The federal government has published an investigation into its violent efforts to erase the cultures of Native and Indigenous peoples from the early 1800s to at least 1970.
Dan Romero, or Walking Bird, of the Ute Tribe encircles each lost child's grave with sage smoke at Sherman Indian School Cemetery.
Still, the early results of the report released Wednesday are damning and confirm what survivors and their family members have long been describing: a systematic effort by the US government and Christian institutions to erase their existence and cultures by targeting and taking away their children. The investigation explained that in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson told Congress in a confidential meeting that he wanted to create policies to separate Indian tribes from their land. The main strategy was forcing their children to be Christian Americans, and the government tapped and paid churches to help run the system. Children were"coerced, induced, or compelled" to enter the schools, many without their parents' consent.
Government officials at the time stated that it"was indispensably necessary that [the Indians] be placed in positions where they can be controlled, and finally compelled, by stern necessity, to resort to agricultural labor or starve,” according to the report. When students arrived, officials intentionally stripped them of their identities by giving them English names, cutting their hair, preventing them from using their native languages and cultural practices, and"organizing Indian and Native Hawaiian children into units to perform military drills," the report states.
While the investigation is a huge step, there is still a lot more work to do, Haaland said Wednesday. Congress is funneling $7 million more to help members of the initiative continue to locate and sift through sites, as well as hundreds of thousands of government records for the report's second volume. Efforts to preserve tribal languages are also part of the initiative.
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