||| FROM SPIRIT EAGLE |||
Regarding Gov Inslee’s statement about Native American Boarding Schools: I have spoken to many elders who lived through the Hell of the Indian “schools.” Not very many people know that there was a family on Sucia Island who had many children. The government agents arrived on Sucia and said that they HAD to give up their children so they could go to the Indian School. They forcibly removed this families’ children, except one who was in the arms of the mother.
They literally tortured the children in the Indian Schools. Forms of abuse were physical abuse, psychological abuse, and sexual abuse. I heard the stories from their own mouths, the pain evident after 60 years. The government schools were often run by christian churches, yet they were prisons to these children. Houses of horror. One elder who I spoke with said there was severe punishment for speaking their native language. He did so, at one time, and in the dead of winter was taken outside and was told to put his tongue on the metal fence post and to keep it there.
The heartlessness was beyond what kind, loving people would do. And yet, it happened all over the United States and even in Canada. I have spoken to Native People in Canada who told the stories, too. Once, when I was on my way back to Washington from Florida by Greyhound, we stopped in North Dakota and changed buses. There was a big tall cop there (I am 5′ 1 and 3/4″) and he just had it in for me. I was in my 50s then, and he was disrespectful and verbally abusive to me, and he asked for my ID and of course it said: “Spirit Eagle.”
I can tell you that prejudice is alive and well, as is ignorance. This degradation had grave consequences for Native Culture. In the last thirty years, or so, Native Americans have been speaking out, and taking their power back, it is good to see. Every inch of ground in the United States was first walked upon by the Native American people, and the land was sacred to them. They understood the Gift of Life, for all Beings on the planet, human and animal, and the land and waters, itself.
The best exercise I have found, is to look within, at our own souls and into our Hearts, for the answers we all seek, regarding what it truly is to be a Real Human Being.
AHO Mitaquiasi. (All My Relations.)
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Thank you, Spirit Eagle, for so eloquently stating how it was for these people who were tortured and removed from their families and culture by force. I don’t know what Gov. Inslee has said, but thank you for bringing this to light and keeping it there. We must never forget or repeat this terrible thing done to these families and their children – there are enough terrible things still being done today, such as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – boys as well, being sold as slaves and worse and trafficked away from their homes and people, never seen again.
Recently I learned about the 60s Scoop. It made my stomach churn to read about this. These schools, many of them, didn’t even close til the 70s. The 60s scoop sold the kids to adoptive parents – another form of torture and abuse. it was kidnapping, plain and simple. This kind of trauma is intergenerational. I am happy to see the elders teaching the young ones their cultures and languages before all is lost. May they regain their strength and teach care of the earth; they are our real leaders.
I was blessed to work with many incarcerated Native Elders in my role of facilitating groups at San Quentin State Prison. All of them who were of a certain age told stories of the terrible tortures that happened at the hands of mostly white women in boarding schools. One very large, peaceful man told me he was quiet not because he was shy, but because he had his tongue split at a young age because he spoke his native language in a Boarding School.
These men-locked up in the ‘Iron House’-maintained their connections with spirit, with nature. One man who had been locked up for decades and moved from prison to prison, told me that every time he was transferred, he was guided and guarded into his heart by five eagles who flew above him. These are just a few stories of many. The intergenerational trauma that led so many of the younger Native men to prison is rooted in the traumas and abuse of their elders.
This atrocity continues in our world. In Tibet, the Tibetan language was abolished from schools a years ago. Mandatory abortion/sterilization units roamed the nomadic lands, enforcing cultural genocide. And similar to what went on in the Boarding Schools, most of the rest of the world chooses not to look.
Thanks for this.