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The US Interior Secretary’s year-long listening tour, to learn more about the federal Indian boarding school experience, moves to California.
As part of their “Road to Healing” journey, Sec. Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) will visit Riverside on Friday and Rohnert Park on Sunday.
Rhonda McBride from our flagship station KNBA reports.
Asst. Sec. Newland says he’s been to a lot of these sessions, but always learns something new from boarding school survivors and their families.
“Many of them are elders now and, and I try to, as they’re speaking about their experiences, picture them as little kids when these things were done to them. And it really humanizes this story in a way that’s painful but necessary.”
The listening sessions are an outgrowth of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to look at the troubled legacy of policies that tried to systematically assimilate children by altering their identities in a militaristic way.
“It’s more than statistics. It’s more than a policy. It’s more than a law or a supreme court case. At the end of the day, these were kids in these boarding schools.”
The sessions will not only document the physical and emotional abuse they endured but also attempt to start a healing process.
Trauma-informed support will be available at each gathering.
Another goal of the “Road to Healing” tour is to develop new programs to revitalize tribal languages and culture, to counteract nearly two centuries of policies aimed at their destruction.
Blackfeet educator and leader Earl Barlow died last week at the age of 96.
Montana Public Radio’s Austin Amestoy has this remembrance.
Barlow became known as the “Father of Indian Education” in Montana for his efforts to recognize the tribes during the state’s 1972 constitutional convention.
In a 2007 interview with the Regional Learning Project, Barlow recounted part of his address to the convention’s delegates after he read a newspaper article that contained racist stereotypes about Native Americans.
“Is bigotry in the state of Montana a real concern? If it is, then you, the delegates, have a golden opportunity to strike a blow for tolerance by incorporating into this constitution words to that effect.”
Despite there being no Native American delegates, Barlow’s advocacy led to the constitutional creation of the Indian Education for All program.
Barlow was born in 1927 and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation.
After serving in World War II, he returned to Montana and began a long career in education.
In 1970, he became the first American Indian to serve as Supervisor of Indian Education within Montana’s Office of Public Instruction.
State Sen. Susan Webber (Blackfeet/D-MT 8) attended Browning High School when Barlow was its superintendent.
She said Barlow broke down barriers for Indigenous people in Montana and encouraged Native American girls to pursue their dreams in a time when that sentiment wasn’t popular.
“They never said that you could be a Montana state senator. That came a long way — and he was the first to show us the way.”
Each June 2 since 2019, the state of Montana has recognized Earl Barlow Day in honor of his lifetime commitment to Indian education and Indigenous rights.
The Cherokee Nation has partnered with the University of Tulsa’s Oklahoma Center for the Humanities to share the story of Cherokee Freedmen and explore the tribe’s history with Black slavery.
“We Are Cherokee: Cherokee Freedmen and the Right to Citizenship” details the fight Cherokee Freedmen went through to get back their Cherokee Nation citizenship.
This exhibition opens Friday and will be on display through September 23.
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