True Left

aint Francis Mission was one of more than 400 Indian boarding schools operated or funded by the federal government through the late 1960s.
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By 1926, more than 80 percent of Native school-aged children in America were attending those boarding schools, according to the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. Sickness, abuse, and neglect at the schools was well documented.
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Nationally, the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report conducted by the Department of the Interior over the course of nine months and published in May 2022 found that at least 500 Native children died at boarding schools across the country. As the investigation continues, Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) estimated that number will rise to the “tens of thousands.”

Beginning with President George Washington, the official policy of the federal government was to forcibly replace the Native culture with white culture under the guise of “education.”

“Indian Education: A National Tragedy—A National Challenge,” a 1969 report by the Senate Special Subcommittee on Indian Education, known as the Kennedy Report after subcommittee chair Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), describes the rationale behind the practice: “This was considered ‘advisable’ as the cheapest and safest way of subduing the Indians, of providing a safe habitat for the country’s white inhabitants, of helping the whites acquire desirable land, and of changing the Indian’s economy so that he would be content with less land. Education was a weapon by which these goals were to be accomplished.”
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Beginning in 1893, Congress authorized the Secretary of the Interior to withhold rations, including those guaranteed by treaties, to Native families whose children did not attend schools, according to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report.
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Conditions at the schools varied, but corporal punishment was normal at Saint Francis.

Hollow Horn Bear remembers a brutal beating from a scholastic — a priest in training — who searched the boys as they left the dining hall to make sure they didn’t sneak any food out. He was 10 and had taken half his apple to eat later at a movie screening in the gym.

“He whaled on me 50 times for half an apple,” Hollow Horn Bear recalled. “I couldn't be on my back or sit down for days.”

Another Saint Francis survivor, Ione Quigley, told Native News Online that she didn’t even know what violence was until she showed up to Saint Francis as a sixth-grader.
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The nuns and priests “formed a social stratification within the boarding school system,” she said, drawing a pyramid on scrap paper. “The nuns and priests were on top, and then the next layer would be all the non-Natives, like the teachers, (and) the workers. The next layer would be the mixed-blood children, who were English speakers. At the very bottom layer were those of us that were brown and spoke our Native languages.”
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She recalls the girls receiving beatings from the nuns for events they had no control over: including one who habitually wet her bed, and another time when all the girls in her dormitory accidentally witnessed a nun kissing a priest outside the window.

Although she frequently endured physical and verbal abuse, Quigley said perhaps she was spared from the worst of it since her grandparents spoke English well, and threatened to report the abusive nuns to the diocese after one incident.

“The [students] who had no family or who had no one to stand up for them, I know they were abused,” she said. “Emotional abuse leaves scars on your heart. So does physical abuse—and sexual abuse, I can't even imagine. It takes away your innocence. It takes away your trust, your securities.”
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In South Dakota alone, former boarding-school students have filed more than 100 lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by clergy members. All 27 Indian boarding schools in the state were run by Christian churches.

“I am a 44-year-old man, and the boarding-school experiences have been locked up inside me all these years,” a classmate of Hollow Horn Bear who was sexually abused by a priest wrote in a 2001 letter responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking information from former boarding-school students.
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All of the more than 100 people who have filed lawsuits alleging sexual abuse at boarding schools in South Dakota said it had been done by agents of the church, mostly priests and nuns, said attorney Greg Yates, who worked on each of the cases. Some said they simultaneously experienced physical abuse.

All but two of the cases were dismissed by the trial judge before the victims had their day in court. In 2010, South Dakota amended its statute of limitations to prohibit people 40 or older from suing institutions that knew or should have known about sexual abuse. In 2011, the state  Supreme Court ruled that complaints of childhood sexual abuse against a church entity had to be filed within one year of turning eighteen.
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Dismissing all those cases, Yates told Native News Online, deprived the survivors of their access to justice “and had the effect of revictimizing these Native American victims of sexual abuse by the clergy.”
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The Department of the Interior’s investigation found that some Native children as young as 3 were sent to boarding schools.