South Dakota Boarding School Survivors Detail Sexual Abuse

[xchrom]

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/07/south-dakota-boarding-school-survivors-detail-sexual-abuse/

The Dakota expression for child, wakan injan, can be translated as “they too are sacred,” according to Glenn Drapeau, Ihanktonwan Dakota and a member of the Elk Soldier Society on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. “To us, children are as pure as the holy moving energy of the universe, and we treat them that way,” he says.

When Native children arrived at Holy Rosary Mission, founded in 1888 at Pine Ridge to help in the conversion of the Oglala Lakota, nuns staffing the school described them as having good “morals” and giving “a tenth of the trouble white children cause,” Raymond A. Bucko wrote in Lakotas, Black Robes, and Holy Women (University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Nevertheless, corporal punishment was meted out at Holy Rosary—“apparently without scruple,” according to Bucko—and was an important part of the effort to cut the children off from their parents, their language and their culture.

Across the nation, in both the secular and church-run schools the federal government required Native children to attend from the late 1800s to the 1970s, the goal was assimilation—“kill the Indian to save the man”—seemingly at any cost. Court documents filed in recent lawsuits against the boarding schools in South Dakota allege that as recently as the ’70s children were beaten, whipped, shaken, burned, thrown down stairs, placed in stress positions and deprived of food. Their heads were smashed against walls, and they were made to stand naked before their classmates. Untold numbers of children died over the century during which the residential schools flourished: some while en route to the institutions or at the schools themselves; others died of exposure and starvation while trying to escape, according to www.boardingschoolhealingproject.org/.

[Snoutport]

1. That was a difficult read. I'm crying but I'm glad I read it.

Those poor kids.

[xchrom]

2. it is difficult. nt

[jwirr]

3. When the wars against the Natives ended the US Army was in

control of the reservations. They relocated many tribes during that time. When they were replaced because of abuses the US government handed the reservations over to the churches. The abusive school system is very much a part of this system. One abuse they forgot to mention which Grandmother told me about - if children were caught speaking their native tongue the nuns/teachers put their heads down the toilet hole (out houses) and made them endure the horrible smells.

We had at least two family members who went to the famous school in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. I do not know if this kind of treatment was also happening there - they never said.

One of the nice things is that none of this abuse worked. Grandmother spoke her native toge (Ojibwa) till the day she died and she taught it to most of her children and many of her descendants still speak and teach it.

This policy is very like trying to win hearts and minds by bombing our "allies" into submission in the ME.