Federal leaders face Indigenous schools’ tragic past for first-of-its-kind report

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel The government has really screwed over the indigenous people.

..."Lajimodiere remembers talking to her own father about his time at Chemawa Indian School in Salem in the 1920s.

“He said kids would just die,” Lajimodiere said. “And I asked him ‘what did they die of?’ … He said they died of being lonesome.”

Now the federal Interior Department has started to re-examine the long, horrific period from the 1880s through the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. government routinely forced Native American children to attend far-off boarding schools. Treatment at the schools was often abusive. Conditions could be unhealthy. Students could be punished or beaten for speaking an Indigenous language. Many children died.

Until now, the federal government had done little to confront the traumatic legacy of the “boarding school era” of forced assimilation. Canadian authorities have been examining their boarding school history for a number of years, and discoveries last year of unmarked graves in British Columbia helped prompt action in this country. The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative has the ambitious goal of finding all the old boarding schools, identifying associated grave sites and determining who is buried in them.

A few federally-run boarding schools remain, including Chemawa Indian School in Salem. While Chemawa has had significant health, academic and budget problems recently, its mission has changed completely toward supporting Indigenous culture and preparing Native American teenagers to attend college or start careers. Chemawa is still around, but many of these schools are long gone, and there’s little documentation left of them. The written record is spotty, and the people who attended or sent children to the campuses are gone or suffer from fading memories.

The most immediate challenge is finding the schools in the first place."...