For decades, Native Americans attended schools designed to “kill the Indian” in them. An untold number of children never returned home, their bodies often buried in unmarked sites. One school in South Dakota is launching an effort to unearth the truth.
Native Americans are speaking out decades later about the abuses and indignities they endured at a school designed to “kill the Indian” in them.Photography by Tara Rose Weston for NBC NewsPINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. – Inching forward on her knees, Marsha Small scraped away at the earthen floor in search of a bone, a tooth, any human fragment at all.
Marsha Small at the Red Cloud Indian School’s historic cemetery, also seen above in drone video, in May. The boarding school system was used as a “weapon” not only to break the children’s bonds with their families and culture but to take Indigenous peoples’ land, according to a Senate report released in 1969.
An untold number of children never returned home, their bodies often buried in unmarked or poorly maintained burial sites hundreds of miles from home. The total number of students who died at the schools could be in the tens of thousands, according to the Interior Department. Marsha Small speaks to the Red Cloud Indian School community in May about her efforts to locate unmarked graves of Indigenous children at former Native American boarding schools using ground-penetrating radar devices.
His research also shows that Native American students in off-reservation boarding schools were many times more likely to die than their comparably aged white counterparts. The schools often required that students take on English names and give up their style of clothing and hair, as well as their traditional languages, religions and cultural practices.
Students at Red Cloud Indian School, reading in an elementary school hallway and in a class with Lakota culture teacher Jason Drapeaux Jr., in May. A mural of Chief Red Cloud painted on a building at the school. “It fell on the floor and they were walking on it,” Brave Heart said. “That to me was a deep spiritual violation and disrespect.”
Top, Basil Brave Heart on the high school football team ; center, at his desk; and bottom, with the high school band . “Anytime we're in there being punished like that, don't cry out and don't cry. You take it, period,” he recalled. “No one escaped that whip.” Cecelia Fire Thunder, now 76, worked as a nurse before becoming the first female president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in 2004.
“I felt I was a bad mother,” said Fire Thunder, who is now an adviser to Red Cloud’s Truth and Healing Coalition. “I screamed and yelled and punished my kids. That’s what they showed us.”A ground-penetrating radar specialist, she gained recognition when she started using the technology as a student at Montana State, where she identified graves at Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, for her graduate project.
Cecelia Fire Thunder, center, in a high school yearbook photo, and outside Red Cloud Indian School in May. Nearly 30 years later, the Jesuits in charge of Red Cloud are going further: They’re funding the effort to search for unmarked graves on its campus. The Rev. Peter Klink in front of Drexel Hall in May. Klink served the student community as president from 1985 to 1991, and then again from 1998 until 2010.
In July, Pope Francis traveled to Canada for a weeklong “penance tour” and issued a historic apology for the church’s role in the country’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools. The U.S. government, meanwhile, is still in “phase one” of its investigation into the former boarding schools. The Interior Department is expected to release a second report that will provide an estimate of the total number of children who attended the schools in the U.S. as well as the identity, ages and tribal affiliations of students who died and the location of burials associated with the schools.
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