By David R.M. Beck, Next City, October 25, 2021
The National Day of Remembrance for Native American children honors children who died years ago while attending the United States’ Indian boarding schools each Sept. 30. On that day this year, a bill was reintroduced in both the Senate and the House to establish an American Indian Truth and Healing Commission on Indian boarding schools.
The bill’s purposes include both truth-seeking and healing. It asks “to formally investigate and document” the impact of the trauma that resulted from Indian boarding school policies – a trauma that has been passed down through the generations in Native communities. It also urged federal support to heal “cultural and linguistic” destruction to tribal communities carried out by the federal, state and local governments.
Outside of Indian Country, the lasting legacy of boarding school policies has been largely ignored in the United States. As a historian of federal “Indian policy” in the 19th and 20th centuries, I study the ways that the U.S. federal government has tried to force American Indians to abandon their cultural heritage and the ways in which tribal communities have tried to remedy the damage.
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