They were stripped of their clothes and scrubbed with lye soap. Matrons cut their long hair. Speaking their tribal language could lead to a beating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Taken from their homes on reservations, Native American children \u2014 some as young as 5 \u2014 were forced to attend Indian boarding schools as part of an effort by the federal government to wipe out their languages and culture and assimilate them into White society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For nearly 100 years, from the late 1870s until 1969, the U.S. government, often in partnership with churches, religious orders and missionary groups, operated and supported more than 400 Indian boarding schools in 37 states, according to the first investigation into the schools<\/a> by the U.S. Interior Department. Government officials and experts estimate that tens of thousands of Native children attended the schools over several generations, though no one knows the exact number. Thousands are believed to have died at the schools. Many others were sexually assaulted, physically abused or emotionally traumatized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now a reckoning is underway as Interior Secretary Deb Haaland<\/a>, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe whose grandparents were stolen from their homes\u2002<\/a>and sent to boarding schools, tours the country to expose the devastating legacy of the schools on families and tribes. At the same time, a major nonprofit group, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, is collecting tens of thousands of documents on Indian boarding schools<\/a> to build an interactive, digital archive that is expected to launch later this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe made it through this Indian holocaust,\u201d said Deborah Parker, chief executive of the Healing Coalition and a member of the Tulalip Tribes. \u201cWe made it to a place right now where we can finally talk about this pain and find enough strength to just stand up and say that our lives mattered and the lives of our children mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Washington Post talked to four survivors of Indian boarding schools who attended the institutions in the late 1940s and 1950s and are now in their 70s and 80s. Some have never spoken publicly about their experiences, which left them deeply scarred. One 86-year-old Kiowa recounted being sodomized by another student at age 10. A 72-year-old Sioux described being snatched from her first-grade classroom by two strangers in suits and driven to a South Dakota boarding school, with no chance to say goodbye to her family. An Alaska Native man said he spent six years being referred to by a number instead of his tribal name. A Chippewa woman remembers watching her mother cry as she climbed aboard a green bus bound for a school 100 miles from her home. She was 7 years old.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here are their stories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ramona Klein, 76<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, North Dakota<\/p>\n\n\n\n The large dark-green bus pulled up to the elementary school on the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa reservation in Belcourt, N.D., in 1954.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At 7 years old, Ramona Klein reluctantly climbed aboard. She took a window seat on the side of the bus where she could see her mother standing outside, holding two of her younger siblings by the hand. Her mother wiped away tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Klein didn\u2019t fully understand she was headed to the Fort Totten Indian boarding school, 100 miles from her home. Looking back now, she said she believes her mother didn\u2019t want to send her and her seven siblings away but didn\u2019t have any other options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Living in a small house with no electricity and no running water on the reservation, her parents grew flax and had a small herd of cattle, but nearly lost what little they had as they tried to care for one of her brothers who\u2019d undergone a botched surgery for a broken arm. When she was 10, her father died of a heart attack, leaving her mother with eight children younger than 16.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere just weren\u2019t any resources to take care of us,\u201d said Klein, a retired educator and mother of two who now serves on the Healing Coalition\u2019s board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Fort Totten, Klein and the other kids on the bus were taken into a laundry room, where she was told to sit on a high stool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne of the first things they did was cut my long hair that was down my back,\u201d Klein said. With black combs dipped in kerosene, a matron brushed her hair to kill head lice, even though she had none.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI remember watching my hair fall to the floor,\u201d Klein said, noting that she got the nickname \u201cButch\u201d because her hair was cut so short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her daily routine started at 6 a.m. with making her bunk bed. The covers had to be tight enough so a coin bounced off them. If not, she\u2019d have to redo it. She then had to do \u201cdetails,\u201d or chores such as cleaning floors and bathrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For meals, she and other young girls were marched to the cafeteria. Boys ate on one side; girls on the other. They weren\u2019t allowed to talk to one another, and she rarely saw her siblings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most mornings, they were served burnt toast. Lunch and dinner were often barley soup or mush, a mix of cornmeal and milk. Klein was always hungry, she said. Sometimes, she would smuggle a milk carton and a packet of sugar from the cafeteria, hide it on the windowsill of her room and wait until lights were turned off. She\u2019d pull it out when it was nearly frozen, shake it up and add the sugar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat was my first homemade ice cream,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Only the bigger girls in the upstairs dorm were allowed to watch television, so the younger girls were often bored. \u201cWe had no playground with swings, or a slide, a teeter-totter or merry-go-round,\u201d she said. \u201cThere were no puzzles, toys or books.