The recent discovery of unmarked mass
graves of 1,300
Indigenous children buried in five former
residential schools has forced Canada to come
to grips with a legacy of cultural and
physical genocide against Native people.
In the 19th and 20th centuries,
150,000 children were separated from their
families, language and culture and placed in
150 government-funded residential schools.
There, children were subjected to torture,
trauma and death to “kill the Indian in the
child.” Thousands of children died —
4,100 according to Canada’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission on the residential
schools, although the actual number may have
been as high as 15,000. And we can only imagine the trauma
these children experienced, including those
who were forced to bury their classmates and
build their coffins.
The disturbing news from Canada was a
reminder that the United States maintained its
own system of 367 Indian boarding schools
from 1860
until 1978. The two countries’ systems
were intertwined, with the United States providing a
model that Canada would adopt and emulate.
Responding to events in Canada, U.S. Interior Secretary
Deb Haaland — the first Native American to
hold a Cabinet position and a granddaughter of
people forced into these boarding schools —
announced an investigation of residential
schools. She noted that most Americans would
be alarmed to learn that “the United States
also has a history of taking Native children
from their families in an effort to eradicate
our culture and erase us as a people.” But,
she emphasized, “it is a history that we must
learn from if our country is to heal from this
tragic era.”
She is right. Just as America is being
forced to address its legacy of enslavement,
segregation and systemic racism, the nation
must confront the genocide of Indigenous
people — who are rendered all but invisible in society — and the role of
settler colonialism in building the country.
Native American genocide, like slavery,
constitutes America’s original sin.
From the earliest colonial days,
violently clearing the land of Indigenous
people — like slavery — was critical to the
formation of the country. And, as with
slavery, Christianity played an instrumental
role in advancing violence against
Indigenous communities. Three papal edicts — known together as
the Doctrine of Discovery — provided a
religious justification for colonial conquest
and exploitation of non-Christian people and
paved the way for the West African slave
trade, slavery and Indigenous genocide.
These beliefs permeated the
Declaration of Independence, which referred to
the original inhabitants of this land as
“merciless Indian savages.” And with U.S.
expansion came Native American dispossession,
death, forced relocation and containment in
reservations. In fact, it was public policy.
In 1819, Congress enacted the Civilization
Fund Act, which authorized the president “in
every case where he shall judge improvement in
the habits and condition of such Indians
practicable” to “employ capable persons of
good moral character” to introduce tribes to
the “arts of civilization.” In 1824, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs was established to
administer the fund, which paid Christian
missionaries to “civilize” the Indians.
The creation of residential schools
were part of the broader settler colonial
project to exterminate Native American culture
and separate them from the land through war
and violence. The first government-run
boarding school for Native American children
was the Carlisle
School, which opened in Pennsylvania in 1879
for the purpose of “civilizing” by forcibly
assimilating the children into White society.
Founded by a Civil War veteran, Gen.
William Henry Platt, who was in charge of Native
American prisoners of
war, its mission was clear. “A great
general has said that the only good Indian is
a dead one, and that high sanction of his
destruction has been an enormous factor in
promoting Indian massacres,” Platt said. “In a
sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in
this: that all the Indian there is in the race
should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and
save the man.”
Of the 10,000 children who attended
the Carlisle School until it closed in
1918, more
than 180 died amid abuse, malnourishment and disease
related to substandard living conditions.
After 100 years, the bodies of 10 of these
children were returned to their families in
June 2021.
Nevertheless, Carlisle came to serve
as a model for other residential schools.
Employing Platt’s assimilationist
and genocidal philosophy of eliminating Native American
culture, these schools adhered to policies
forcing children to speak, dress and behave
according to White
American values, focusing on individualism and
materialism, private rather than communal
property and the monogamous nuclear family
structure. Boys received industrial training,
while girls learned home life skills in
regimented environments, suffering under
living conditions the Native American Rights
Fund described as “somewhere between dungeons
and death camps” in a 2019 report.
Between one-third and 40
percent of the Indian boarding schools
in the United States were operated by
Christian denominations. Churches believed
that “civilizing” and
converting Indigenous people to
Christianity was their only hope of salvation
from a “dying” culture. Missionaries regarded
Indigenous spirituality as witchcraft
and Christianity as the only acceptable moral law
for a civilized society.
But, in fact, the boarding school
system is now recognized as a form of genocide designed to forcibly remove
children from their homes and separate them
from their families, culture, clothing and
language. Their hair was cut in a humiliating
manner. Sadistic missionaries punished them
for speaking
their native tongue by washing out their mouths with
soap, lye and chlorine. They were neglected,
denied food, beaten and raped, sometimes
leading to death — all for the sake of destroying
Indigenous culture.
And their influence spread across the
northern border. Nicholas
Flood Davin, the architect of the Canadian
residential school program, visited Indigenous
boarding schools in the United States in 1879
and was impressed with what he saw,
particularly with the Carlisle School and its
solution to the “Indian problem” through
an “aggressive
civilization” policy that deconstructed
Indigenous children.
“The experience of the United States is
the same as our own as far as the adult Indian
is concerned. Little can be done with him,”
Davin wrote in his 1879 report to the Canadian government. “He
can be taught to do a little at farming, and
at [live]stock-raising, and to dress in a more
civilized manner, but that is all. The child,
again, who goes to a day school learns little,
and what little he learns is soon forgotten,
while his tastes are fashioned at home, and
his inherited aversion [avoidance] to toil
[work] is in no way combated [stopped].” In
Canada, residential schooling was made
compulsory for all First Nations children in
1920.
Most of the schools ceased operations
by the mid-1970s, with the last one closing in
the late 1990s. With the Indian
Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007, Canada paid reparations
to the survivors of residential schools and
issued an apology.
Lawyers in Canada have requested the
International Criminal Court investigate the
Canadian government and the Vatican for
alleged crimes
against humanity. While the Canadian government
identified 5,300 abusers, none have been charged under a
federal law addressing war crimes and crimes
against humanity. A few priests have faced
sexual assault charges but not homicide. Out
of more than 38,000 reports
of abuse at the residential schools,
there were fewer than 50
convictions.
The mass graves in Canada are a wake-up call for the
United States to seize the opportunity and get
on the right side of human rights. As a
country with a long, unresolved and traumatic
history of genocide and mass graves, of family
separation and the erasure of children,
America must heal itself by accounting for its
past.
This commentary is also posted on WashingtonPost.com.