Latest news with #CarlisleIndianIndustrialSchool
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Native American boarding school funding under scrutiny in lawsuit
The tribes are demanding a federal accounting of an estimated $23.3 billion in funding taken from those funds, saying the government has never detailed how the monies were used. The lawsuit was filed last month in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where one of the boarding school system's most notorious campuses - the Carlisle Indian Industrial School - once operated. "The United States took upon itself the sacred trusteeship over Native children's education - a trust responsibility that has remained unbroken for 200 years," said Adam Levitt, founding partner of DiCello Levitt, one of four law firms representing the tribes, in a news release. "At the very least, the United States has a legal and moral obligation to account for the Boarding School Program, including a detailed explanation of the funds that it took and spent." Federal trust responsibility "was born of a sacred bargain," according to the lawsuit. Through numerous treaties, Native Nations promised peace and ceded land; in exchange, the U.S. would provide for the education of their children. "The land was ceded; the peace was a mirage," the lawsuit said. "And the primary victims of decades of ongoing statutory and treaty violations were the Native Nations' children." The lawsuit names Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Interior Department, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education as defendants. Alyse Sharpe, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, told USA TODAY the agency as a matter of policy does not comment on litigation. "The Department of the Interior remains committed to our trust responsibilities of protecting tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources, in addition to its duty to carry out the mandates of federal law with respect to American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages," Sharpe said. A shameful chapter in US history More than 18,000 children, some as young as 4, were shipped off to 417 federal boarding schools, many run by religious organizations, between 1819 and 1969. The system's detrimental effects were both immediate and long-lasting. Under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the department's first Native American director, the agency released reports in 2022 and 2024 detailing the program's abuses, including death, forced labor and physical and sexual abuse. The investigation confirmed the deaths of at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children in the boarding school system. According to the lawsuit, the program sought to destroy children's links to their Indigenous families, language and cultural practices, depriving them of skills necessary to participate and succeed in their own communities, indoctrinating them into menial positions and more broadly breeding cycles of poverty, violence and drug addiction. "The Boarding School Program represents one of the most shameful chapters in American history," Serrell Smokey, chairman of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said in the news release. "Our children were taken from us, subjected to unimaginable horrors, and forced to fund their own suffering. This lawsuit seeks to hold the U.S. government accountable for its actions and to ensure that the truth is finally brought to light." The lawsuit says the program was not only "a national disgrace" but violated the government's duty to provide Native children with an education, an obligation that continues today based on a "unique and continuing trust relationship with and responsibility to the Indian people for the education of Indian children." "The Boarding School Program inflicted profound and lasting harm on our communities," said Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe, president of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. "We are seeking justice not only for the survivors but also for the generations that continue to suffer from the intergenerational trauma caused by these schools." Faith E. Gay of Selendy Gay, another firm representing the tribes, noted the Interior Department reports revealed not only the scale and scope of the government's actions but that key information related to program financing remains under federal control. Those reports said the boarding school system was part of a pattern of forced assimilation policies pursued or allowed by the U.S. for nearly two centuries and recommended an official apology. President Joe Biden formally apologized for the program in October. "The harm inflicted by the Boarding School Program endures in the broken families and poor mental and physical health of survivors of the Boarding Schools and their descendants," the tribal lawsuit reads. "It endures in the cycles of poverty, desperation, domestic violence, and addiction that were born of the Boarding School Program. It endures in the silence of lost language and culture, and ... in the missing remains and unmarked graves of the children who died."
