Road to Healing tour sheds light on suffering of survivors of Native American
“I will never, ever forgive this school for what they did to me. I still feel that pain.”
These were the words of 84-year-old Donald Neconie, a former US Marine and member of the Kiowa Tribe, as he spoke at the first event in the “Road to Healing” tour that began on Saturday at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklohoma.
Key points:
- There were more than 400 US forced assimilation schools with the stated goal of wiping out Native American culture
- The number of known deaths at such centres is expected to rise from 500 into the tens of thousands as more research is done
- Deb Haaland is the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history
Mr Neconie and other native American tribal elders — all former students at the government-backed “Indian” boarding school — testified about the hardships they endured at Riverside, including beatings, whippings, sexual assaults, humiliation and painful nicknames.
They came from different states and different tribes, but they shared the common experience of having attended a school that was designed to strip Indigenous people of their cultural identities.
As the elders spoke, US Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland — herself a Laguna Pueblo from New Mexico and the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history — listened quietly.
“I’m here to listen. I will listen with you, I will grieve with you, I will believe you and I will feel your pain,” Ms Haaland said.
Riverside was Ms Haaland’s first stop in the nationwide tour that will give First Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiian survivors of federal Indian boarding school policies a platform to share their painful experiences.
Mr Neconie, who still lives in Anadarko, recalled being beaten if he cried or spoke his native Kiowa language when he attended Riverside in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“Every time I tried to talk Kiowa, they put lye in my mouth,” he said.
“It was 12 years of hell.”
The ingestion of lye, a metal hydroxide used for cleaning and curing foods, causes “rapid burns of the mouth, tongue and pharynx”, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
A cabinet secretary with ‘shared trauma’
Ms Haaland’s agency recently released a report that identified more than 400 schools that were centres of forced assimilation from the early 1800s through to the 1970s, with the stated goal of wiping out Native American culture.
The report said students, often separated from their families by the age of four or five, endured “rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse”.
More than 500 children died at such schools, but that number is expected to reach into the tens of thousands as more research is done.
The schools carried out a “christianisation” policy, removing indigenous cultural signifiers by cutting the children’s hair, having them wear American-style uniforms, forbidding them from speaking…
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