Stolen Children: The Missionary Conquest of Boarding Schools
Children are biosocial. Especially critical is the ecology of care provided by the nuclear family and extended family that anchor them and allow them to flourish and develop compassionate social-spiritual practices that triangulate mind, body, and spirit. In the First People Communities the children had multiple and multi-aged mentors who encouraged their interests and gifts. Like their teachers, the children perceived themselves as integral to the natural world. As they transitioned from being a child to being an adult, they were helped and taught to hold more of their story as a human being, incorporating the wisdom of the past into the present, knowing that there was no separation between them and the other life-forms with whom they danced within the cosmic path.
Children were the “seeds” of the people for future generations. Through their rites of passage ceremonies they learned to hear the stars singing and to understand the language of the animals offering themselves in the hunt for the love of the people. They smoked the pipe knowing that like the rising sweet grass smoke they were both visible and invisible. They were matter and energy. They were body and spirit. They learned that they were portals connected to the Earth-womb within which they were deeply grounded in an immersive sense of the web of relationships. They in turn would be teachers of the practices and ceremonies that honored the cycles of life. They knew what it meant to be human and to be attuned to the beauty of life as it cycled around and through them. They had a profound sense of self.
In the forced assimilation policy of the settler-colonizers, the children lost everything when they were brutally and violently wrenched from their families and cultural ways for long periods, sometimes four or more years. The children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing. They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only forced to speak English but were punished for speaking their own languages that held the vitality of their spirit and psyche attuned to the stars and other Earth voices. Their traditional cultural practices and shared wisdom were forcibly replaced with Christianity. To them it was a religion of punishment and dehumanization that had no relationship to their ancestral wisdom. In fact they were taught that the wisdom of their ancestors and relatives was inferior. They were ridiculed and punished when they made any reference to their past.
This is the incredibly sad story of forced assimilation and cultural eradication (and sometimes death) that happened largely through missionary schools. The violent edge of the stories in this resource library is shocking. Please take care to titrate to make “space” for the tragedy of the Boarding Schools, knowing that grieving is a necessary and painful process but it is a catalyst to change the mind-set and value system that created this history. A history that, sadly, continues today with the ongoing saga of immigration abuse and ethnic cleansing in all of its subliminal and visible forms.
US Boarding School History
US Boarding School History: This website offers innumerable resources on the Boarding Schools. Browse freely to gather not only information but to intuit a sense of the people that are rebirthing their earth voice so that one day they will once again hear the stars singing as they heal from their ancestral trauma.
3,100+ Indigenous Students Died at U.S. “Boarding Schools”
Native American Journalist Dana Hedgpeth
More than 3,100 Indigenous students died at boarding schools in the United States between 1828 and 1970 — three times the number of deaths reported earlier this year by the Department of Interior, according to a new investigation by The Washington Post. Many of the students had been forcibly removed from their families and tribes as part of a government policy of cultural eradication and assimilation. The new report was led by Dana Hedgpeth, an enrolled member of the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe of North Carolina, and expanded its reach beyond federal records to achieve a full public accounting of the death toll of what many scholars and survivors have described as “prison camps,” not schools. Hedgpeth shares how some tribes have now been able to recover the remains of children who had been buried at the boarding schools and return them for traditional burials in their ancestral homelands. “The impact of these schools is still being felt in many ways.”
Video: “We Were Children”
A beautiful and heartbreaking documentary that tells the story of two Native Americans who attended Boarding Schools in Canada (length 1 hour 28 minutes).
The film is available for rent from Amazon for $1.99
and available for viewing free here.
Documentary: Little Bird: Wanna Icipus Kupi
The documentary delivers a hard-hitting reality check for viewers unfamiliar with the Sixties Scoop, providing insight into the policies that were created to separate Indigenous children from their heritage, and the systems that continue to dismantle Indigenous families today. Coming Home is the feature directorial debut from Cree/Ojibway filmmaker, Erica Daniels of Peguis First Nation, and Kejic Productions. From 1951 to 1984, the Sixties Scoop was an assimilation project led by Canadian federal and provincial governments that attempted to erase Indigenous identity. More than 20,000 Indigenous children were forcefully taken from their families, and displaced into foster care systems throughout North America and abroad. Daniels crafts a visual tapestry to evoke a profound sense of homecoming related to family, culture, traditions, values, community and connection to the land. The communities of Brokenhead Ojibway Nation and Sioux Valley Dakota Nation are at the heart of this documentary. COMING HOME entwines profound interviews of personal recollections from Sixties Scoop survivors, accompanied by glimpses of on-set moments of the Little Bird drama series and archival footage from news sources. The layering of these elements creates a rich and emotional exploration of the devastating impacts the Sixties Scoop has had on Indigenous peoples, and the creative team’s essential work of narrative reclamation through storytelling from an Indigenous lens.
Coming Home (Wanna Icipus Kupi) — Official Trailer
Tracing the Path of Violence: The Boarding School Experience
Mending the Sacred Hoop Technical Assistance Project Introductory Manual: Tracing the Path of Violence: The Boarding School Experience, 2003 (10 pages) [PDF download]
This is a well-done Indigenous overview of the Indian boarding schools and the harm they did to tribal peoples and cultures.
Unspoken: America’s Native American Boarding Schools
The Quaker Indigenous Boarding Schools: Facing Our History and Ourselves
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Quakers managed more than thirty schools for Native American children. Some Quaker schools operated with federal funds and carried out the government’s policy of forced assimilation. Quakers separated Indigenous children from their parents and tried to remake them in the Euro-American Quaker image, causing tremendous harm.
YouTube video (1 hour 8 minutes)
Assimilate or Be Exterminated
by David Raymond (Mi’kmaw descendant)
For much of their existence, the Quaker Yearly Meetings of Turtle Island and Britain pursued the eradication of Indigenous Peoples’ cultures and matriarchies as a means to save Indigenous Peoples from the supposed necessity of extermination (mass killing).
David Raymond examines Quaker writings and deeds from the late 18th century to the present and offers reflections on the impact of the truth on his faith journey.
David is a Quaker from Ontario (Canada). He is of European and Mi’kmaw ancestry and is reconnecting to Mi’kmaw culture. For several years he has been researching Canadian Quakers’ historical role in the attempted forced assimilation of Indigenous Peoples.