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Some day, the Sokaogon Chippewa Community in Wisconsin hopes to have a full list of all Tribal children forcibly taken to Indian boarding schools in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Compiling that list – and providing answers for current Tribal members – could take years.
But it is now at least started, as Ben Meyer reports for WXPR.
As part of an attempt to force the assimilation of Native children into white culture, the United States government operated or supported 408 boarding schools, largely in the last decades of the 1800s and first decades of the 1900s.
At least ten of those schools were in Wisconsin.
But records of the schools – and what became of the children who attended them – are shoddy and haphazard.
Michael LaRonge is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Sokaogon Chippewa Community.
“They were not considered ‘Native enough’ to fit back into the community and they weren’t, essentially, ‘white enough’ to fit into society outside of some subservient roles.”
The Tribe has started the long process of trying to identify all Tribal children who attended boarding schools.
It has now digitized the records of Wisconsin’s Catholic boarding schools, which were housed at Marquette University.
LaRonge and volunteers still must painstakingly find, review, and sort the records of other church-operated and federally operated schools, searching for Sokaogon children.
LaRonge anticipates they will find some somber results.
“The writing’s on the wall. I think it’s pretty clear, based on what happened in already in Canada, that we are going to identify unmarked gravesites at some of these boarding schools and then have to deal with, do you move any of those individuals? Can you identify them by person?”
In the last three years, the likely sites of unmarked child graves were located at dozens of Indian boarding school sites in Canada.
In the United States, the records are so scattered that LaRonge cannot even guess how many Sokaogon children were taken to boarding schools or how long his work will take.
That work may bring closure to some families and heartbreak to others.
“It’s a path forward, but it’s a path forward to some sad news.”
The White Buffalo Recovery Center helps Native community members who are recovering from addiction – and it’s launching a new family-oriented program in June.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hannah Habermann has more, in the second and final part of her special series.
It’s a version of Mending Broken Hearts, a bi-monthly, three-day workshop that provides culturally-informed healing from grief, loss, and intergenerational trauma.
The new iteration of the program is open to teens – and their parents or guardians.
Luke Brown is a peer specialist and will help run the first workshop.
He says the hope is that families can heal together.
“Mending broken hearts itself is an effort to help resolve unresolved grief and to complete some incomplete relationships. It helps us to look at where our trauma has stemmed from, a lot of it is from historical trauma, from colonialism.”
The center offers clinical support and other services run by peer specialists – including drum sessions, recovery support meetings, and a 12-step Medicine Wheel program.
It’s based in Arapahoe, Ethete, and Riverton, Wyoming and serves enrolled tribal members and tribal descendants.
The American Indian Policy Institute at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University and the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has announced the launch of the Center for Tribal Digital Sovereignty.
The center is dedicated to providing tribal governments and communities with resources and support needed to establish a digital sovereignty plan, which includes managing their own data.
The announcement was made this week at NCAI’s mid-year convention taking place in North Carolina.
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