The American Genocide

The boarding schools are, to this day, rarely spoken of. They're difficult to find in any history book, and are not spoken of by Indians, Whites, or the government -- each for their own reasons.

Besides their loathsome goal of wiping out a culture, the schools quickly turned to methods that decent people shudder to hear. Once those methods began to produce results without arousing moral outrage, it became clear that working at these schools was carte blanche -- there were no rules because the students were subhuman.

Photo (c) .: Mandala :.


The goal of separating children from their culture was often carried out with cold efficiency. Don has met a woman, now an elder, who vividly remembers her first day at boarding school. She had never heard of boarding schools before, and only knew that she had been taken from her weeping family and taken by soldiers to a strange place with other children. She did not speak a word of English and had, in fact, never heard it before. The students were warned that they could only speak English -- but, being as the warning was given in English, it meant nothing to many of them. This little girl was one of the unlucky ones. Near panic, she sought out someone, anyone, who could explain to her what was going on. Obviously, her request was not in English, so she was selected to be an example. One teacher led her briskly to a side room, where an attendant waited. She was told to hold out her hands. Not understanding, she did nothing until the teacher demonstrated. The attendant took one of her hands; pressed it to the table; then, in one swift motion, hit her finger with a butcher's meat-knife hard enough to crush the bone and sever the finger.

She had no idea why this was happening. No one made any effort to explain it to her in a way she understood.

So the same thing happened the next day.

And the next.

The connection was made and she stopped speaking altogether. Today, she is an old woman, and has lived almost her entire life with only 7 fingers.


Children -- little kids -- were forced into silence and fear. Beatings were common for minor infractions, and more severe punishments were dealt out nearly at random. A man (who I personally heard speak) told about the time he was going between "classes" and fell hard on gravel. His knee was scraped and cut, and he cried. The school's solution was to take him aside to an upstairs room and leave him there until his leg got better. He was locked there for four weeks, only seeing a single nun who changed his bandage once a day and left meals, during which time his leg eventually grew grotesquely and turned a putrid green. Only once teachers began complaining about the smell was he brought back into society and grudgingly taken a doctor.

He overheard the doctor saying that two to four more days of isolation would have been enough to require amputation. As is, his leg was barely saved.


Due to the cramped quarters and miserable shelter, disease ran rampant. Typhoid, for example, spread wildly. The school's positions was that the little savages clearly had inferior immune systems. Bodies were often buried in unmarked graves.

I have been to the cemetaries behind these schools. How do you, in good conscience, put a seven-year-old girl, or an eleven-year-old boy, or any student of yours into the ground -- and when the workers come to put in the headstone, you tell them to chisel in "Unknown" ?

How do you bury a little kid and not bother to even ask anyone what his or her name is? How could any headstone ever read "Unknown" at a school?

And what are the chances that poor little Unknown's parents ever learned what happened to their child? Did any of the parents ever learn what happened to their babies?


But, the schools did raise a generation that was quiet, fearful, timid, and followed orders well. Additionally, they spoke English and knew almost nothing of their parents' religion, ceremonies, songs, or pride. In fact, they knew almost nothing of their parents. This was, obviously, a huge success, and so the methods were overlooked.

You could do whatever you wanted, so long as the children you worked with grew up as broken, fearful individuals.

Within a few years, staff enrollment began to swell. It was something of a golden age for sexual predators, who took whatever jobs they could find in the schools.

Abuse reached sickening levels.

Likewise, a number of sociopaths discovered that the students performed "better" if they were always on guard. Beating increased in viciousness and began to performed randomly and arbitrarily. Anyone could be caned, or whipped, or struck with a ruler at any time. Sure enough, all the students began sitting straighter and working harder and harder to be unremarkable, to not stick out in any way. The system worked perfectly.