Linked with Andrea Smith – USA, with American Indian Boarding School Experiences: Recent Studies from Native Perspectives, and with INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND BOARDING SCHOOLS.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, American Indian and Alaska Native children were forcibly abducted from their homes to attend Christian boarding schools as a matter of government policy. Sexual, physical, and emotional violence was rampant in many of these schools. As a result of boarding school policies, there is now an epidemic of child sexual abuse in many Native communities. However, because of the shame attached to the abuse, there has been no forum to adequately address this problem. Consequently, child abuse passes from one generation to the next. This project is a starting point to address child sexual abuse. By framing abuse as the continuing effects of human rights abuses perpetrated by government policy, we hope to take the shame away from talking about the abuse and provide space for communities to address the problem and heal … (Homepage 1/2).
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Resources;
A Century of Genocide in the Americas, the Residential School Experience, by Rosemary Gibbons and Dax Thomas, 2002;
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Homepage 2/2: The Boarding School Healing Project, a coalition of several organizations around the country, seeks to document Native boarding school abuses so that Native communities can begin healing from boarding school abuses and demand justice. This project will entail the following components:
- HEALING
- EDUCATION
- DOCUMENTATION
- ACCOUNTABILITY