Daily Maverick
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Letter from Trumpland — an Indian boarding school near Pennsylvania reopens an old ache
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first Indian boarding school deliberately established off-reservation, with a specific mission to cleanse students of their home cultures. For four decades it also served as a flagship for similar cultural-assimilationist schools across the US and Canada. 'Kill the Indian, Save the Man.' That was the grisly, unapologetic motto of the North American Indian Boarding School Movement, from the 1870s until the 1960s. Today, Donald Trump may be on a mission to sanitise US history as he issues executive orders requiring publicly funded museums to celebrate an 'unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty'. Yet no matter how much white Americans may want to look away, history's darkness keeps sounding a tragic undertone to the cheery amusement park melodies of much of contemporary US life – the 100,000 STEAM games, the city-sized malls, the yachts, ski resorts and recreational vehicles. Recently, I visited the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, located about an hour away from my adoptive home of Sunbury, Pennsylvania. This school, founded in 1879 and operational until 1918, was the first Indian boarding school deliberately established off-reservation, with a specific mission to cleanse students of their home cultures. For four decades it also served as a flagship for similar cultural-assimilationist schools across the US and Canada. In recognition of its importance, in December 2024 President Joe Biden proclaimed the old grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School to be a national monument. The Carlisle school was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, no relative of the South African David Pratt who shot and wounded Hendrik Verwoerd. Richard Pratt, a former military officer, was inspired by his experiences teaching Native prisoners of war to assimilate Indigenous youth into white American culture, believing that this would offer these children their best life opportunities. The school was founded on a former military camp from the US Civil War, and after the school was closed the site returned to being a military barracks. Today, the monument is co-administered by the National Parks Service and the US Army. I began my visit at the Cumberland County Historical Society, on a leafy street in the quaint, 300-year-old centre of Carlisle. I went there to buy a copy of their booklet titled 'Walking Tour of Grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School', the only such guidebook currently in print. It was on something of a whim that, after my purchase, I took the lift up to the second floor to view their small museum. There, amid the displays of folk art wood carvings and antique clocks, to my surprise I found an entire room dedicated to the industrial school, with information about its accomplishments in sports, music and vocational training. But it was the wall-sized picture that caught my attention. Here, I also got my first clue that this exploration was going to be less a dispassionate intellectual journey than an emotionally charged confrontation with my South African past. Looking out at me was a sea of several hundred faces, Indigenous children all in the woollen, buttoned-down uniforms of the Carlisle school. Some certainly looked happy: say, the debonair boy with a tuft, towards the back middle of the crowd But then there were the majority: the young girl with frizzy hair, apparently on the verge of tears. The young boy, so numbed out he seemed on the verge of falling asleep. And then, most horrifying of all, a second young boy, staring into the camera, shaved head, wide-eyed, his face communicating, what exactly? A vast, almost incomprehensible loneliness. The trauma of being torn from those who loved him. I had my own brush with boarding school suffering, from ages 12 to 17, a much shallower wound than those of the children I was now looking at, but enough, now, to reopen an old ache in my chest, and to leave me uncontrollably weeping at this vision of mass mistreatment of children. (Luckily I had the museum to myself, and I could cry away beneath the display cases of moccasins and athletics trophies and the photograph of legendary Carlisle football player Jim Thorpe kicking up at a near-vertical angle). My parents lived in Skukuza village, in the Kruger National Park. Those were the final years of apartheid, and the nearest white, English-speaking high school was an hour and a half away, in Nelspruit. So every Monday and Friday I climbed on a green and white bus, for the trip down the R40, to or from Lowveld High Hostel, with its tall brick buildings and wire fences. To me, it was a nightmare. Older boys were responsible for maintaining discipline in the passages, and they did so by administering daily beatings with cricket bats. Somehow they pegged me, correctly, as gay, and so they subjected me to a special range of humiliating initiations, designed to cure me of my effeminacy: thrashings with pillow slips filled with athletics spikes; baking summer afternoons, confined to bed under piles of blankets, and surrounded with electric heaters. I had no idea what steamroller of hatred had hit me. In the early mornings, I climbed to the top storey of the east classroom building, and looked towards my parents' home, fantasising about the angels who might grab me if I jumped, and ferry me home across koppies and savannahs. Carlisle Indian Industrial