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Klein invented her own games. At night, she\u2019d take a mattress and a blanket, wake up her classmates and pull them around on it in the hallways as if it were a sled. Sometimes they\u2019d ride the mattress down the stairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019d make sounds and be laughing, and the matron would get up and come,\u201d Klein said. She\u2019d bring out a broom and what was called the \u201cboard of education,\u201d a paddle with holes at one end. Klein said she\u2019d be told to kneel on the broom handle and then she\u2019d be whacked several times with the paddle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe would hit me so bad, I\u2019d have bruises on me. \u2026 All on my back and buttocks,\u201d Klein said. \u201cI remember thinking, \u2018You\u2019re not going to get the best of me,\u2019 and I refused to cry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In class, she said, teachers repeatedly told her \u201cIndians can\u2019t learn\u201d or \u201cIndians aren\u2019t smart.\u201d Often, she was ordered to sit in the corner of the classroom and wear a dunce hat, she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there was the abuse. For two of the four years Klein attended Fort Totten, she said, she was sexually molested by the adult son of one of the school\u2019s matrons \u2014 the term used to describe boarding school employees, regardless of whether they were women or men. She still has flashbacks from the sound of keys on a chain, because he would take his mother\u2019s keys and let himself into the girls\u2019 dorm and inappropriately touch her at night while she was supposed to be sleeping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019d have those keys and I could hear them jingling,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019d smell that Brylcreem hair cream of his and then \u2026 his hands seemed so big.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo child should ever be touched in the way he touched me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She never told her mother about it, didn\u2019t discuss it with anyone until years later in a support and counseling group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a lifelong scar,\u201d Klein said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lifelong wound.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Donald Neconie, 86<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kiowa, Oklahoma<\/p>\n\n\n\n Donald Neconie was 10 when an older student at Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla., began attacking him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 17-year-old \u2014 nicknamed \u201cThe Big Guy\u201d \u2014 crept into his bunk bed in a dorm room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI felt a hand on my mouth, and the next thing I know, he took off my underclothes and molested me,\u201d Neconie said. It happened \u201calmost every night\u201d for years to him and at least three other boys, Neconie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019d turn us over and bury our heads and do this,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One night after drinking a bottle of stolen vodka, Neconie and the other boys got up the courage to tell a matron about the abuse. She said she\u2019d \u201clook into it,\u201d Neconie recalled. But later that day, the local sheriff came and got him and the other victims. He took them to a jail, where they were forced to stay the night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe ratted on him, and we became the prisoners,\u201d Neconie said. The next day, Neconie and the other boys were taken back to the boarding school in handcuffs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat jailing was to teach us and others a lesson \u2014 \u2018keep your mouth shut,\u2019\u201d Neconie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As far as Neconie knows, \u201cThe Big Guy\u201d was never charged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For decades, Neconie used the internet to track the man. In the mid-1990s, he saw him in person at a powwow in Maryland. The man sat at a drum, and the two made eye contact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe knew me,\u201d Neconie recalled. \u201cHe glanced at me and then never looked at me again.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n His attacker has since died, but the nightmares remain for Neconie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNobody ever talked to us. They never gave us any counseling,\u201d he said. \u201cWe held it inside of us, all welled up. Nothing can make it go away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was only about a year ago that he told his wife of 56 years and family about what happened to him at the boarding school, just seven miles from his childhood home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At age 8, he was sent to Riverside \u2014 one of the country\u2019s oldest and largest off-reservation boarding schools \u2014 and stayed until he was nearly 20, going home only twice. He describes it as \u201c12 years of hell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On occasion, his parents came to visit, but they had to stay in their car with the windows rolled down while he stood on the curb to talk to them. No gifts or money could be given.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe couldn\u2019t go toward them,\u201d Neconie said. \u201cWe couldn\u2019t go near them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three of his 10 siblings also went to boarding schools, and he was the only one who graduated. He served in the Marines, then worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a tribal claims office clerk and later as a specialist for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he and his wife were raising their three kids, Neconie said, he was strict with them: \u201cIf they got out of line, they\u2019d get a whooping.