The remains of nine Indigenous children were buried by the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota after being transferred back from the former Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where the children were forcibly sent over 140 years ago. Carlisle was the first government boarding school off reservation land, and it set the standard for other schools with its motto, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The schools were known for their brutal assimilation practices that forced students to change their clothing, language and culture. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe negotiated the return of the children’s remains buried at the school, and a caravan of Rosebud Sioux youth returned them to their tribe this week. Dozens of other Native American and Alaskan Native families have asked Carlisle to return their relatives’ bodies. Knowledge of the boarding schools is still being recovered as many survivors are reluctant to revisit the trauma, says Christopher Eagle Bear, a member of the Sicangu Youth Council. “These schools, they played a key part in trying to sever that connection to who we are as Lakota,” he says. “They took away our language, and they made it impossible for us to be who we really are.”
Yes, so, when we first started, we were a youth council that was primarily just kids, you know? This is six years ago. A lot of us were still in high school or still in middle school. And so, when we started, we went over there. And for us, it was the first time — for a lot of us, actually, it was the first time we were getting a good understanding of what a boarding school was, because boarding schools aren’t really talked about, growing up, where I come from, you know? There’s a traumatic event — something traumatic happened that made you not want to talk about it, made you not want to recreate the pain, or whatever it was, and your parents just wanted you to be protected from all of that horrificness. And so, when we went to Carlisle, it was very — it was an eye-opener to who we are today as the Lakota people, you know? Everything that makes us who we are was kind of detached from us from these boarding schools.
— source democracynow.org | Jul 19, 2021