The disturbing truth behind America’s indigenous boarding schools | Fault Lines Documentary

so what if one day someone just came here to the house and just took you away and you never saw your parents again and i never told you why she was only nine and my granddaughters will be eight soon so thinking back boggles our mind that this happened and what they had to go through [Music] an indigenous group in canada says it's discovered 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school indigenous leaders are calling it a crime against humanity the second such discovery in less than a month the indigenous people from canada they always knew it was their they said you need to look to our neighbors to the south of us in the u.s [Music] things like that happened here kind of want to brush it aside hopefully it stays buried hopefully it's not brought out in the open that we've had those kinds of atrocities happen to us here in the united states i've talked to elders who told me that all the children in the village had to leave and there was an eerie quiet in the village there was no sound of children the headmaster whipped my bear back with the rubber hose i couldn't breathe couldn't catch my breath i passed out little boy said they had to hold me up for one more whip our stories need to be heard this part of the united states history has to be told [Music] very capable student respects rights of others has a friendly manner one reports that little jimmy was blocking the doorway when we first heard about the children buried at kamloops canada that brought back a flood of memories for myself and many in my generation of our own experiences in boarding school it was just kind of writing under the surface of our consciousness here's my dad my mom and me when i was a baby when my dad passed away we became of interest to the bureau of indian affairs and it wasn't very long before the social workers in fairbanks forced my mom to make a decision give your children up for adoption or send them to boarding school here's a picture of our mom with kermit and i she chose to send us to boarding school with the idea that at least we would be together in the summertime when school was out on our way to the airport our mother made this a big apology saying that she's sorry we're gonna have to have you go to boarding school this was in the fall of 1955. we were taken to the town of wrangle into this huge kind of government enclosed enclave that kind of rose out of the mountains and trees as wrangle institute we were not quite sure what was going to be in our future [Music] the government said that it was becoming too expensive to continue killing indians let's educate them let's assimilate them he was a rabid assimilationist so it was let's kill the indian them and save the man the whole basis for his boarding schools was to get them as far away from the culture as he could forced assimilation and forced christianity the work ethic in a complete military style format no one had ever asked the federal government how many boarding schools they ran no one ever asked the churches how many boarding school they ran so i decided to dedicate as much time as i could to research how many boarding schools were in the united states just recently i've come up with 406. [Music] [Music] at the school the first place we went to in the boys dorm was a large open area a concrete floor and there we were ordered to get completely undressed many of us did not know each other and here we are we're standing in this receiving room and some children who did not understand the commands to get undressed some matrons were frustrated enough that he ran over to that little guy and just literally tore his shirt off off his body and forcibly pulled off his pants of course the child was in tears was frightened there was a lot of eerie silence among the other kids who were watching this the little things that we had brought with us were were basically confiscated and we'd never seen them again and we were ordered to get in line each kid was assigned a two-digit number and that two-digit number was written in with indelible ink on our clothing here's one from 1960 my number was 68 that year it was very dehumanizing to the to the extent that some matrons were fond of only referring to us buyer number we were handed government-issued clothing and then we were marched off to our dorm rooms which is basically a military style barracks we got settled in for the night that's when some of them start to cry it started off with little whimpers little stipples but it caught on all it took was for one little child to start crying and then another one and then another and then another to a point where the entire dorm room of little kids were just wailing into the night and we all cried ourselves to sleep waking up the next day our eyes are swollen shut and the process was repeated over and over and over until the middle of the school year i don't think any child cried anymore because no one's going to come and get me or hold me tell them that they're loved the buildings were cold they were under heated the kids were hungry and they were half worked to death the discipline was was horrific the kids were killed they got killed working in the barn or working out in the fields they were overcrowded so they died if tb measles they died of typhoid pneumonia and the flu i had a reporter ask me rsa while the history of boarding school was written out of the books and i said well it's never written in it's not in any history books [Music] my father was nine years old and he was sent off to boarding school this is daddy right there my interest in boarding school began listening to my father and my mother tell stories about their boarding school days there isn't any native person alive today that hasn't had someone that went to boarding school in their family [Music] [Music] for more than a century the interior department was responsible for operating the indian boarding schools across the united states and its territories at no