- Details
- By Levi Rickert
A portion of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative - Volume II, released today, contains snippets of testimonies from The Road to Healing tour.
The 12-stop Road to Healing tour began on July 9, 2022 at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and concluded on November 5, 2023, at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana.
During 12 sessions held throughout Indian Country, approximately 135 Native American survivors of Indian boarding schools or their descendants made testimony about personal experiences.
The poignant testimonies were made in tribal communities in an open forum— typically held in gymnasiums, Indian casino banquet rooms, or auditoriums. All testimonies were transcribed by court reporters to create a permanent oral history collection.
At every Road to Healing sessions, Native elders testified about their memories of boarding school, including incidences of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
The elders recounted atrocities that happened decades ago in vivid detail, as if they occurred a week or two ago. It is as if they have played a tape recorder in their minds over and over for years and are finally allowed to hit the play button for the rest of the world, and turn up the volume.
Native Americans are often told to “get over it” by non-Natives who have no comprehension of the historic trauma that exists within tribal communities.
Below are excerpts from testimonies made during the Road to Healing tour, included in the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative - Volume II:
Physical and Mental Impacts
“For my own grandchildren, for my great-grandchildren and I – some of the things happened in boarding school – is going to be a long time of healing and forgetting. I mean you’re put in there, treated like you was some type of a hired hand. I stayed in the summers, worked in the heat, hauled brush…If we got poison ivy, we still had to go back the next day.”
- The Road to Healing Oklahoma Participant
A lot of the – all of the food we ever ate when we first got there were so foreign and alien to us we couldn’t eat traditional – we couldn’t bring any of our traditional foods. We ate industrial Western processed foods and these huge industrials cans of salted meats and salted vegetables. There was powdered juice, powdered milk, powdered eggs. We were forced to eat all those kind of foods [sic], and of course, we all got violently ill because our bodies couldn’t process changing our diet [sic] over from our traditional Native foods. And we had vomiting, we had diarrhea, we had both and we were often punished for soiling our pants or clothing or bedding and we got beaten for that.
- The Road to Healing Alaska Participant
“Unfortunately, Wrangell was a place that attracted pedophiles and many matrons, men and women, perpetrated themselves upon little boys and girls. And what I witnessed in the boys dorm were where matrons were sodomizing boys in their beds or in the bathrooms. We saw girls going home in the middle of the school year pregnant and a lot of these children were like 11 and 12, 13 years old.”
- The Road to Healing Alaska Participant
“But, you know, the sad part about it is a lot of us had to watch the priest sodomize our -- so, had to watch our classmates become sexually assaulted. So that’s -- nobody wants to share things like that. I’ve learned how to be tough because you couldn’t cry. Couldn’t do that.”
- The Road to Healing South Dakota Participant
Generational Impacts on Families
“But I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home. And I remember one girl was a bedwetter, and they made her scrub the entire bathroom on her hands and knees with her toothbrush.”
- The Road to Healing Michigan Participant
“I could just hear all – you could just hear crying. First it would just start really slow and then pretty soon, you could hear the whole dorm crying. You’d hear girls saying they want to go home. And it was true, all our clothes were taken away from us and we were given government issued clothing and…we were given numbers, you know, we weren’t – we never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers. My number was 77 too because my sister was there before me and her number was 77 and then – and it was marked on everything you owned.”
- The Road to Healing Alaska Participant
“I think the biggest thing of learning from this experience and having my dad as a survivor is I survived my dad. And I’m really lucky that he was able to repress and repress and repress and nothing came out. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He didn’t do drugs. He just was so detached. He was not here. And so there are sometimes when you can see him and you literally have to just, like, trauma. Dad, come back. Come back to us. We’re here right now. We’re safe. Come back. Be with us right here. Feel it. We love you. And I think the biggest thing for him is that he just wasn’t the parent that he wanted to be or that he could be.”
- The Road to Healing Montana Participant
“My boarding school experience at Seneca – the most traumatic thing for me was being separated from my family, from my siblings. And the years that you’re separated, you never get back. The days that you’re separated they don’t return, but you learn to live. You learn to become part of the trauma. You don’t understand it. I know many days, even now, I don’t understand why I had to go through what I went through. And healing is a long entire life process.”
- The Road to Healing Oklahoma Participant
“The important years of bonding with your parents and getting loved and hugged on daily is vital to child health, growth, and emotional well-being. I did not get that. We didn’t get that. There were no hugs, no encouragement, no praise.”
- The Road to Healing Michigan Participant
Economic and Militarizing Impacts to Indian Tribes
“She didn’t call them boarding schools. She called them military school where she had to get up and march every single day. And as soon as she finished marching, she had to go to work. And I said, ‘What did you do?’ She said, ‘Well, we worked in the farm, in farmyards, the animals, the cows, the chickens. We plucked the chickens. We fed them. And we took care of the goats, the cow. Cooked the bread, worked in the kitchen, cleaned the halls, did all the work. And the boys did blacksmith and other things like that.’”
- The Road to Healing Washington Participant
“I came through that boarding school. I was not academically prepared to succeed in higher education. The Vietnam War was going strong in the late 1960s. That’s where I ended up, serving this country. One year, day-to-day, in Vietnam.”
- The Road to Healing South Dakota Participant
Impacts on Indian Languages, Cultures, and Religions
“I had been there for a few weeks and wanted to go home. I said to Sister Naomi, I think I'm going to go home now. She leaned way over into my face and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’re going to be here for a long, long time. So, I choked back my tears and I hid inside myself.”
- The Road to Healing Michigan Participant
“I had been there for a few weeks and wanted to go home. I said to Sister Naomi, I think I'm going to go home now. She leaned way over into my face and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’re going to be here for a long, long time. So, I choked back my tears and I hid inside myself.”
- The Road to Healing Michigan Participant
“At night, they would come and hover over both of us and shine their flashlights on us. I don’t know why. Just to scare us, I guess. Because of the dorms, the lights were off. We turned off all the lights, and they did that every once in a while, pulled the sheets off and shined the flashlight on us. And if we weren’t good, if you were messing around when the lights were off, they would take us and punish us and put us in the basement. And the lights were all off in the basement, and we’d have to sit on the steps. The line of light for the door is that we would sit right there because we were afraid of the dark, and sometimes they would forget about us and they wouldn’t – sometimes they would forget that they had put us down in the basement. Wouldn’t get out of there until early morning, and it was – maybe that’s why I’m afraid of the dark now. I don’t know. I leave the light on in my bedroom. Even today. That was a – that was hurt – hard for me. I still think about those nights when I had to sit in the basement. I was afraid of the dark. And I survived there – the dorms for six years.”
- The Road to Healing Montana Participant
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Following the release of the U.S. Department of the Interior's final report, we at Native News Online took a moment to reflect on our extensive three-year effort to highlight the traumatic legacy of Indian boarding schools. By covering all 12 Road to Healing events and publishing over 250 articles, we have amplified survivors' voices and illuminated the lasting impact on Indigenous communities. Our work continues. Please consider donating to help fund our ongoing coverage of Indian boarding schools.
