Hello friends, welcome to episode 7 in our series, Taken Native Boarding Schools in America.

We began this series with a government's intervention into the lives of Native Americans

from stolen ancestral lands to general Pratt's experiment on prisoners of war and the

forces simulation of Native American children who were taken far from their homes.

Today we're going to explore an explosive pendulum swing in the other direction when the

government basically told Native communities enough you're on your own.

The ominous sounding termination policy fundamentally changed the relationship between the federal

government and Native tribes again and its reverberations can be felt even today.

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

In the early 1950s the Bureau of Indian Affairs set out to recruit families to leave their

reservations and assimilate into urban American life, promising high paying jobs, good educational

opportunities and a happy life. They offered one way fair and a $160 payment for the first month's

expenses. If they had children they could get an extra $10 per child up to eight children.

They assured the families that before the month's end, fathers would have found employment.

Clyde and Charlotte Day, along with six of their 17 children, took the government's deal and

ventured off to Cleveland where instead of finding good employment opportunities, the days experienced

discrimination, low paying jobs and poverty. Clyde had been a hunter-trapper before the move,

but in Cleveland he could only find work as a dishwasher and his small salary couldn't support his

family. Overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle and all the differences from their previous life in

a cabin near a lake, the family huddled in a small one bedroom apartment, afraid to go outside.

When the first month was up, the days asked to return home, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs,

the BIA, refused to help. While the days were spared the fate of being forced out of their

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