School was famous, too, for its violent punishments. When children spoke their own languages, teachers washed their mouths out with lye soap. Teachers caned boys and girls for mistakes on tests, or for forgetting their homework. For fun, the younger boys were made to run 'belt lines' where they were whipped by older lads. If students sneaked off the school grounds to, say, perform their cultural rituals in the woods, they were locked for days in the guard house, with nothing to eat but bread and water. I gathered myself emotionally over lunch, then drove out to the Carlisle Barracks where I followed signs to the office where visitors undergo a background check before receiving a pass to visit the monument. Lucky for me, I'm a dual citizen of South Africa and the US. Later that weekend, at an academic conference focused on the legacy of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, I would meet an Italian museum curator who was denied entry because the office was unable to complete an FBI background search. But after getting my clearance in five quick minutes, the guard at the gate waved me right into a miniature, fenced-off suburb, with a commissary, human resources building, athletics stadium, hospital and the US Army War College. Presidential proclamation be damned: I could not see a single sign to the historical monument. Nor was the map on the inner back cover of the Historical Society booklet much help. It simply showed the base as a giant, featureless semi-rectangle, with the old school grounds protruding from the bottom left. After driving around for a few minutes, I parked in a visitor's bay and decided to ask for directions. But then I ran into what I struggle, in hindsight, to see as anything other than the great American habit of historical erasure. I asked, first a young man in uniform, carrying a book satchel; then a blond middle-aged man cleaning his car; and finally an elderly fellow mowing the football fields. 'No clue,' said the student, even when I showed him the booklet with the pictures of the buildings still standing. 'Never heard of it,' said the car washer. The lawn mower just shook his head. Laboriously, I oriented myself with the map, then, at last, I was in luck. Outside the post office, a soldier said: 'Just keep going down this road until you hit the guard house.' And once I found the old school, the booklet came into its own. There are 14 buildings still standing out of an original 32, all of them now repurposed. The old hospital has become an army hotel. The teachers' quarters have become flats for junior officers. Only the sports centre, with a display honouring Jim Thorpe, remains a gymnasium. And now, again to my surprise, I found something oddly familiar, even comforting, in the buildings themselves. There, right on the edge of the base stood the coach's house, looking cute and inviting, with its white siding and Greek-revivalist porch pillars. In later years at Lowveld High, I got invited into teachers' homes like these, with my friends. I remembered the vice-principal having me over for supper; the hostel head teacher inviting me to watch PW Botha's 'Rubicon' speech in his living room, and saying after it: 'God knows what happens now.' Likewise, viewing the Carlisle school's old music centre, I remembered practising at Lowveld High for a cameo appearance in Strauss's Die Fledermaus. In one scene, I accidentally kicked a beach ball off stage into the audience, and someone batted it back to me. Music, like literature, was a corner of that community where I could be myself. Was that true, too, for members of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Band, which performed at presidential inaugurations? More importantly, did some of the devastated-looking kids from the photographs eventually find a measure of peace even in this place of cultural genocide? Did they eventually return home to build fires in their Southwestern kivas, or dance for the green corn harvest in the Appalachian mountains? I finished the tour and returned to my car. There, I plugged the address of my hotel into Google Maps. One block forward, one right turn and I'd left the army base by a back route, no papers or checks in the outgoing direction. When we sneaked out at boarding school, we always had to climb out of a window, then down a fire escape and through a hole in the fence. The 20-minute walk to the Nelspruit restaurants was both exhilarating and terrifying, the latter because of the canings that would come our way if someone saw us. 'If you want to see me well and strong again,' wrote Luzena Swaney to her mother, a Cherokee living more than a day's train ride away, in North Carolina, 'you will have to help get me away from here.' But for many Carlisle students home was unreachable – half a continent away. In addition to the cultural assimilation, the US government appreciated the leverage boarding schools gave the government over adult Native communities. After all, no Apache warriors or Choctaw protesters were going to oppose the federal government too vigorously with their children held hostage in Carlisle's dormitories. As a result, boarding school officials discouraged trips home, even over long summer breaks. When Richard Henry Pratt died in 1944, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside presidents and generals. By contrast, the approximately 180 children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School – of tuberculosis, influenza, homesickness and suicide – were buried on-site. Today, their graves line Claremont Road; commuters drive past them to the skyscrapers of nearby Harrisburg. Many names are misspelled. All the graves are adorned with crosses, whether or not the children they commemorate worshipped their conquerors' gods. These children, at least, never recovered. They never got to go home, to heal, grow or reclaim their cultures. I imagined them lying, close to death, in that hospital that is now a hotel. I pictured them, praying in Cherokee, Navajo or Ojibwe, to the Great Spirit: 'Please, get me out of here. Please send me an ancestor to lift me up and take me home.' DM