\u201d He said he inflicted on them \u201cthe pain I\u2019d brought from that boarding school. … I wasn\u2019t always the kindest to my kids. I regret doing that to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When one of Neconie\u2019s sons heard that Haaland, the nation\u2019s first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, was making a trip to Riverside last summer to listen to boarding school survivors, he encouraged his father to go. At first, Neconie wasn\u2019t interested. He\u2019d been back only once and cried as he watched crews tear down an old dorm where he\u2019d once lived with other Kiowas and boys from the Navajo and Hopi tribes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, he changed his mind and testified at the school, which remains open but now champions Indian culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt may be good now, but it wasn\u2019t back then,\u201d Neconie told Haaland. \u201cWe were sodomized. … And people knew that was going on and did nothing to stop it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He believes that Indian boarding school survivors should get not just an apology but reparations, like those given to Japanese Americans for their incarceration during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI didn\u2019t think I was an animal,\u201d Neconie said, \u201cbut they treated us like we were. \u2026 Nothing could ever make me forget \u2014 or forgive \u2014 what they did to us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim LaBelle, 76<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u00f1upiaq, Alaska<\/p>\n\n\n\n The social workers arrived at the family\u2019s one-room shack in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1955 and gave Jim LaBelle\u2019s mom a stark choice: give up her two boys for adoption or send them to an Indian boarding school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, she was newly widowed and struggling to feed her sons, who sometimes scavenged with her for something to eat at the edge of the local dump. She was also an alcoholic, LaBelle said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LaBelle, then 8, and his younger brother, then 6, were sent to the Wrangell Institute, about 700 miles from their home. His mother was in tears, he said, and \u201ckept apologizing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe said, \u2018You\u2019re going to have to go away for a while,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cWe got that it was some kind of school, but we didn\u2019t know where or how far or how long we\u2019d be there.\u201d LaBelle stayed at Wrangell for six years and then spent four years at a second boarding school in Alaska.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He remembers, on that first night at Wrangell, how one boy started quietly crying and then others joined him. \u201cYou\u2019d hear some crying out \u2018Mama, mama.\u2019 But no mama came.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jim LaBelle, at age 7, with other family members. (Salwan Georges\/The Washington Post)<\/p>\n\n\n\n LaBelle, whose I\u00f1upiaq name is Aqpaiuq, which means \u201cfast runner,\u201d was fluent in his language when he left home, but after he saw other students being slapped and shaken when they were given commands in English they couldn\u2019t understand, he learned to keep quiet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like the other children, he was assigned a number every year he was at Wrangell, and can still recall them: 71, 68, 57, 52, 51, 64. \u201cOne boy who didn\u2019t know any English when he came,\u201d LaBelle said, \u201cthought his number was his name.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n During his first few weeks at the boarding school, LaBelle said, he and many of his bunkmates got sick from the salted meats and cans of processed vegetables and powdered milk they were served instead of their traditional diets of walrus, seal, moose, salmon, wild potatoes, celery and blackberries. Often, he said, they were given huge portions of food and forced to clean their plates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOur stomachs would be cramping. We\u2019d have headaches and vomit and soil the beds and our clothes,\u201d he said. \u201cThe matrons would get pissed off and beat us for getting sick.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The kids were disciplined for talking back, not paying attention, not following orders, or giving the wrong answers in class. He\u2019d get demerits for no reason, he remembers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI didn\u2019t even know what I\u2019d done wrong sometimes,\u201d he said, \u201cand I\u2019d be punished.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The punishment he feared most was known as \u201cgoing through the gantlet.\u201d Kids were forced to undress, then run up and down between other kids who stood in two lines with belts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe matrons would tell the other kids to use them on us,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019d be 15 or 20 kids on each side hitting us as we ran.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n On occasion, LaBelle said, he was told to go to the blackboard at the front of a classroom to do a math problem. He said he was so scared of getting it wrong, he froze. The teacher, he said, would yell at him, \u201cYou\u2019re wasting my time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019d give me these stares of anger, meanness and just disgust,\u201d LaBelle said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He was told by some matrons that his mom was evil for practicing her traditional Native ways of singing, drumming and dancing. When he went home in the summers, he said, he would be so ashamed of being seen in public with his mom that he\u2019d ignore her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LaBelle, a Navy veteran and father of four who worked in the oil and gas industry and for state government, became a professor of Native studies at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He now serves as president of the Healing Coalition, which is pushing Congress to create a commission to investigate the way the schools operated, examine church and government records of the schools and identify where children were buried.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He will always live with what he endured at boarding school, he said. He watched as a 12-year-old friend was punched so hard by a matron for \u201cmouthing off\u201d that he was left unconscious and had to be taken to a hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen he came back, his mouth and jaw were wired shut,\u201d LaBelle remembered, \u201cand he had to eat and drink through a straw.\u201d The matron was never reprimanded. \u201cIt was a reminder,\u201d LaBelle said, \u201cwhat they could get away with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI developed this fantasy of getting back at him for years,\u201d he said of the matron. Later, he would look at obituaries to see if the matron had died. \u201cI never forgot him or his face,\u201d LaBelle said, \u201cor what he did to my friend.