On our trip west last August I was reading about Indian boarding schools as a means of cultural genocide after the attempt at physical genocide had been sufficiently successful to shift policy. I was reading Adam Fortunate Eagle’s ( Red Lake Band of Chippewa) account of the Pipestone Indian School in Southwest Minnesota as we drove through Pipestone, ironically a sacred site so named because of the beautiful rock formations there that have made it a pilgrimage site for many indigenous peoples to mine rock for tobacco pipes. The area is gorgeous. ‘
This year has been a year of new reckoning with this history as unmarked graves of hundreds of native children have been discovered at schools in Canada and the US. The poem below, written by an award-winning writer and Professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Linda LaGarde Grover, gives a visceral feel for the state sponsored and funded policy to ‘Christianize and civilize the savages.’ And the fact that Christian churches were core to enacting this horrible abuse needs to be said out loud. The ‘institutionalized social forgetting,’ while obviously preferred by the dominant white settler culture, is morally bankrupt and will not open spaces of repair and healing.
I’ll be extending this reflection with new posts each day during the week our settler nation calls Thanksgiving, and many native peoples call the National Day of Mourning.