time in history have the records or documentation of this policy been compiled or analyzed to determine the full scope of its reaches and effects we must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of these schools [Music] when they started reporting on the missing children in canada it brought back memories of carlisle pennsylvania and the school there [Music] this is my grandmother my grandmother's older sister was mary kinnanook sometime in the 60s grandma said to mom sister mary went to school and she's buried there when you hear words like that you don't know to ask other questions because you're shocked by the words that you just heard we all grew up with clinton names mom always wondered what did that mean so in the late 60s she started doing some searching for what happened to mary she had this photo captioned william kinnanook and daughter taken around 1903. and we both discussed could this be mary it's hard to know does she look like a nine-year-old girl she looks like a little girl but they took mary and 30 other children from southeast alaska in 1903. they went from a temperate rainforest where there's lots of trees to a country that's flat and has trees but not like home so it had to have been so much they had to adjust to it's an awful long task of little children and it's a lost ass for adults hmm it's a long eight days to figure out what's going on once they got to carlisle pennsylvania it was an immediate transformation into becoming westernized outing rules to govern carlisle indian students and our patrons pupils are placed in families to learn english and the customs of civilized life outings are under the guise of teaching people how to do housework how to learn how western culture works in a household but it was kind of like free labor [Music] here was the first evidence that mary had gone to an outing mom was trying to find any information because she knew she died at carlisle state of alaska's department of health and welfare 1967 1985. it took a long time this was over several years that she was writing back and forth trying to figure out who has what information 1993 june 2008 mary kinnanook and she finally found those two pieces of paper that said she had been there and she got sick and died confined to bed in hospital for past two weeks irregular temperature weakness and emaciation my cousin's a family medicine doctor when he read that he said she must have had tb just by that little bit of a description when i first went to carlisle and went through all the names on the stones i was overwhelmed with so many children [Music] there was no mary [Music] 14 graves had markers unknown in the school cemetery we figured she must be one of the unknowns they moved the cemetery to where it is today and the records were not good they can't keep track of children that's when i got my first anger about the people not knowing what we've gone through during the boarding school time they did start that cemetery over there there's a lot of old graves there a lot of kids died from disease i was going to boarding school here meningitis pneumonia flu this used to be dormitory at one time when it was boarding school the little boy in the hat here is my dad eugene senior when he went to school here as a board school student he had bad experiences it was catholic school and they were suppressed he was suppressed in speaking his language he said there was times that he was punished for being caught speaking the language and they'd get disciplined he was traumatized by that the impact on from boarding schools was language loss even cultural laws i'd even hear elders one time the kids that went to carlisle or went off to a different boarding school that they come back and they like they were in the sense they were changed like they didn't want to speak their language like they didn't want to do their cultural ways the overwhelming thing that all matrons looked out for was to make sure that no child spoke their language they had a thing called the gauntlet and a child could rack up some demerits sometimes those demerits were speaking your language and during that gauntlet children who had these demerits were forced to become completely undressed and walk and run naked down a line of children who were on both sides of them using their belts against their fellow student and sometimes some kids use the buckle end some of these kids hit pretty hard because if they didn't they would have to go through the gauntlet another day which will always be seared in my memory is a friend of mine was knocked out this grown man just took his fist and just hit the side of my friend's face so hard that it splayed his face open all the way under his ear and his face just fell open he was instantly unconscious he was bleeding profusely he was taken to the hospital and for the next six to eight weeks i think he was a daily reminder that this matron could do anything he wanted to because this matron was never fired never admonished never went to jail the physical punishment there was psychological abuse and of course sexual abuse wrangles seemed to attract pedophiles and a lot of boys in the boys dorm were sexually molested you know when i was about 10 years old i had written home and i was writing about some of the abuses i saw an experience and my mom didn't do anything with what i wrote her about so i thought she didn't care but what i learned when i was much older and she happened to remember was she said when i got your letter there was large parts of your letter that was blacked out i guess today we call that being redacted so a lot of the things i talked about my mom could never have known about because i was just blacked out that's when i was at wrangle right there i was 13. at the end of uh the 10 years that i was in boarding school i knew everything about the world but i didn't know who i was what happened in boarding schools is the cultural genocide after finding my dad's records i just broke down and just sobbed and sobbed to think of this nine-year-old boy