their families when they were only eight years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture and communities until they were 13. Many children like them never made it back home.”

As members of the LDS church, we have our own past to reckon with. Even after the residential school in Brigham City closed, the LDS church ran a “foster care” program until 2000, where baptized Indigenous children were placed in white LDS foster homes, usually with parents who had no qualifications other than being recommended by their bishop. According to a guide given to children, they were to “try to learn the accepted ways of behavior in the society in which you live. Be anxious to accept those ways of the church which will help you fit into the modern society of today.” They were not to speak their native language if anyone in the room was unable to understand them. And when they returned home in the summer, they were not allowed to participate in their native cultural or religious ceremonies. The purpose, like that of residential schools, was full assimilation. President Kimball cheered, “The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised.”

Bringing “Lamanites” to Christ begins with the assumption that the people living in the Americas pre-Columbus were somehow fallen, deficit, and in need of salvation. We’re still coming to terms with the cost of our hubris. In 1977, the US government investigated accusations that the LDS church was using its vast influence to pressure children, largely Navajo, to be baptized in order to enter the program. To date, more than a dozen plaintiffs have filed lawsuits against the LDS church, alleging physical and sexual abuse.

Bízhínłth baá (Navajo) filed a suit stating that her foster father raped her 3-4 times a week when she was 12. She reached out for help to a local leader of the Relief Society but says she was scolded, slapped, and told to be quiet. 

LB filed a lawsuit after participating in the program in 5th grade. He was sexually molested by a bishop living across the street from the foster family. When he told his foster mother about the abuse, she accused him of lying, grounded him, and sent him to bed without dinner. After he reported it to a caseworker, his foster father spanked him. The abuse continued until he succeeded in getting himself kicked out of the program. We will tolerate abuse, it seems, but not petty theft.

I would like to think that of the 50,000 students who participated in the LDS program, these reports represent anomalies. But I’m not hopeful. Knowing how frequently Indigenous children were abused in other programs, and seeing our church’s history of shielding abusive leaders, I believe there are more stories out there.  

How do we move forward?

First, we need to recognize that, although residential schools have closed, the attempted genocide of Indigenous Peoples is ongoing. Currently, the US and Canada are guilty of failing to adequately equip reservations, enacting paternalistic laws, obstructing Indigenous sovereignty, and failing to investigate murdered and missing Indigenous women. We can push for a change in those policies, encourage our governments to honor the treaties we’ve signed, and show our support for Indigenous sovereignty. 

Second, we can push for official apologies from governments and religious leaders. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for residential boarding schools. PM Trudeau urged the Catholic church to do the same. It’s time for the US government, and the LDS religion, to do likewise. Michael Greyeyes (Nêhiyaw/Muskeg Lake Cree Nation) said, “This refusal (to issue a Papal apology) only cements that the mission was never about saving our souls. It was purely about subjugation and the obliteration of our presence on the land.” I haven’t even touched on the treatment of aborignal people in Australia and New Zealand, or the effects of British rule throughout Asia. If those are your nations, I would love to hear about your efforts to encourage accountability.

Third, we can advocate for reparations. Money can’t bring the children back, and it won’t ease the pain, but it can provide a path forward. After centuries of genocide, #landback is the first step in healing.

Fourth, we can do our own shadow work. Self reflection, and looking at the ways we, too, have biases and commit harm, can help us be the type of people I believe Christ asks us to be, “For inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.”

While the residential schools carry with them a legacy of ongoing community trauma, they don’t mark the end of Indigenous people, who continue to thrive. As I write this, summer ceremonies are being held across the continent. Healing circles allow survivors to share their stories and mourn the loss of their childhoods. Elders pass on stories full of love and wisdom. Dorothy Visser, boarding school survivor, teaches Cree and urges community members to learn the word ‘nehiyaweh’win’ which means “retaining our heritage.”

Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche) wrote, “Whether we do this standing in front of hundreds of people or standing in the presence of two or three, we must walk in the way of an Indigenous paradigm with dignity, measured movement, and courage, lest we be found guilty in the presence of our ancestors of promoting the history and causes of our oppression.” We, too, need to walk with dignity and courage lest we be found guilty of causing oppression. Recognizing past mistakes, supporting current efforts at truth and reconciliation, and celebrating the beautiful, complex, varied ways Indigenous people continue to show up, reach out, and lift up will help us bring that peace promised to those who seek it.