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.