How the US stole thousands of Native American children

I was adopted by a white missionary couple I was adopted immediately placed for adoption I was in foster care with one family for 18 years they were white my parents loved us and I understand that but at the same time they took the idea that they were saving me saving us from ourselves being saved and I should be grateful for the life that I've been given because any child on the reservation would give anything to live as I was living they took us away from our mom they came marching right in and literally took us and thousands of other children from their home it's a way to right eradicate us and to go to a nation's children is one of the sure ways to do that [Music] the US has a long and brutal legacy of attempting to eradicate Native Americans for centuries they colonized Native American lands and murdered their populations they forced them west and pushed them into small confined patches of land but Native Americans resisted a Board of Indian Commissioners report said instead of dying out under the light and contact of civilization the Indian population is steadily increasing and that was an obstacle to total American expansion so the u. s. found a new solution to absorb and assimilate them it all started with an experiment and a man named Richard Henry Pratt he had in his charge some prisoners of war and he taught these men how to speak English how to read and write and how to do labor he dressed them in military uniforms and basically ran an assimilation experiment and then he took his results to the federal government and said they're capable of being civilized so he was able to get this project funded in 1879 the government funded Pratt's project the first-ever off-reservation boarding school for Native American children his motto was to kill the Indian and save the man what started there at the Carlisle Indian industrial school was nothing short of genocide disguised as American education children were forcibly taken from reservations and placed into the school hundreds even thousands of miles away from their families they were stripped of their traditional clothing their hair was cut short they were given new names and forbidden from speaking their native languages to take our children and to indoctrinate them into Western society to take away their identity as indigenous peoples their tribal identity I think it's one of the most effective and insidious ways that the u.

s. did do harm to indigenous peoples here because it targeted our children our most vulnerable and they tried to make us ashamed for being Indian and they tried to make us something other than Indian there are also accounts of mental physical and sexual abuse of forced manual labor neglect starvation and death my great grandfather went to Carlisle and nobody in my family ever talked about it so if you google Indian boarding schools the majority of the pictures that you will see will be actually from Carlisle Colonel Pratt created propaganda he hired a photographer to create those before-and-after photos to show that his experiment was working so he it was you know intentional propaganda and it worked the Carlisle model of Education swept the country and led to the creation of over 350 boarding schools to assimilate Native American children to these boys and girls have ever seen a white man yet through the agencies of the government they are being rapidly brought from their state of comparative savagery and barbarism to one of civilization in 1900 there were about 20,000 Native American children in these schools by 1925 that number more than tripled families that refused to send their kids to these schools faced consequences like incarceration at Alcatraz or the withholding of food rations some parents who did lose their children to these schools even camped outside to be close to them many students ran away some found ways to hold on to their languages and cultures others though could no longer communicate with family members and some never returned home at all by stripping the children of their Native American identities the US government had found a way to disconnect them from their lands and that was part of the u. s.