IN U.S., RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS PART OF THE BURIED PAST
Bessie Smith's first days at a government-run boarding school were bad enough.
The 11-year-old was forced to abandon her traditional Indigenous clothing, hair style and name, threatened with punishment for speaking her own language and told she'd go to hell if she clung to Indigenous spiritual beliefs.
But it got worse. After being moved to a different school, Smith says she was sexually abused by male teachers, then accused of lying and given “demerit points” when she tried to report them.
“I just thought `That's the way it is because they're white,' ” she told an oral-history project at the Los Angeles-based Autry Museum of the American West in 2016. “They ruled, so I have to take it.”
Smith's experiences would sound painfully familiar to most Canadians, as the grim history of this country's residential schools again comes to the fore. But she is Navaho and her sad tale unfolded in Arizona and New Mexico, underscoring what until recently was a littleknown fact: the U.S. had a similar network of schools designed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children, with strikingly comparable abuses.
Indeed, Canada's system was modelled in part on America's “Indian boarding schools” after an emissary from Ottawa made a fact-finding trip to the States.
But unlike in this country, the U.S. policy has until recent weeks received scant attention from non-indigenous society, government and news media.
Though long in coming and too little for some, Canada has confronted its residential schools past with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an apology from the prime minister, federally funded counselling programs and compensation in the billions of dollars.
There's been none of that in the U.S., where courts have actually rejected lawsuits filed by boarding school survivors, even as racism against African-americans drew renewed attention.
“There still remains within American society a romantic understanding of native people,” says Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, head of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. “Perhaps the public doesn't want to think about some of the horrible things that took place in American history and Native American history specifically.”
In fact, it took the discovery of unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. — and extensive news coverage of it in the U.S. — for President Joe Biden's administration to take action.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, her country's first Indigenous cabinet secretary, announced a review of the boarding school policy last month, admitting it was prompted by the Kamloops revelations.
“Only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we're all proud to embrace,” Haaland said in a statement.
Until now, at least, that past has barely been recognized.
Only about 10 per cent of Americans are aware of the boarding schools, estimates the Colorado-based Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, compared to 70 per cent of Canadians familiar with the former residential schools here.
“The truth about the U.S. Indian boarding school policy has largely been written out of the history books,” the coalition says.
Sakiestewa Gilbert, a member of the Hopi tribe, said it's important for U.S. society to account for that ugly past. But he said Indigenous historians are concentrating less on the cruelties inflicted and more on how Indigenous communities “exerted agency” — tried to resist the assimilation drive.
“We as native scholars don't want to portray Indian people as victims,” he said. “We want to demonstrate how we as Indian people pushed back, pushed back against the government.”
America's boarding or “industrial” schools date at least to the early 1800s, with legislation in 1869 entrenching them in federal law.
They lasted until the 1960s, with hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children taken from their families and forced to attend one or more of about 350 schools.
As in Canada, administrators strove to banish Indigenous culture, language and religion, forcing students to adopt European-style clothes, speak English and convert to Christianity. Food was often inadequate and disease rampant.
There was also widespread physical and sexual abuse and long-lasting, intergenerational trauma stemming from students made to feel racially inferior, says the Native American Rights Fund.
“All the Indian there is in the race should be dead,” Gen. Richard Henry Pratt, a founder of the U.S. boarding schools, said in summarizing their mission. “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Nicholas Flood Davin, an MP and journalist considered a key architect of Canada's system, toured the United States in 1879 and came away impressed with its program.
The schools were the principal feature of an attempt at “aggressive civilization,” he wrote in a report to the young Canadian government of John A. Macdonald. A key aspect was forcing the children to attend boarding schools away from home, he said.
“The day school did not work because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school.”
Canada adopted the idea, largely handing over administration to religious organizations. Its first schools opened soon after Davin's report. Their impact still reverberates in Indigenous communities today, survivors say, helping fuel a range of social problems.
So why has the U.S. yet to reckon with its history? That may be partly because the anti-racism movement south of the border has focused largely on African Americans, said Sakiestewa Gilbert.
“Right now in American society, there's been a big push and an emphasis on movements such as Black Lives Matter,” the professor said. “We have to be careful to not allow some of these larger conversations that are taking place in American society about race ... to cloud or to distract us as native people and what we choose to focus on.”
For Smith, that focus came late in life. The retired hospital employee told the Autry project she avoided alcohol or drug abuse as an adult, but eventually came to realize her emotional troubles — including shame at being Indigenous — stemmed from the trauma of her boarding school years.
“That sudden change to where I was no longer Navaho and had to become somebody else had been riding on my shoulder all the time,” she said.
WE AS NATIVE SCHOLARS DON'T WANT TO PORTRAY INDIAN PEOPLE AS VICTIMS.