Millions of dollars have been committed to documenting the stories of Native boarding school survivors.
The US Interior Department has announced a partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the oral history from boarding school survivors isn’t forgotten.
The partnership includes a $4 million fund to pay for research and educational programming sharing stories of boarding school abuse victims.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited the Rosebud Reservation in October to talk with survivors. Arlouine Kingman is the executive director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association. While she said she appreciates Haaland’s actions, listening to survivors is long overdue.
“She’s made a point of taking time to go and hold community forums to listen to people who were in those boarding schools," Kingman said. "I happened to go to the one at Rosebud, and I tell you I was crying with some of these people who told their stories.”
Kingman said these forums are alleviating some of the trauma.
“This one woman, she had been in the boarding school, and she told how even today she’s still got trauma from that," Kingman said. "She said it was sort of a healing for her – to be able to voice this and see there’s some healing taking place now.”
She said she hopes this money is used to continue healing in that vein – to reclaim what was taken.
“The main thing is when they were raised in the boarding school, it took their culture, their values from them, so they did not grow up in a family where they were taught to share with one another or taught to take care of one another," Kingman said. "They grew up without those family virtues we all instill in our children as they grow up – and that’s the great harm.”
Haaland saidthe goal of the project is to rebuild bonds between native communities and the federal government and ensure future generations will learn from the boarding school era.