Tribal elders recall horrors at schools
ANADARKO, Okla. — Native American tribal elders who were once students at government-backed Indian boarding schools testified Saturday about the hardships they endured, including beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, forced haircuts and painful nicknames.
They came from different states and different tribes, but they shared the common experience of having attended the schools that were designed to strip Indigenous people of their cultural identities.
“I still feel that pain,” said Donald Neconie, 84, a former U.S. Marine and member of the Kiowa Tribe who once attended the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, about 80 miles southwest of Oklahoma City. “I will never, ever forgive this school for what they did to me.
“It may be good now. But it wasn’t back then.“
As the elders spoke, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, herself a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary in U.S. history, listened quietly. The event at the Riverside Indian School, which still operates today but with a vastly different mission, was the first stop on a yearlong nationwide tour to hear about the painful experiences of Native Americans who were sent to the government-backed boarding schools.
“Federal Indian boarding school policies have touched every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland said at the start of the event. “Some are survivors. Some are descendants. But we all carry the trauma in our hearts.”
Haaland’s agency recently released a report that identified more than 400 of the schools, which sought to assimilate Native children into white society during a period that stretched from the late 18th century until the late 1960s.
Although most closed their doors long ago and none still exist to strip students of their identities, some still function as schools that celebrate the cultural backgrounds of their Native students. Among them is Riverside, which is one of oldest.
Neconie, who still lives in Anadarko, recalled being beaten if he cried or spoke his native Kiowa language when he attended Riverside in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“Every time I tried to talk Kiowa, they put lye in my mouth,” he said. “It was 12 years of hell.”
At least 500 children died at such schools, but as more research is done, that number is expected to reach into the thousands or tens of thousands.