ripped away from everything he knew [Music] i decided as a professor that i wanted to do a qualitative interview study of boarding school survivors there were themes that came out number one of course was loss of identity loss of language loss of culture loss of ceremonies traditions self-esteem there was extreme loneliness there was loss of their parents and a sense of abandonment then there was abuse there was corporal punishment forced child labor they were hungry malnourished and there was sexual and mental abuse there was unresolved grief the survivors i talked to several of them had never told their children are their grandchildren there was another elder that said when do we tell our boarding school stories thanksgiving dinner you know do we say oh i was molested for five years by a priest at boarding school you know at a family dinner so there's just this resounding silence of boarding school survivors because when do they tell their stories what format how who no one's ever asked them they can't talk about it this one gentleman he patted the back of his head and he said my boarding school story will stay forever there that intergenerational trauma is um has been handed down to uh to even those that didn't go to boarding school [Music] let's go through our exercise of introducing yourselves [Music] without a language you don't have a culture my dad and mother talked about how they were raised in the boarding school especially the language they said we're going to teach our children english we're not going to speak our language to them because we don't want our kids to go through the same thing we did this intergenerational trauma [Music] it does something to you up here it seems like carries on into the next generation our floored speakers are really low [Music] i've been working in earnest trying to find ways to try to work ways to get this language out to the kids and then but who taught me was my mother and my grandma my dad's mother she talked to us in arapaho when my dad wasn't there what we're saying there in that song is all my people look at your flag it is being raised it is raised and flying in the wind this flag song i used to always sing that song when i was a little kid and my mother was in the kitchen she heard me then she said i'm going to teach you the proper words so she did i always kept that song in my head she told me the meanness to the words well hey nia down there why jennifer that was a rapport nation flag song oh hey siakka sometimes i tell them okay you guys are going to grow up you're going to start families to keep this language and this culture alive is being rapports follow along after me but he and the song obey him try to not forget it try to remember it it's our language that keeps the arapahoe blood going keeping it alive that's it no her blessing that's not her blessing that's not her blessing [Music] i ask now what are we being healed from what has been the problems it just carries on from generation to generation from the traitors the disruption in our language and our culture i don't speak either language because my parents both believed that we would never progress in the western culture unless we spoke english mom wanted to know who her family was so that's why she would go out and try to put the picture together to say who are we why are we scattered why do i not know this part of my family what happened [Music] so paul william and martha never returned that's a big hole in your family but that was the goal of the school and the churches was to cut family ties and that's what mom worked hard to have was a close-knit family i think for mom the beginning of the healing of our family was to find out where our relatives are it was very important to her [Music] it's important for me to finish mom's journey to have mary so far away it's like no we need to bring the family home mom was trying to find all the dogs put it all together make the story complete is to bring her home this is part of our hurt that we need to figure out how to start healing that hurt [Music] i discovered when i was attempting to tell my story i couldn't finish i got caught right here in my throat i couldn't let it out and that was another indicator that i hadn't done my own healing work what got taken away not just our culture and language but things like parenting when i had my own children i could relate to them until i was eight years old because that was the age i was when i first went to boarding school and i left boarding's fellow when i was 18. so my own children i just couldn't be a parent an effective parent for them while they were in that age group themselves my wife being a social worker knew that the source of a lot of my anger was my early experiences at boarding school but i didn't realize it and i i started going to therapy group meetings talking circles healing circles i was able to let so much of my stuff that i had carried around with me all this time and it was such a relief to know that i didn't have to carry it with me i'm a firm believer in sharing stories even with my grandchildren and even though it may not be in the history of books i'm going to tell them about things and experiences that i had in boarding school i think justice for me would be to hold our government accountable for allowing a system like that to prevail for so many decades against generations of children [Music] you

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 62,889

Keywords: Buried Truths: America’s Indigenous Boarding Schools, indigenous boarding school, indigenous boarding schools US, indigenous us, indigenous schools usa, indigenous schools documentary, Fault lines, fault lines al Jazeera, al Jazeera fault lines, Al Jazeera live, al Jazeera, al Jazeera English, al Jazeera news, al Jazeera documentary, United states, United States of America, Indigenous, indigenous united states, Indigenous rights, indigenous history, racism, us history

Id: AY8WVxOAUNQ

Length: 30min 28sec (1828 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021