Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the second half of our two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic Church to share information about the boarding school it ran on the reservation. Listen to part 1 here.
ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe, visits Red Cloud Indian School, which has launched a truth and healing initiative for former students and their descendants. A youth-led activist group called the International Indigenous Youth Council has created a list of demands that includes financial reparations and the return of tribal land. The group also wants the Catholic Church to open up its records about the school’s past, especially information about children who may have died there.
Pember travels to the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, which administered boarding schools like Red Cloud. She discovers that many records are redacted or off-limits entirely, but then comes across a nuns’ diary that ends up containing important information. Buried in the diary entries is information about the school’s finances, the massacre at Wounded Knee and children who died at the school more than a century ago.
Pember then returns to Red Cloud and attends the graduation ceremony for the class of 2022. In its early years, the school tried to strip students of their culture, but these days, it teaches the Lakota language and boasts a high graduation rate and rigorous academics. Pember presents what she’s learned about the school’s history to the head of the Jesuit community in western South Dakota and to the school’s president.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Etzin. |
| 0:12.4 | Today, the second part of our series about Indian boarding schools and how the Catholic |
| 0:17.1 | Church shaped U.S. policy towards Native Americans, that policy can be boiled down to one ugly |
| 0:22.6 | phrase from the 1800s. Kill the Indian and save the man. |
| 0:27.4 | To more than a century, Native children were taken from their families and sent away |
| 0:32.1 | to boarding schools. Some were run by churches, others, by the federal government. They all |
| 0:37.5 | had the goal of stripping away Native identity. Children were traumatized by their experiences. |
| 0:44.5 | But these schools ultimately failed. Native language and culture are still here. |
| 0:53.2 | They partnered with Indian Country today, now known as ICT to investigate the history |
| 0:58.3 | of boarding schools. Last week, ICT National Corp. at Mary Annette Pember took us to Red |
| 1:04.3 | Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which is starting to confront |
| 1:10.3 | its trouble past. These days, students are reclaiming their heritage. |
| 1:17.2 | I tell them, whatever you do as a Lakota, be proud because our ancestors couldn't do that. |
| 1:26.6 | For some members of the older generation, memories of the school are harsh and vivid. |
| 1:32.2 | Being left out of school and taken away from my parents, I was in a state of shock, traumatized. |
| 1:44.6 | I couldn't understand what it happened. We met the man in charge of the school's effort |
| 1:49.6 | to bring truth and healing to the community. There are things that we can do as an institution, |
| 1:54.5 | things that might help individuals to overcome those experiences and that painful history. |
| 2:01.3 | And we learned how difficult it is to move beyond that pain without accountability. |
| 2:06.0 | I am not going to accept no cheap apology. The Catholic Church needs to own up. We need |
| 2:12.2 | to mind a lot. For many people on Pine Ridge, owning up means the church needs to answer difficult |
| 2:18.3 | questions about land ownership and money and about children who were sent to boarding school |
... |
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