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dora Brought Plenty, 72<\/p>\n\n\n\n Standing Rock Sioux, South Dakota<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two men in black suits and ties arrived with no warning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dora Brought Plenty, orphaned at 4 when her mother was murdered, had been living with her grandparents on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in South Dakota and attending a nearby day school. Then one day in 1956, the two White men showed up in her classroom and spoke to her teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cShe pointed at me,\u201d remembered Brought Plenty, whose mother was from the Standing Rock Sioux Turtle Clan and also Canadian Assiniboine and whose father was Black and of the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe. \u201cThey came toward me, grabbed me by my little arms, jerked me up out from the desk, out the door, to a black car.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was 6\u00bd years old and too terrified to ask who they were or where they were taking her. She had no chance to say goodbye to her grandparents, she said, and never saw her grandfather again. The men drove her to the Pierre Indian School, nearly 200 miles from her home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once there, she was told to climb up on a stool. A matron \u201cjerked my head back and cut off my braids,\u201d Brought Plenty said. \u201cI remember seeing them hit the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When she asked for her clothes, a matron told her, \u201cWe\u2019re going to teach you.\u201d She took her to a dark basement in just her undershirt and panties and left. Hours passed before another matron came, took her to her dorm, threw a nightgown at her and ordered her to bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day, she got the school\u2019s uniform \u2014 a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar, pedal pusher pants and saddle shoes. She was taken to church and asked if she was Catholic or Episcopal. When she said she thought they were the same, they put a metal cross in her hand, told her she\u2019d be Episcopal and said she should \u201cgo pray for forgiveness for who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brought Plenty became known by her assigned number \u2014 199. When she whispered in Lakota to another classmate, a teacher told her to put out her hands and smacked her knuckles with a ruler. Another frequent punishment: She was taken to a hallway, where she was told to kneel and stretch out her arms with her palms up. Bricks were put in each hand and she was left in that position for hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey beat me so bad at times, threatening that when they finished with me,\u201d she said, \u201cI\u2019d never remember a word of my Indian language.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She thought about running away during her 4\u00bd years at Pierre, which is now tribally run with classes on Native culture and history. Escape seemed impossible, she said, because she didn\u2019t know what direction her home was in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In second grade, one of her friends, Lucy, did run away with another girl. They were caught and brought back. After they returned, a matron rang a bell. She ordered all the girls in Brought Plenty\u2019s dorm to get out of bed. Get hand towels, she told them, and go to the washroom. Wet the towel with hot water, don\u2019t wring it out, and stick open safety pins in it. Form two lines, she told them, and as the runaways walked by naked, smack them with the hot towels and pins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen Lucy got to me she looked at me, eye-to-eye,\u201d Brought Plenty said. \u201cI couldn\u2019t hit her. She was my friend. I just stared at her.\u201d A matron grabbed Brought Plenty, ripped off her nightgown and pushed her into the gantlet. The other girls hit her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was horrible,\u201d Brought Plenty said. \u201cI think I was in shock.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She didn\u2019t see Lucy again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In class, Brought Plenty would draw trees, the Black Hills and animals as a way, she said, \u201cto get my mind away.\u201d But sometimes she\u2019d be caught, and her creations would be crumpled up and thrown away. Then her artwork impressed one teacher, who asked her to draw pictures of fish and other animals that were used in science classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI figured out what they liked and realized I wasn\u2019t going to get hit if I did what they liked,\u201d she said. \u201cI quickly realized at a young age that my art could save me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She was chosen for piano lessons, but had to fight with other girls to practice at the one piano, Brought Plenty said. All of them scrubbed floors, sometimes with bleach and a toothbrush, and wiped down walls or shined chrome counters, earning \u201cspare time\u201d to play jacks or basketball or to go skating. Brought Plenty stayed at Pierre until she was in the fifth grade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For years, Brought Plenty, who went on to work as an HIV educator, teach art and library sciences at elementary schools in the Dallas area and raise four children, struggled with bouts of depression. Sometimes she punished herself by isolating from her family. She stopped showering \u2014 a flashback to years at Pierre when matrons stood in the shower area. \u201cThey\u2019d jerk back the curtains,\u201d she said, \u201cto look at you and call you names.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey\u2019d call us \u2018you damn dirty Indians\u2019 and only allow us to shower once a week,\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Brought Plenty tried to get help. At 13, she went to a doctor and told him she wanted to hurt herself. \u201cHe told me, \u2018That\u2019s nonsense,\u2019\u201d she recalled. At 16, she started cutting herself \u2014 a coping habit that continued off and on into her late 50s. At 21, a psychiatrist prescribed Valium that left her feeling \u201czoned out.\u201d She said she attempted suicide three times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About eight months ago, Brought Plenty started to draw and paint to show her experiences at boarding school. In one of her pictures, a young Indian girl runs as a nun chases her. The girl is her, and she\u2019s wearing a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar just like the one Brought Plenty wore at boarding school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cArtwork,\u201d she said, \u201callows me to heal. It\u2019s my freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n