This article from High Country News explores the history and legacy of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the United States, a school where many Indigenous children who had been forcibly separated from their families by US policy were sent. "Child removal," says the author, "is a longstanding practice, ultimately created to take away Native land." Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools were "designed to strip Native people of their cultures and languages by indoctrinating them with U.S. patriotism."
Carlisle is also the resting place of many children who were sent to the school and died in its care. Native tribes are seeking answers, and justice. "Since 2013, the National Congress of American Indians has requested all federal records for the hundreds of Native children who have disappeared or died while attending one of the hundreds of federally run or funded boarding schools." And since 2017, several Carlisle students' remains have been returned to their tribes, while others have yet to be returned, according to the article.
The article describes the origin and history of the Carlisle school in greater detail and also shares the experiences of one survivor of the boarding schools, Luther Standing Bear, whose name was changed from his Indigenous Lakota name to "Luther" when he arrived at the school. Standing Bear recalls that in the first three years at Carlisle, nearly half of his classmates died. "In those early years, more students died at the school than graduated from it. And if one did escape death and return home, that survivor became, in Standing Bear’s words, 'an utter stranger' to their own family."
The author also connects the legacy of the Indian boarding schools to the modern family separation policy at the US border with Mexico in which children, many of whom are Indigenous children from Guatemala and other countries, are being separated from their families and placed in detention centers. The article includes statements from Ben Rhodd, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s tribal historic preservation officer, who sees the connection between these policies. “Children are being incarcerated unjustifiably, without merit but for economic gain.”