On this Native American Day we must remember — and make atonement for — the evil done to Native Americans

Nearly 100 years ago, my great-grandfather and grandmother Harry and Cecelia Jumping Bull mounted a wagon and set out on a day-long journey west to buy supplies. The couple lived in the western part of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Each month, they would have to spend several days traveling to Hot Springs nearly 50 miles to the west to buy supplies for their home in Oglala. While they were away, they would leave their children in the care of Cecelia’s sister, who was deaf and mute but who was otherwise of sound mind. During their absence, a Catholic priest and nun arrived at the home to forcibly remove my great-grandparents’ three children from their home and take them to Holy Rosary, a Catholic boarding school today known as Mahpiya Luta or Red Cloud some 11 miles away.

A day later, my great-grandparents arrived home to find their children gone and my great-aunt beside herself. With little hesitation, they got back on their wagon and began riding toward Holy Rosary. 

When they got there, Cecelia walked up to the front door and knocked. When a nun opened the door, she punched her in the face and stormed into the building to find and retrieve her children. And that was that. She brought her children home and they never had to attend a boarding school (probably similar to the one above in Springfield, South Dakota, in a public domain 1895 photo posted on wikimedia commons).

Nevertheless, somewhere along the way, my grandparents and mother decided that neither I nor my cousins should learn our Lakota language. I think the boarding schools that they attended — while not as physically or psychologically abusive as earlier such schools — had convinced them that holding onto the Lakota language would somehow hold their children and grandchildren back from becoming successful citizens.

“Don’t talk to him in Indian,” they would say when people tried to speak to me in Lakota. Very few people of my generation speak their Native languages. And many, many of us and our parents and grandparents have fought to reclaim their cultural traditions, language and Indigenous identity. It hasn’t been easy.

In many ways, the boarding schools broke the sacred hoop of our people.

Generations of Native people have suffered with the lingering effects of trauma suffered in the boarding schools. I have a hard time explaining just how destructive these alleged “schools” really were. If we saw another country doing this to the children of a minority population within their borders, we would call those places “re-education camps,” such as those that continue to exist in modern-day Russia and China.

We would allege human rights abuses in those countries. Yet many Americans look at what happened in our country and see no problem with the boarding school “experiment.”

Some even romanticize the intentions of the people who ran those boarding schools, choosing to entirely ignore the completely traumatizing impact of removing children from the loving arms of their parents and transporting them hundreds and thousands of miles away to strange places where they were beaten for speaking their languages. Many did not come home. Many died of broken hearts, broken bones and disease.

The awakening in this country toward the physical and sexual abuses by Catholic clergy against children has been well-documented, yet many refuse to believe that such abuses occurred in boarding schools. It doesn’t matter that hundreds of boarding school survivors have related horrendous experiences in these schools, including sexual abuse.

While it’s become clear to many today that such institutions draw pedophiles and sadists who intend to exact pain on children in their care, they refuse to believe such people preyed upon Indigenous children. I don’t see any difference between those who cling to their beliefs that boarding schools benefited Native children and abuse was rare and neo-Nazis.

There, I said it. It’s funny. Americans are willing to pass judgement on extremists in other countries who deny historical genocide within their borders but utterly fail to see themselves doing the same things. Many foreigners balk at America’s treatment of its Indigenous people.

They see it for what it is — the complete dismantling of another race and willful neglect of the truth of their history. America is a colonial state. We as Indigenous people know this. We walk into the mostly white communities in which we live each day acutely aware of the angry stares and subtle racism of those with whom we work and live.

We’re made to feel like we’re overly sensitive and dramatic. It’s the ultimate form of gaslighting. America doesn’t want to remember its genocide, and our very existence forces them to remember. But we continue to walk beside one another and battle the racism and ongoing efforts of institutions — including our schools and historians — who seek to erase us from classrooms and books. And somehow we continue to practice our cultural traditions and fight to reclaim our Native languages.

We’ve found many well-intentioned non-Native allies in our communities. There are those who choose to acknowledge and seek to atone for their ancestors’ actions.

The trauma we suffered from forced assimilation isn’t a thing of the past. Every day, our bosses, our teachers, our neighbors seek to make us feel ignorant and misguided for failing to give up our savage beliefs and practices, cut our hair and live the lives of ordinary Americans.

Native American Day, celebrated on Monday, Oct. 14, this year, shouldn’t just be a reminder of what happened to us, to our children, but a day to acknowledge the ongoing genocide of the Indigenous people of America.

It should be a day to wake up those who refuse to remember and reclaim our power.

Kevin Abourezk is the deputy managing editor of Indian Country Today and an award-winning film producer who has spent his 24-year career in journalism documenting the lives, accomplishments and tragedies of Native American people. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of South Dakota and a master’s in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.