Surviving US Genocide of Native Indians
Lamentations of American Genocide Children
Native American children were forcibly abducted from their homes and put into US Government-funded and Christian-run boarding schools from the mid 1800’s into the 1950’s. The US Government policy was designed to “civilise” indigenous Indians and to stamp out Native cultures in a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide.
In 1869, the US Congress established the Board of Indian Commissioners (BIC), the forerunner of the current Board of Indian Affairs (BIA), which includes the federal boarding school policy. A key Goal was “to Christianize the Native tribes and eradicate their culture and religion, primarily through removal of the children from reservation settings”.
In these federal boarding schools, Native indigenous children were held in isolation and dormitory-like regimented settings where they were controlled, neglected and abused. They were punished for speaking their native languages, banned from acting in any way representative of traditional indigenous or cultural practices, stripped of traditional indigenous cultural clothing, with hair and all behaviors with artifacts reflective of their cultures forbidden and removed.
The Native children were systematically inculcated with shame for being Indian, taught…
