This lead article on The Federalist grabbed my attention but it was terribly undetailed and primarily concerned church burnings and the media amplifying Native American activism, so I performed a little bit of research and pulled together the following historical information.
On a recent episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Senior Editor Christopher Bedford joined Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss his article “Anti-Christian Hysteria Has Grown Into Church-Burning Terror, And People Might Be Next,” breaking down some of the myths about the American Indian graves found at residential schools that are being used to justify attacks on Canadian and U.S. churches. This from thefederalist.com.
Click HERE to view the FOX News report.
The idealized purpose of the Native American Boarding schools was to assimilate Native American children into the American culture by placing them in institutions where they were forced to reject their Native American culture. The boarding school experience for most of the Tribal Nations in the U.S. and Canada had only limited success at best. This from grunge.com.
Native American boarding schools, also known as Indian Residential Schools, were established in the United States from the early 19th until the mid 20th centuries with a primary objective of “civilizing” or assimilating Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture. In the process, these schools denigrated Native American culture and made children give up language and religion. At the same time the schools provided a basic education in Euro-American subjects.
These boarding schools were first established by Christian missionaries of various denominations, who often started both missions and schools on reservations, especially in the lightly populated areas of the West.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the government paid religious orders to provide basic education to Native American children on reservations, and later established its own schools on reservations. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) later founded additional boarding schools based on the assimilation model. These sometimes drew children from a variety of tribes. Some off-reservation schools, such as St. Joseph’s Indian School in Chamberlain, South Dakota, continue to operate.
But in summarizing the recent scholarship from Native perspectives, Dr. Julie Davis argues:
Boarding schools embodied both victimization and agency for Native people and they served as sites of both cultural loss and cultural persistence. These institutions, intended to assimilate Native people into mainstream society and eradicate Native cultures, became integral components of American Indian identities and eventually fueled the drive for political and cultural self-determination in the late 20th century.
Since those years, tribal nations have carried out political activism and gained legislation and federal policy that gives them the power to decide how to use federal education funds, how they educate their children, and the authority to establish their own community-based schools. Tribes have also founded numerous tribal colleges and universities on reservations. Tribal control over their schools has been supported by federal legislation and changing practices by the BIA. The largest boarding schools have closed.
By 2007, most of the schools had been closed down and the number of Native American children in boarding schools had declined to 9,500. The remaining ones are primarily under Native American control.
The statue of Egerton Ryerson at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, was doused in red paint and surrounded by 215 shoes following the discovery of unmarked graves containing 215 bodies of students from residential schools in Kamloops, British Columbia. Ryerson was an original architect of the residential school system. (Photo by Shawn Goldberg/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.)
In May, the remains of 215 children were discovered on the grounds of a former residential (boarding) school in Canada that was used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. Soon after, over 750 unmarked graves were discovered at another residential school. Given the historical brutality of such schools in their treatment of Indigenous children, it is widely suspected that similar gravesites exist at residential schools across the US and Canada. Investigating these atrocities will require a significant commitment from the US and Canadian governments, and atoning for the (continued) evils wrought upon Indigenous people will take an even more significant commitment from all of us.
In summation, the Native American Boarding School “experiment” in the United States and Canada did not see great success. And any success that was gained came with the diminishment of Native American cultures. Resultantly, both the U.S. and Canada are now experiencing anger and reprisals from Native Americans. Investigations into alleged atrocities will likely go on for many years.
