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Anchor: Antonia Gonzales
The Department of the Interior has held its third stop on a tour to hear from Indian boarding school survivors.
One of the goals by the department is to create a permanent oral history of what occurred.
South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Lee Strubinger has more.
78 year-old Rosalie Quick Bear attended one of the 31 boarding schools located in South Dakota.
The Sicangu Lakota describes being powdered with the pesticide DDT, spending weeks with an untreated broken leg and getting locked in a dark cement cellar for days.
Quick Bear describes her experience like this to her grandkids.
“You see all this horror stuff on TV? Real bad? That’s how we grew up. That why we are like we are.”
Quick Bear says her experience at St. Francis Indian Boarding school still affects her.
“I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred. Sometimes I’m—still to this day—I’m quiet. I’m off away from people. I still can’t really feel that love that we’re supposed to know as human beings.”
Another survivor says every boarding school story is similar.
Cheryl Angel also spoke.
“We were treated inhumanely.”
It’s stories like this the Department of Interior is collecting as part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
The initiative hopes to identify marked and unmarked burial sites across the boarding school system and the total amount of spending and federal support for the schools.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland says the tour is one step among many.
“That we will take to strengthen and rebuild the bonds within native communities that the federal Indian boarding school policies set out to break.”
The Road To Healing is a year-long tour. It’s not clear where Sec. Haaland and the Road To Healing tour is going next.
The federal government rolled out a new Arctic Strategy this month.
As Emily Schwing reports, it’s unclear what this new strategy means for residents on the ground in the only U.S. state in the Arctic: Alaska.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the new strategy for the government’s future policy in a video posted to Twitter.
The Arctic is home to more than four million people, extensive natural resources, and unique ecosystems. The new National Strategy for the Arctic Region articulates an affirmative U.S. agenda over the next ten years to realize a peaceful, stable, prosperous & cooperative Arctic. pic.twitter.com/MCHEPCtPrc
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) October 7, 2022
It outlines four areas, or pillars that will guide White House policy in the Arctic in coming years.
“More than 50,000 people live in the Arctic, home to precious ecosystems.”
The last time the U.S. government released an Arctic strategy was in 2013.
That version was heavy on military presence in the region.
The new strategy also calls for improved military capabilities in Alaska, but includes three other objectives that focus on economic development, climate change, and international relations and diplomacy.
“It’s much more right of a list of goals.”
That’s Amy Lovecraft.
She’s the Director of the Center for Arctic Policy at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.
She says the Biden Administration has revived Obama-era policies discarded by the Trump Administration, but she says it falls short of providing clarity on how the goals outlined might be met.
“So these are strategic objectives. What I want next are the action items.”
It’s action items that Lyman Hoffman also wants to see.
He’s been a state legislator representing the Western Alaska as a Democrat for more than three decades.
“How do you make people that are living in the Arctic, their lives affordable to live up here? The food is high. The transportation costs are high. The heating costs are high. Everything is too exorbitant.”
Hoffman says he’d like to see a strategy that addresses on-the-ground realities for Alaskans – things like melting permafrost, food security, and the need to relocate remote villages as the climate warms.
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