Indigenous Resistance: Tribunal on Indian Boarding Schools

Indigenous Resistance: Tribunal on Indian Boarding Schools Oneida, WI, October 2014...:

October 22 -- 25, 2014: Wisconsin event to focus on U.S. Indian boarding schools, promote healing

Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School
More than 200 undocumented deaths of
children including Anishinaabe. 

Blue Skies Foundation has scheduled a Tribunal to focus on the experiences of Native children who were forced at early ages to attend Indian boarding schools. This Tribunal is scheduled for October 22 through the 25, 2014 at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center, at Oneida, Wisconsin.

Blue Skies Foundation is working with the staff of the Human Rights Action Center, from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, Jack Healey of the Human Rights Action Center, Bill Means, co-founder of the International Indian Treaty Council, and with Sheron Leonard, Pele Films, as well as numerous other individuals interested in documenting the history of the Indian boarding schools.

A panel of qualified Native judges will be listening to the witnesses as they provide first hand testimony of the abuse and mistreatment they suffered at the hands of the federal government, and of the Council of Churches, while being forced to live away from their families and Nations. In the words of the founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, General Richard Henry Pratt, “Transfer the savage born infant to the surroundings of civilization and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”

At the conclusion of the Tribunal the Judges will issue an executive summary with their findings, which will be shared with the Native communities.

This Tribunal will be live-streamed by professionals out of California and the contents will be formatted into DVD form to be used as an educational tool in the schools, especially the Tribal schools. We are trying to provide a clear history while we have some of the witnesses able to tell their stories.

One reason to put together a Tribunal on the boarding school era is to bring an

Haskell, where children were beaten and tortured,
and buried in the marsh.

awareness of the treatment of Native children while in those schools and try to begin to understand the effects this treatment had on the survivors. We are told of the physical punishment the children suffered for speaking the language, and of the sexual assaults, the physical and mental violence that took place in the name of “educating” our children in order to strip them of the “savage upbringing” and introduce them to civilization.

We feel that while we have the ability to capture the first hand documentation from some of our people, it is vitally important because we will have in their own words, the harsh reality of the boarding school experience.

MORE  

NPR coverage in 2008 

FILM CLIP: HERE