Any “Healing” Conversation must be Grounded in Truth

SUBSTACK: We examine the U.S. government’s Federal Indian Boarding School Report, often framed as a historic apology. We analyze its language, its focus on “assimilation” and “dispossession,” and what it reveals—and obscures—about domination, genocide, and the continuing structure of federal Indian policy

The FEDERAL INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOL REPORT: Apology, Assimilation, Domination by Peter d'Errico

More than a historical document—it’s the ongoing reality of domination, land dispossession, and the attempted erasure of entire peoples.

Read on Substack

As we walk through volumes one and two of the report, we look beyond the bureaucratic language and euphemisms to examine how these so called boarding schools functioned as prisons for children — an admitted tool in the overall program to seize Indigenous lands.

We connect the report’s own admissions—about cultural “assimilation,” forced citizenship, and the U.S. government’s ‘trust’ doctrine—to the broader system that tried to destroy Indigenous nationhood while training Native children to identify with “our nation,” the United States, instead of their own peoples.

In this discussion, we also bring in powerful firsthand accounts and historical testimony that the official report only partially grapples with: the chaining and flogging of children, the dungeons and unmarked graves, the parents imprisoned for resisting the kidnapping of their own sons and daughters.

We don’t dwell on these stories to shock, but to insist that any “healing” conversation must be grounded in truth—truth about genocide, about land theft, and about a still active domination system that did not end when the schools closed.

We talk about what a rightful education looks like, about how language shapes identity, and why “remembrance” without legal change serves to mask the operations of the ongoing system.

We encourage you to watch and listen to this conversation and then explore the resources linked with it, including the Boarding School reports themselves and the book Massacre by Robert Gesner.

Resources:

“Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report” –

Volume I - https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf

Volume II - https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/media_document/doi_federal_indian_boarding_school_initiative_investigative_report_vii_final_508_compliant.pdf

“Indian Civilization Act” (1819) - https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/3/STATUTE-3-Pg516b.pdf

“Report of the Committee, to whom was referred so much of the President’s message as relates to the civilization of the Indian tribes” - https://www.loc.gov/item/ca25001025/

“Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide” - https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2t4ds5

Robert Gessner, Massacre; a survey of today’s American Indian - https://archive.org/details/massacresurveyof0000gess_i8w6