The U.S. Department of the Interior’s recent report on Native American boarding schools underscores just how much generational damage the government has done to Native families in the name of America.
Michigan was home to several Native American boarding schools. The three best known were located in Baraga in the Upper Peninsula, Mount Pleasant, and Harbor Springs.
“If you think about the tragedy of a child being taken from a family, their family home and put in a boarding school never to return, it’s just devastating," said Levi Rickert, a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation.
Rickert is also the publisher and editor of Native News Online and Tribal Business News.
Many of us now know that the Native young people who were forced to attend boarding schools had lasting scars from that experience. But the only people who can really grasp what it was like are the students themselves.
Fred Kiogima was one of them. He’s a retired Marine, and a member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians. He attended Holy Childhood of Jesus Catholic boarding school in Harbor Springs during his formative years.
The school closed in the 1980s after about a century of operation. Kiogima has spent a great deal of his adult life coming to terms with what happened to him and other members of his family there.
"The close incidences of abuse you didn't really speak to your parents about because they were already hiding their demons because they came from the same place. So what you were trying to talk about, they were actually trying to suppress and so were your grandparents," he explained.
On today's episode, we talked to Rickert and Kiogima about how Native families and tribal communities have been grappling with the profound damage done to many young people who attended boarding schools—and the lasting effect that trauma had on families.
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Music in this episode byBlue Dot Sessions.
