Stolen Land, Federal Boarding School Report (podcasts)

 

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More than a historical document—it’s the ongoing reality of domination, land dispossession, and the attempted erasure of entire peoples.

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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

 

 

Episode 009: McGirt v. Oklahoma: Revealing and Concealing Domination

Our conversation moves beyond McGirt into other claims of a right of domination—including claims of “bureaucratic expertism” that seek domination over all people. We say that free existence requires free inquiry into all claims of a right of domination.

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A Used Book from 1896 Yields a Fascinating Find

 

Some History and a Challenging Question by Steven Newcomb

A Used Book from 1896 Yields a Fascinating Find

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Excerpt:

Two of the contributors to the book were U.S. Senator Henry L. Dawes from Massachusetts, and his wife Anna L. Dawes.  She wrote Chapter XIII of the book, titled “The Story of the Indian.”  An excerpt of Ms. Dawes’s chapter (with edits based on my Domination Translator added), reads:

“At the time when our forefathers first landed on these shores, they found the Indian here [living free and independent]. Whether at Plymouth or Jamestown, at the mouth of the Hudson [River] or in Florida, their first welcome was from the red man. . . [T]he white settler coveted the land and pushed the Indian off it that he might dwell there in peace. And it must be said that in the seventeenth century [the 1600s] he [the Christian European] violated no tradition, set himself against no law, human or divine, when he did this [pushed the Indian off the land by establishing domination over it].

“Possession [domination] was still the right of the stronger, the world over, and the conquest [domination] of new countries the chief glory of king and commons alike. To flee away from oppression [domination] was the only refuge, and to the oppressor [dominator] as well as oppressed [dominated] it seemed a natural resort. The country was broad enough for both, thought the white man. If the red man could not live with the new comers on the coast, let him fly to the fresh wilderness of the interior; and so he did, year after year, until one day there was no more wilderness [where the Native peoples could live free].”

Anna Dawes’s explanation acknowledges that the Original Nations and Peoples of the continent had been living perfectly free for countless generations when the Christian Europeans arrived and “coveted the land,” meaning “to desire what belonged to someone else.”  She goes on to describe a centuries-long process whereby, for generations, the free Nations and Peoples were forced by foreign and invading colonizers and their descendants to live under the invading People’s claim of a right of domination, which she calls “oppression.”

As question arises:  Will it be possible for the Original Nations and Peoples which have been living under the invading claim of a right of domination for so long, to one day free themselves from that claim?

CLICK LINK:

https://open.substack.com/pub/stevennewcomb/p/some-history-and-a-challenging-question?r=cbskx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false 

 

DAWES ACT:

 READ:  https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dawes-act