Hello friends, welcome, welcome to episode eight in our series, Taken, Native Boarding

Schools in America.

Dr. Corey Still, who studies Native American educational policies, writes, as Native people

we are the only demographic in the United States that the federal government has a moral

obligation to educate a trust responsibility to provide adequate resources for native

serving programs which include education in exchange for the land and resources tribes

seeded years ago.

And yet, the result of this trust responsibility to our students has been laid in with decades

of destructive federal policy.

That doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of the government's attempts to write some

of the educational wrongs of the past, so let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting.

In 1946, Congress created an independent agency, the Indian Claims Commission.

Its purpose was to listen to tribal claims of broken treaties and lands taken by the US

government without compensation to determine redress or repayment.

When President Harry Truman signed the bill to create the Indian Claims Commission, he

also offered a, let's say, non-apology for the treaty agreements the government had broken,

he said.

It would be a miracle if in the course of these dealings, the largest real estate transaction

in history.

We had not made some mistakes and occasionally failed to live up to the precise terms of

our treaties and agreements with some 200 tribes.

...