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hochul to apologize for state's role in Indian school atrocities during Seneca Nation visit
Gov. Kathy Hochul will visit Seneca Nation Territory on Tuesday to apologize on behalf of New York State for its role in the Thomas Indian School atrocities. Hochul and Seneca Nation President J. Conrad Seneca announced the plans on Friday. Her visit is believed to be the first time a sitting governor has officially visited Seneca Nation Territory. On Tuesday, Hochul will issue a long-awaited official apology to the Seneca people, as well as all former students and their descendants from various Indigenous Nations, for the State of New York's role in the operation of the Thomas Indian School. 'No words or actions will ever be able to undo the pain and suffering of the Seneca people and other Indigenous peoples across the state, but by visiting the Seneca Nation and the site of the Thomas Indian School we will mark a new day in our relations,' Hochul said. 'As we prepare to officially recognize the horrifying shortcomings of our past, I thank President Seneca for his advocacy on behalf of the Seneca people and his invitation to the Cattaraugus Territory, and I look forward to further strengthening the relationship between the Seneca people and the State of New York.' Originally established by Presbyterian missionaries on the Cattaraugus Territory in 1855, Thomas Indian School was owned and operated by the State of New York from 1875 until it closed in 1957. Thomas Indian School, and other residential boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada, operated under the government's policy of forced assimilation of Native children. Thousands of children from various Indigenous Nations were separated from their families and forced to attend the school. They were stripped of the traditional language and culture, and suffered abuse, violence, hatred, and sometimes death, at the hands of school officials. Thousands of children are known to have died at the residential boarding schools. It is believed that the deaths of hundreds — if not thousands — more were never documented. The devastating impacts the boarding schools had on Native American families and communities, including the decimation of family structures and traditional language, are still keenly felt today. Seneca said, 'The severity of the wounds inflicted on our children warrants the historical significance of our Nation welcoming Governor Hochul to the Cattaraugus Territory. The atrocities that our children suffered at the Thomas Indian School have remained hidden in the shadows for far too long. At long last, our people will hear, directly from the governor, the words we have waited lifetimes for the State of New York to say — 'We're sorry.'' Added former Seneca Nation President J.C. Seneca — whose father attended Thomas Indian School, and whose grandmother was removed from her family at age 11 and forced to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, 'I know the pain and the trauma because I have seen it and felt it in my own family, just as countless families have borne that pain and carried it every day for generations. The governor's visit will be an important moment on our road to healing. In coming to our territory and apologizing to our people, the governor can give voice to the children whose youth and innocence were stolen from them.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
‘Sorry, not Sorry': Trump administration goes silent on boarding school history
Mary Annette Pember ICT The advancements made in the United States in recent years to officially face up to its ugly Indian boarding school history are being walked back under President Donald Trump. The Trump administration announced in April that at least $1.6 million in funding had been slashed for projects meant to capture and digitize the stories of systemic abuse of generations of Indigenous children in government-run boarding schools. Now questions are being raised about the removal of details from the White House website of President Joe Biden's historic apology for Indian boarding schools and his proclamation a few weeks later that the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a national monument. SUPPORT INDIGENOUS JOURNALISM. CONTRIBUTE TODAY. Both announcements have been scrubbed from the website, which responds to links with an '404 error' message. The Carlisle proclamation appears to have been moved to a government web page described as 'Biden White House Archives.' 'This is historical material 'frozen in time,'' according to a statement at the top of the archived page with Biden's Carlisle proclamation. 'The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.' Related: Historic Apology: Boarding school history 'a sin on our soul' Other statements suggest some of the measures may have been rescinded by the Trump administration. An archived statement posted by outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Jan. 6, 2025, includes links to the apology and the Carlisle proclamation, with a warning note at the top. 