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President Joe Biden, at his last White House Tribal Nations Summit in December, announced the creation of a national monument to honor Native American boarding school survivors.
“I don’t want people forgetting – ten, 20, 30 years from now, pretending that it didn’t happen.”
In October, President Biden apologized on behalf of the federal government for the abuse of Native American and Alaska Native children, who attended the government- funded schools, dating back to the 1800’s.
The monument will go up at the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
It was one of the first and largest of the federal boarding schools.
Before it closed in 1918, more than 10,000 Native children had been taken away from their families and forced to attend.
U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) also announced that her department, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress are working to preserve stories Interior collected on its national Road to Healing Tour, which included a stop in Anchorage.
Jim LaBelle was one of those who shared his experiences of abuse at the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska, a school that was similar to the one in Pennsylvania.
“Carlisle served as the model for almost all of the other boarding schools that came afterwards. And that was the military model.”
LaBelle is a retired Alaska Native studies professor, who has researched the influence of the Carlisle school on other Native boarding schools.
He says it was founded by General Richard Henry Pratt, an Indian fighter in the U.S. Army who coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
LaBelle says many of the Alaska Native children who were sent there had been orphaned by epidemics, and Pratt’s militaristic approach only added to their trauma.
“It was a process of getting your hair shorn, having clothing confiscated and burned, being issued government issued clothing. It was all part and parcel of the Carlisle experience.”
Labelle says he’s glad the former campus of the Carlisle School will become a national historic landmark.
He hopes it also will recognize the other boarding schools, which include about a hundred in Alaska.
This story is by KNBA’s Rhonda McBride.
(Courtesy North Dakota Historical Society)
The North Dakota State Historical Society obtained a collection of original lithographs depicting life among Indigenous peoples of the Dakotas.
What was once hidden in a San Francisco arthouse are now part of the group’s permanent collection.
South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s C.J. Keene reports.
In 1832, Swiss artist Karl Bodmer and German Prince Maximillian embarked on a journey throughout the American Interior West.
One of the results of that expedition were the paintings of dozens of lithographs depicting Indigenous life in the region before widespread colonization of the plains.
Less than five years later, a smallpox epidemic would devastate the local Indigenous population depicted in these paintings.
Kara Haff is the public information officer for the North Dakota State Historical Society.
“The expedition stayed at Fort Clark, they were down in South Dakota, up near Fort Union. Along the way, a number of significant portraits of different Native American chiefs were a part of it, but the daily life too were documented through Bodmer’s artwork.”
Haff says it’s a rare collection of originals to see, let alone acquire for a state historical society.
“Bodmer was working on turning the sketches, paintings, and drawings to transfer those artworks onto plates to be stamped or lithographed. They don’t come up to auction very often, or come even in a complete set very often.”
The 1830s originals will be placed into rotation at the North Dakota Historical Society.
The collection, featuring over two dozen total works, was acquired via a donation from Sam McQuade Jr., with an earmark for fine art purchases.
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