Interior Secretary Haaland listens—at a public meeting on July 9 in Anadarko, Okla.—as a boarding school survivor details the abuse they endured decades earlier.
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland knew first-hand about thepainful legacyof Indian boarding schools — where countless children were abused and untold thousands died — when she first launched afederal investigationinto the government-run institutions in 2021.
“I’m human, and it’s hard not to cry,” Haaland tells PEOPLE, describing what it’s been like to hear these pain-filled testimonies during the Department of the Interior’s “Road to Healing” listening tour, created to catalogue the stories of survivors and their descendants.
“It takes a lot out of me. It’s sad to sit there for six and a half hours listening to these stories. We all react in different ways, but it really tires me out. I want to go to sleep afterwards just to regenerate myself.”
Tami A. Heilemann/DOI
Haaland — who now leads the same department that carried out the assimilation policies which stripped Native American children of their traditions, culture, and language — is quick to point out that these listening sessions are even more painful for the survivors who come to share their stories.
In July and August two sessions were held in tribal communities in Oklahoma and Michigan that attracted hundreds of attendees.
One speaker after another discussed their recollections of this dark chapter in U.S. history that stretched between 1819 and 1969, when the U.S. government forced hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their families and sent them to live in408 boarding schoolsin 37 states. The government’s goal was to strip away the children’s cultural ties and force assimilation into white Anglo-American culture.
“It’s almost like the folks at these schools got together and decided how to best make these children’s lives a living terror,” says Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary.
For those in attendance, the events marked the first time that many of them had spoken about what they endured in a public setting.
“It was 12 years of hell,” 84-year-old survivor Donald Neconie told the crowd assembled in the gymnasium at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla., on July 9, according toThe Express-Star.
“They said, ‘If you cry, we will whip you.’ And then they whipped me. And they whipped me. And they whipped me into shape. I still feel the pain of what this school did to me.”
source: people.com