'You are viewing ARCHIVED content published online before January 20, 2025. Please note that this content is NOT UPDATED, and links may not work,' the notice states. 'Additionally, any previously issued diversity, equity, inclusion or gender-elated guidance on this webpage should be considered rescinded.' ICT's requests for comment received no response from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nor from press representatives from the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Park Service and the Office of Army Cemeteries. 'A sin on our soul' The U.S. made great strides toward officially facing its Indian boarding school history during Biden's years in office, including a year-long Federal Indian Boarding School initiative launched by then-Interior Secretary Haaland, who is Laguna Pueblo and a descendent of boarding school survivors. As part of the initiative, Haaland traveled across the country on a 'Road to Healing' tour that gathered testimony from survivors and their families. The initiative also began the process of documenting the thousands of Indigenous students who were forced from their families and taken to boarding schools, which sought to wipe out Native people, culture and language. The Department of the Interior released two Indian boarding school investigative reports in 2022 and 2024. The final report included a series of recommendations for the government, starting with an apology. Biden issued the historic apology at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona on Oct. 25, 2024, in an emotional speech that brought tears to many in the crowd, describing federal Indian boarding school policies as 'a sin on our soul.' 'I formally apologize today as President of the United States of America for what we did,' he said. 'I apologize, apologize, apologize!' As first reported in The New York Times on May 1, the link to Biden's apology has been deleted from the White House website. Biden's apology could not be found on other government websites, either, although a chronological slide show of his presidency in the archives includes one photo of the event. Related: Honoring the children: Biden proclaims new national monument at Carlisle Biden followed up the apology with a proclamation in December 2024 designating the Carlisle Indian Industrial School site as a national monument. Although the proclamation is no longer on the White House website, an archived version remains and a description of the monument — which would be the 432nd site in the national park system — remains on the National Park Service website. Biden proclaimed the Pennsylvania school site a national monument under the Antiquities Act, which authorizes the president to declare, at his discretion, historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest, as national monuments, safeguarding them from harm. According to Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, about half of the country's national parks were first protected under the Antiquities Act, and they note that no court has ever overturned a president's monument designation. Earthjustice leadership says that nothing in the Antiquities Act authorizes the president to remove lands from a national monument, but the Yale Journal on Regulation published an opinion earlier this year that a general discretionary revocation power exists for the president that authorizes him to reverse the designation. According to the National Park Service, not all of the national monuments proclaimed by presidents over the past century are still national monuments. Eleven have been abolished by acts of Congress. Some of the designations were removed because resources for which the monument was originally established diminished or were determined to be of less significance, or because of mismanagement or other problems. 'Start with the truth' Questions remain whether the advances made in recent years for Indigenous people will last through the latest Trump administration. A string of federal layoffs cut off resources in the Indian Health Service, the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education, and other agencies that impact tribal communities. Tribal colleges and universities also faced cuts. Some of the cuts were rescinded by the Trump administration or by judicial orders, but reports continue to surface about problems accessing funds that should still be available. In April, the Trump administration announced the reduction of $1.6 million for the boarding school digitizing project. The cuts to the digitization project were among a string of grants canceled by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition lost more than $282,000, halting its work to digitize boarding school records. Also terminated was a $30,000 grant for a project between the Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and Alaska Native Heritage Center to record and broadcast oral histories of elders in Alaska. NABS and the other grant recipients received identical letters saying the grants "no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities," signed by Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. "If we're looking to 'Make America Great Again,' then I think it should start with the truth about the true American history," said Deborah Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. This article contains material from The Associated Press. Our stories are worth telling. Our stories are worth sharing. Our stories are worth your support. Contribute today to help ICT carry out its critical mission. Sign up for ICT's free newsletter.
