eco-womyn:

Native parents from around the world held their very young children’s hands as they walked them to boarding schools and residential schools. Some Native parents were forced to completely sign away their guardianship to principals of these “schools”, or face jail time. Others were visited by policemen, who forcibly seized their children from them. A few were undermined by “Indian Agents” on reservations, who withheld their rations on ration days. Some children never saw their parents again.

Boarding schools were built to “assimilate” the Native population into a white society, targeting their children. It had been assumed that conversion to Christianity and assimilation was “for the best interests” of Native and Indigenous people in Australia, the US, and Canada. The Native children were not allowed to practice skills relevant and appreciated to their cultures, such as carving. They were disallowed to speak in their native tongues, and were often physically, sexually, and psychologically tormented for doing so.

A five year old Native boy is raised by his family to know his hair as an extension of his soul, and that people only cut their hair if they experienced a loss of a loved one, a loss of a relationship, or a loss of oneself. As a stranger cuts off the little boy’s hair in order to better assimilate the child into the sex-based roles of a white male, the Native child is left quietly wondering who it is that has died, where his family went, and why the other children are being beaten for speaking to one another.

Only a small portion of each day was spent learning academically at these “schools”. Most of the day the children were exploited for their labor.

How the labor was divided was based upon the Native child’s sex.

Native girls were expected to do the domestic labor that was expected of white girls and women, such as cooking and cleaning, and Native boys were expected to perform manual labor, such as farm work, blacksmithing, and shoemaking.  The children would reach a point where they would be “phased out” of these boarding schools for a summer or year at a time and forced to perform labor for private white and wealthy families who did not want these jobs and duties themselves.

Many boarding schools and residential homes had an overwhelming death rate from Tuberculosis, which swept through these schools and homes. Tuberculosis kills it’s victim within ten days. Native children were forced to play and sleep alongside other Native children who had contracted tuberculosis so that they, too, would die. Boarding schools suffered a 50% or higher death rate because of this, effectively reducing the Native population in an attempt to eradicate them.

Maisie Shaw, age 14, was kicked down a flight of stairs by Alfred Caldwell, the principal of the residential school she was forced to stay in and killed.

 Other small skeletons of Native children have been found in church basements, which served as residential homes and boarding schools.

Other children were forced into prostitution rings.

Over fifty thousand children in Canada’s First Nations residential schools were beaten, raped, suffered from electrocutions and electroshock therapy, were forcibly sterilized, often medically experimented on, starved, and murdered. 

It wasn’t until 1978 in the US that Native parents won the rights to deny sending their children to boarding schools. This wasn’t that long ago. In 1978, my mother was 21 years old. 

In Australia, the residential homes lasted until 1984.

In Canada, the last residential home was closed in 1996.