“This building used to be classrooms, next door was the dining room,” Talahongva says as she walks toward a small exhibition space set up in her building. There are display cases with yearbooks from the 60s and 70s and class photos from the early 20th century hang on the wall. The faces are clearly of original inhabitants of America, but the children are dressed in Western clothing.
“Their hair was cut here, they were not allowed to speak their own language and their religions were banned.” She talks about the time when her grandmother was at the school, around 1900. “She was here for twelve years and never saw her father and mother during that time. Being mistreated because you spoke in your own language, never being able to go home, that was all part of life here.”
The school ran for nearly a hundred years, from 1891 to 1990, and was one of an estimated 350 such boarding schools in the United States. The goal was cruel and simple: “Kill the Indian, save the man,” Talahongva says. “That was the intention of America’s federal government. We had to lose our identity and merge into Western civilization.”
Assimilatiepolitiek
At the end of May, 215 children’s bodies were found on the site of a former boarding school in Kamloops, Canada. The graves were unnamed and the deaths of the children are believed to have never been documented. Canada was in shock, especially when radar soil investigations discovered hundreds of bodies in two more boarding school grounds.
Native American tribes in Canada were less surprised; the stories about missing children are well known. But the finds do raise the question of what awaits Canada. Soil research is still being carried out on dozens of former school grounds.
“For the first time in history, America has a minister of indigenous descent,” Secretary Haaland said in response to the finds in Canada. “My own ancestors went through the assimilation policy carried out by the ministry that I now have under me. The ministry that tried to eradicate our culture, our language and our people.”
Determining the full extent
Haaland called the investigation to come difficult and painful. “Never before has all the available documentation on the boarding school program been pooled and analyzed to determine its full scope and lasting impact.” But the US government wants to do this because not all wounds have healed yet, Haaland said.
Rosalie Talahongva agrees, but with doubt in her voice. The shock about the finds in Canada and the idea that an investigation will also be launched at the Phoenix Indian School is still immense. “This is very difficult. Because soon you will indeed make a discovery here, but then it starts. Who are these children, to which tribe do they belong? These are very complicated questions that may not be answered.”
Talahongva is certain about the possible significance of these finds. This could be a time when the true story of America’s Native Americans will be told, she says. “If there is a real understanding in society about who we are, about the traumas we carry with us, if that history can be told and taught, then the process of recovery can really begin.”
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