Indigenous Americans tell horror stories of South Dakota boarding schools

Blurring one line between church and state America's founders extolled the virtue of education as local schools were run both by christian sects and by local municipalities under the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution. But it was not until 1867 and Reconstruction made public education a federal prerogative when President Andrew Johnson created a Department of Education as a proxy for race politics. Missionaries were hired then dispatched to the Deep South to provide schooling for whites and Negroes alike and Roman Catholics were enabled in the American West to assimilate Indigenous youth often with the use of torture. 

In a letter dated April 24, 2021 former New Mexico US Representative from the Third District Deb Haaland now Secretary of the Interior and Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ, 3rd District) asked Pres. Joe Biden for a grant of clemency and the release of Leonard Peltier, a 78-year old tribal citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Peltier attended the Flandreau Indian School in the late 1950s where my mom practice-taught in the mid 1960s and learned first hand how Indigenous Americans were made to write in English.

Now, South Dakota's long history of racism is being told directly to Secretary Haaland.

Rosalie Quick Bear attended one of the 31 boarding schools located in South Dakota. The 78-year-old Sicangu Lakota describes being powdered with the pesticide DDT, spending weeks with an untreated broken leg, and getting locked in a dark cement cellar for days. It’s stories like this the Department of Interior is collecting as part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The initiative hopes to identify marked and unmarked burial sites across the boarding school system and the total amount of spending and federal support for the schools. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland says the tour is one step among many. [Bill Janklow's idea of public radio]

The Roman church is behind the seizures of thousands of American Indian children in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act where Catholic congregations and state legislatures have engaged in obstruction of justice since the law was enacted. 

Cecelia Fire Thunder is the first woman elected President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe.

After attending elementary school at a local school that was largely taught in Lakota, she was enrolled at Holy Rosary Mission’s school for high school. The school forbid speaking Lakota [and] imposed its strict rules through fear, intimidation, and violence. [Firethunder Educator of the Year]

St. Joseph's Indian School in South Dakota fleeces $50 million a year from unwitting donors selling Chinese-made goods that appropriate Native culture all with the approval of a rubber-stamp red state legislature.

Native Americans in Montana have also suffered abuses and rape at the hands of predator priests and nuns. 

“It is a truly historic day to have Secretary Haaland in our homelands,” said State Sen. Troy Heinert (D-Mission). “I would encourage the rest of the Legislature and all future Administrations to learn about these events and attend one if possible. These atrocities to children happened right here in South Dakota, and not that long ago.” [KSFY teevee]

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe has reached a $121 million settlement with victims after centuries of man's inhumanity to man.

Learn more at the Rapid City Journal.