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Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry and this is a little leader where we catch up. I share some of the stories that you all send to me.

So if you have a story and you'd like to share it with the Cult, you know what to do. Just send it on over to Spencer at Cult Leader.com. Put little leader somewhere in the subject line or the body of the email so that I can find it. And you might just hear it on an upcoming episode.

Okay, first order of business in the spade-coolly episode that I put out recently. I very briefly mentioned that he was sent to the Chimewa School in Oregon and I was like, yeah, I don't really know how that all went down.

To be honest, I had no idea about the history surrounding it, but I started getting messages and then comments and emails and I was like, oh God, what's going on here?

I only assume there's a lot of you like me who are perhaps ignorant to this. So I'm going to share an article that a cult babe sent me on Instagram. I called one of my friends who would know way more about this than I ever could imagine.

And so she sent me some resources as well that I'll share and I'll link, but she was kind of giving me the lowdown and I'm not going to read this entire article, but there's portions of it that I absolutely am going to read.

And this is from USA Today and it says, Chimewa Indian School families seek answers healing through federal investigation. This is by Natalie Pate.

Happy Lynn and Diane Lugo of the Salem Statesman Journal. And this was published in October of 2021. And this is talking about an active investigation that was being launched into what was happening here at Chimewa specifically.

Chimewa is a federally funded residential boarding school for indigenous youth from throughout the western United States and it's operated by the Bureau of Indian Education and is one of four of its kind in the country.

Now this investigation started when the interior secretary Deb Holland called for the federal government to investigate its oversight at schools, including Chimewa following the discovery of over 200 unmarked graves at an Indian boarding school in British Columbia.

According to research by Marsha Small, there are 222 sets of remains at Chimewa, but only 208 of those are documented by the federal government.

Chimewa opened an 1880 in the Forest Grove campus of Pacific University and moved to its Salem campus in 1885.

And what was going on at this school and other schools like it is absolutely horrifying. According to the USA Today article, it says,

Upon arrival, children were stripped of their own clothing, washed in a chemical lie bath and put into a uniform.

Their hair was cut off and they were given Christian names. They were often punished or beaten for speaking their native language or practicing any tribal traditions.

We see this so often throughout history. It says families were promised the opportunity of a quality American education, but during the school's first several decades,

students were forced to work on farms to help fund their school and in the instance of Chimewa were used as labor to construct new buildings.

Their healthcare was often poor and communicable diseases ran rampant in the dormitories, resulting in deaths from illnesses like tuberculosis and measles.

And many were physically and sexually abused by teachers and staff.

Again, I'm going to link that article in the sources because there's several different families telling their stories in that article.

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