The US Is Now Investigating Its Deadly Indian Boarding School System, And Native Americans Are In Dire Need Of Mental Health Support

“People are getting retriggered with each new calamity in a way that’s paralyzing. The level of grieving is almost electric.”Brianna SacksBuzzFeed News Reporter

Last updated on July 19, 2021, at 4:31 p.m. ET

Posted on July 16, 2021, at 2:00 p.m. ET

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Since the remains of more than 1,000 Indigenous children were found buried at former boarding schools in Canada, survivors and their descendants on the US side of the border expressed their own share of outrage and heartbreak, filling Facebook and other social media platforms with personal stories of brutal treatment and even more death.

“Sheldon Jackson [College in Alaska] was run by Presbyterians. They abused my mother and her sisters and killed her twin sister,” a survivor wrote in a Facebook group.

Another survivor commented that he went to this “hell school from the 60s to the 70s and [he] remember[ed] the mean nuns, all of there names.”

“I hated that school Dzilthnaodithhle community school [in New Mexico] I was one of the kids who was abused,” another shared.

As the communal, intergenerational trauma continues to build, advocates and leaders in the US are gearing up for a reckoning that’s just beginning and could create an unprecedented need for culturally informed mental health services. After First Nation officials announced the first set of hundreds of unmarked graves in May, the Canadian government’s dedicated helpline saw more than triple its typical calls from Indigenous people seeking counseling or other crisis-related services, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. But in the US, Native Americans continue to carry the grief they’ve held for generations largely without official recognition or support — even though the scale of abuse and death is likely much worse.

The US had a far more extensive boarding school system than Canada, which has acknowledged the family separations, abuse, and killings as cultural genocide in a report by its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Meanwhile, in the US, the history of stolen children has been hidden, and a government investigation into the unknown number of deaths was only recently announced. From the 1800s to the 1970s, the US forced tens of thousands of children into hundreds of government-sponsored schools, many of whom never came home, their families never being told what had happened. Nearly every Native American has a parent, grandparent, or other relative who survived the abusive system, and the recent headlines have triggered horrific memories and resurfaced traumatic family histories.

“We haven’t even begun the truth-telling,” said Denise Lajimodiere, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa who has been interviewing survivors for 14 years, starting with her own parents. “And talking about it is so traumatizing. One man I spoke to touched the back of his head and said, ‘The stories will stay here.’”

Between 1819 and 1978, US law promoted the “civilization” of Native Americans, leading to the creation of boarding and industrial schools that forced children from their families.

The point of these schools, as the founder of Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School infamously put it, was to “kill the Indian in him, save the man” by erasing students’ culture and making them talk, act, and look like white, Christian Americans. When the children arrived, officials — some directly employed by the government and some by church groups — cut their hair, took their clothes, changed their names, and mostly prohibited them from having contact with their families. At many schools, children were beaten for saying hello in their own language; they were malnourished and sexually abused. They were forced to perform tough manual labor for families through “outing programs” during the summers and when they got back to school, crammed into dirty dorms where infections would sweep through their ranks. And when they died, whether from disease, neglect, or abuse, their classmates were sometimes forced to bury their bodies in mass graves, according to multiple reports, UN filings, and BuzzFeed News interviews with the descendants of survivors.

Comment: We are now ALL reservation Indians. Vaccines were first used to kill Indians; now they are used to kill us. Quarantines were first used on Indians; Now we go thru quarantine after quarantine. The empire-ZIoNiST British or Anglo-Dutch ZIONIST cabal honed their weapons on the Indians to use on us all later.