A History Not Yet Laid to Rest
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on November 24, 2021.
North America’s Indigenous peoples carry a painful past. This truth was laid bare when the mass graves of hundreds of Native children who died while attending residential schools were discovered in Canada this summer. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children in the United States and Canada were forced into assimilationist boarding schools that sought to strip them of their culture and heritage. Many died from disease, starvation, or physical abuse. Most were buried hastily, sometimes two or three small bodies to a grave. Outside the Native community, their deaths have been lost to obscurity, a painful chapter in a long-ago history, willfully forgotten. But try as they might, non-Native people cannot dodge the past.
Indigenous people on both sides of what Natives people call the medicine line—the border between the U.S. and Canada—have been reckoning with the residential schools’ traumatic repercussions for generations. They lie underneath our collective psyche, waiting to be unearthed. This history will continue to resurface until our governments, institutions, and non-Native people fully reckon with it.
Interrogating and researching the history of Indian boarding schools has been my life’s work, both personally and professionally. My mother, Bernice, was a boarding-school survivor. In the 1930s and ’40s, she attended Saint Mary’s Catholic Indian Boarding School, on the Bad River Ojibwe reservation in Wisconsin, where her family in 2019, upon the 200th anniversary of the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, which ushered in the era of assimilationist policies, which in turn led to the beginning of the Indian-boarding-school era in 1860.
