Many in Indian country have expressed that the trauma from the boarding school experience continues to terrorize the hearts of American Indians. Although much has been written about this history that looms so large in the North American indigenous experience, it remains an obscure topic in mainstream America.
Dr. Eulynda J. Toledo, a member of the Diné tribe and project director of a grant from the National Institute for Disability Research and Rehabilitation, is working to bring attention to the “intergenerational trauma” of the boarding school era through the recently founded Boarding School Healing Project. Toledo and her colleagues maintain that many of the social ills plaguing current generations of American Indians, including sexual abuse, child abuse, violence towards women and substance abuse can be traced to the generations of abuse experienced at Indian boarding schools. Toledo describes intergenerational trauma as post-traumatic stress disorder that has been passed down through generations.
Beginning with President Ulysses Grant’s “Peace Policy” of 1869, thousands of American Indian children were forced into government and religious boarding schools away from their families and land or forced to attend Christian day schools located on reservations. The “Peace Policy” was embraced as a more economical solution to the “Indian Problem” of the day than costly military campaigns against the tribes to gain control of their lands.
On Oct. 6, 1879, Captain Richard H. Pratt, a veteran of the Indian wars, opened the first federal Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pa. His motto at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” The philosophy of forced acculturation that stripped Indians of their culture, language and religion was quickly embraced by the United States government, which appropriated funds to support more than 400 such church-run schools and several Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. Students were trained to become contributing members of American society by receiving training for low-skilled jobs.
Carlisle was modeled on a prison school Pratt had created earlier for Indian prisoners of war in Florida and was run with military precision. Pratt’s punitive philosophy of rigid order became the desired model for other Indian boarding schools. Children as young as five years old were taken from their families and subjected to a life of harsh discipline in which punishment was swiftly meted out for offenses such as displaying any Indian tendencies. Their mouths were scrubbed out with lye soap for uttering any words in their native language.
