The 215

At the end of May, we found out what Indigenous people had been saying all along. The genocide continued into our modern age. Children, mere babies, piled into mass graves in British Columbia at a residential school. Babies as young as three years old.

Now, First Nations Peoples are calling for the Canadian government to investigate every known residential school for unmarked graves that may contain more children. (See article HERE) Native Americans south of the Canadian border mourn for the children, but will our residential schools be investigated? Doubtfully. However, the UN Human Rights Office is calling for Canada to do the same, which sets a hopeful precedent that such investigations can be prompted here, even if they must be carried out with private funding.

In an interview with NPR, Annette Penber (Ojibwe), a correspondent for Indian Country Today stated " We don't actually know the entire number of the schools here in the United States because there really has been no documentation and much of it has been lost to history, but certainly more than twice as many schools than were in Canada." (The interview can be read HERE).

The fact that all the residential schools can never be found, the number of dead children can never be known, is a mind-numbing, heart breaking reality that encapsulates how colonizers viewed the "Indian Problem". To separate children from their parents and family, culture and language, and immerse them in unsanitary conditions where starvation and malnutrition were the norm, horrid punishments were meted out, children died of completely preventable diseases due to neglect and poor conditions, froze to death, and lived torturous, miserable childhoods, was an unimaginable cruelty to the children themselves, and all Natives. Many never made it to the adulthoods riddled with mental illness, addiction, poverty, and misery that resulted from these childhood traumas.

We urge you to call your local representatives, your representatives in DC, your tribal council, the BIA, news agencies, the ACLU, and whoever else you can think of that may be able to help start a nationwide discussion that can prompt investigations, apologies, and reparations to the families of children who died at the hands of neglectful, hateful schools.

Please feel free to start a discussion in the forums, or in the comments section of this post. Let people in your area know if you are organizing protests or other campaigns to bring awareness to Residential School Abuse.

~Stacy