New York Times
29-04-2025
- General
- New York Times
Healing the Scars Left by America's Indian Boarding Schools
In 1892, Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of one of the country's first Native American boarding schools, told an audience, 'A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,' referring to George Armstrong Custer's bloody massacres. 'In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.' Before establishing the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Pratt participated in the forced removal of tribes from the southern plains while a U.S. calvary officer. The school was another act of genocide: Upon entering, children were given English names, forced to convert to Christianity and punished for speaking in their native languages or observing tribal customs. Pratt's institution became the model for more than 500 religious and federal boarding schools attended by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children between 1819 and the 1970s. While some parents willingly sent their offspring, many more resisted and endured beatings, imprisonment and denial of their treaty-guaranteed food rations. 'Through force or poverty-fueled necessity, so many Indian children were taken to boarding schools through the 1970s,' writes Mary Annette Pember in her piercing new memoir, 'Medicine River,' 'that virtually no Indian family remains untouched by the experience today.' Pember is perfectly positioned to write this book. She's an enrolled citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, a journalist who has reported on Native issues for more than two decades and the granddaughter and daughter of boarding school survivors. 'Medicine River' weaves together the history of the U.S. government's brutal crusades to exterminate, then assimilate, Native Americans, with her mother's experience at St. Mary's Catholic Indian Mission School, in Odanah, Wis. Bernice Rabideaux was just 5 when she and her four siblings were brought to the school after the implosion of their parents' marriage. The nuns treated the students more like inmates than children, goading them through a rigid schedule of worship, chores and classes that permitted only one free hour a day. The girls spent much of their time cleaning — scrubbing floors, washing dishes, doing laundry — under the supervision of sisters who were quick to slap or call them 'dirty Indians.' Constantly hungry, Rabideaux resorted to stealing food and was once whipped for taking an apple. Rabideaux spent eight years in this loveless environment, only rarely seeing her parents. Although she left after she graduated eighth grade, her harrowing experience at what she called the 'Sister School' warped the rest of her life. 'I can still see her as she tried to outrun her invisible tormentors,' Pember writes of her mother. 'She was lost to our family during these times. She could never speak of nor even allow herself to remember all that happened. Instead, she kept her little hands and stories clenched into fists.' Rabideaux suffered migraines, nameless fears and hypervigilance — all hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder. As a small child, Pember hid from her mother's violent mood swings under the kitchen table. Rabideaux seemed fixated on cleanliness. ''Get down on those prayer bones, girl,' she'd say as she instructed me on how to clean the floor. Often, she muttered, 'We may be Indian, but by God we ain't dirty.'' After running away at age 13, Pember was sent to juvenile hall, where she inked 'squaw' into her arm — 'an attempt to make that derogatory term so often used against me my own.' Then came stints of homelessness, of numbing herself with drugs and booze. Eventually, Pember enrolled in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she became active in the Indian student organization and graduated with a degree in journalism. Although Pember wrote about the boarding schools in her capacity as a journalist, her mother balked at questions about her own experiences at the Sister School, which closed in 1969. It was only after Rabideaux died that Pember visited the school's archives to better understand her mother's trauma — as well as her own. The horrors of the boarding school system are still being revealed. In 2021, the discovery of more than a thousand unmarked graves at residential schools in Canada drew international headlines and, in 2023, Canada agreed to pay some $2 billion in reparations to survivors. The United States has begun its own reckoning. Deb Haaland, the first Native American Secretary of the Interior — whose great-grandfather attended Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School — conducted a listening tour to meet survivors and record their stories. In 2024, the Interior Department identified 74 burial sites at various schools containing the remains of nearly a thousand Indigenous children. That same year, The Washington Post published exposes on widespread sexual abuse at Catholic-run boarding schools and put the student death toll at more than 3,100 — three times the official number. President Biden issued a formal apology for 'one of the most horrific chapters in American history.' The apology has since been removed from the White House website. Only a year later, the U.S. government is again engaging in the erasure of Native Americans, part of the Trump administration's war on diversity, equity and inclusion. Pages referencing the contributions of Native soldiers have been deleted from the Army's website. The Pentagon took down web pages featuring the Navajo Code Talkers — whose encrypted messages helped secure an Allied victory in the Pacific during World War II — only to restore them after public outcry. With a government that is rewriting history in real time, 'Medicine River' stands as a testament to the truth. Pember has continued her own journey of healing, through increasing connection with Ojibwe culture. At the book's close, she shares the ecstatic experience of dancing in a powwow held within sight of her mother's former school, now in ruins. 'Surrounded by friends and family, we laughed and celebrated together,' she writes. 'Not only have we survived, but we have flourished.'
