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Ed Webb

'A Place of Padlocks and Chamber Pots': Repatriation Discussions for the 126 Natives Bu... - 0 views

nativenewsonline.net/...nment-run-native-insane-asylum

USA US history empire nativeamericans genocide

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Dec 21 - Cached
  • After a summer of returning nine ancestors who died while attending boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is zeroing in on another location for return: The cemetery of a former government-run insane asylum in Canton, a town of about 3,000 people in southeast South Dakota.
  • From 1903 to 1934, the BIA operated the Hiawatha Indian Insane Asylum (also known as the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians) for nearly 400 Native Americans, overlapping with the same period that U.S. policy aimed to assimilate Natives into the dominant settler culture and erase their own. Native Americans from across Indian Country were admitted to the asylum at a time where Indigenous peoples were not recognized as citizens of the United States, and therefore would not be admitted to state institutions. 
  • “Many of the people that were there... might have simply been ‘trouble’ or created trouble for the Indian agent,” Lothrop told Native News Online. “Some of [the elders] were medicine men. It was a time when we weren't allowed to practice our spiritual ways, and this was one way to… as my mom said, ‘try to get the Indian out of the Indian.’”
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  • Today, the asylum’s graveyard sits on a city-owned golf course between the fourth and fifth holes’ fairways. It’s sectioned off with a split-rail fence, and maintained by the city and the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story group. 
  • At least 53 different tribal nations are represented in the cemetery. 
  • there were 27 investigations of the asylum over its 31-year operation.  But it would take another nearly three decades for those complaints--some from staff themselves, alleging patient mistreatment in the form of insufficient clothing, bedding, and improper medical treatment—-to shut down the facility.
  • In 1929, psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Silk of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal mental hospital in Washington, described the Canton asylum as “a place of padlocks and chamber pots,” where reservations sent patients they weren’t able to care for. He noted a lack of real medical facilities, and that “several patients exhibited no symptoms of mental illness,”
  • City officials in Canton, which technically owns the cemetery, told Native News Online that they would “respect and honor the decision of each tribal nation” regarding their ancestors buried there. "Whether those decisions be repatriation or leaving them where they were laid to rest, we will honor and remember their lives through continued care and upkeep of the grounds and cemetery,” representatives from Canton, the Hiawatha Golf Club, Sanford Canton-Inwood Medical Center, and Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story wrote in a joint statement.
  • In June, the Department of the Interior announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, prompted by the discovery of 215 Indigenous childrens’ remains at the site of a former Indian residential school, to examine its own dark history. The initiative directs the department to identify boarding-school facilities and examine potential burial sites near them, as well as the identities and tribal affiliations of the students who were taken to those schools. 
  • The Department of the Interior had not responded by press time to Native News Online’s request for comment on whether the asylum would be included in the scope of the federal investigation, or whether they’d pay for repatriations.
Ed Webb

More schools that forced American Indian children to assimilate revealed - The Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...indian-boarding-schools

history empire USA US genocide nativeamericans

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 24 - Cached
  • bringing the number of known Indian boarding schools in the country to 523 in 38 states. In addition to the federally supported schools tallied by the Interior Department, the coalition identified 115 more institutions that operated beginning in 1801, most of them run by religious groups and churches.
  • Tens of thousands of American Indian children attended these schools, although no one knows the exact number. Thousands are believed to have died
  • many of the children likely died of malnutrition, abuse, tuberculosis or typhoid
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  • “Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland, the nation’s first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”
  • At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of the first federal boarding schools in the United States, the remains of five Native American students found at a cemetery near the school will be disinterred and returned to their families for burial this fall, according to officials from the U.S. Army, which now has a war college on the site. The students died between 1880 and 1910.
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