PAWNEE, Okla. — Beginning in the 1800s, the United States began a federally funded boarding school program for Native American children.
Many of them died as a result of neglect and abuse in these schools.
To this day, many bodies haven't been recovered, leaving families and friends holding on to try and find closure.
Historian Matt Reed of the Pawnee Nation closely studied the history of boarding schools.
His aunt was a survivor of the school in Pawnee.
He recalls many stories told to him by survivors, including molestation, corporal punishment, and mental abuse.
"If you were caught speaking Pawnee, they wouldn't punish you, they would have the student body line up in two parallel lines and you had to go down the middle, and the students whipped you," he said.
"You're getting a physical punishment for it, but there's also some psychological harm that goes there, not just to the kid that's being punished, but to the kids that are being forced to do the punishing."
He said the schools weren't established to help educate children about important subjects but to prepare them to become workers.
Subjects like sewing and farming were taught.
"We were going to be the hired help for the ruling class," said Reed.
Cherokee Tribal Counselor Joe Deere has a very close connection to the boarding school issue.
His late parents were boarding school survivors.
"Native Americans and indigenous people across the world were all hit with this at one point at a time, and so the parents don’t really want to talk about it," he said.
Another issue with boarding schools is that so many Natives were just too scared to fully open up.
He and his wife have helped with going on digs to look for mass graves.
He said that thousands of bodies have been found, including those in Canada. This number obviously doesn't even account for bodies that haven't been located, he added.
The trauma from boarding schools wasn't just a thing of the past.
Large parts of Natives' identities were stripped away from them.
"This has led to a lot of tribes, not just here in Oklahoma but nationally, internationally, learning how to do language revitalization," he said.
"You're not allowed to speak the language in the boarding schools, and now that's transcended in to our generation," he said.
To help communities heal, Deere also became a member of the National Boarding School Coalition.
Just as trauma has impacted Natives for several generations, he said it will take several generations to heal.
"When we go forward, these things that the federal government wants to do, it's going to take a couple of generations to do that," he said.
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