Hello friends, welcome to the first episode in our new series, Taken, Native boarding schools

in America.

In the series, we are exploring the 150-year history of Native American children being

forcibly removed from their families and tribes and sent to residential boarding schools.

Learning schools where the intention was to eliminate whatever made the children indigenous,

their manner of dress, their language, their religion, their culture, and replace it with

what Europeans believed made someone, quote unquote, civilized.

The history is tragic, but it's important to know because if we want to learn from our

mistakes, we need to know the truth of what they were.

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

In 1888, a slight 10-year-old boy arrived at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

His name was Kakuni, and in the first decade of his life, he had known countless moments

of suffering and grief.

His father and five siblings had all been killed when the US military battled his tribe,

the Nez Perse, in an effort to force them off their ancestral lands.

He and his mother were exiled from the home they had known.

His mother sent him to the Carlisle school.

History doesn't tell us exactly why, but chances are good she wanted to spare him death

from malaria.

Their tribe had been made to live in camps in Oklahoma, where the death tolls were high

and it's possible his mother thought attending school on the east coast would give him a

chance at an education, a chance at survival.

...