The Goal of Residential Schools

“We instill in them a pronounced distaste for the Native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origin. When they graduate from our institutions, the children will have lost everything Native except their blood.”
-BISHOP VITAL GRANDIN 1875

In the Lakota way, when you are blessed with a gift or gifts of medicine or of a spiritual nature, it is something that you are born into and was passed down to you through your bloodlines. Someone previous with said gifts or medicine in your family was told to pass their medicine down to you. It is a selection made by the Creator and other generational spirits. The Wounded Knee era was a time of spiritual warfare. Native people were forbidden to pray in their ways, and so many had died without this opportunity during Wounded Knee, and alcohol was passed out like it was “medicine.” Surviving families were broken apart as all the children were taken away and placed in “Christian boarding schools,” where they were beaten, tortured, raped, and murdered. Many (thousands) never made it back home to their families. Their little bodies are just now being dredged up from mass graves at these “boarding schools.” Why can’t we just get over it? My question is, “When will the injustice end?” An attempt was made to wipe out a race of people by any means necessary: starvation, mass killings, forbidding their language, inflicting alcoholism (alcohol was never a part of Native culture), deprivation of spiritual and cultural ways, and taking away the only way of life they have ever known, they lose everything including their sense of self and direction, and it doesn’t stop there. Even in the present, there is an MMIW (MISSING MURDERED INDIGENOUS WOMEN) movement because of the alarmingly high numbers of cases of Native women, men, and children who are either murdered or have been missing that go unsolved, my only Brother being among them, without any reaction from law enforcement for justice and guess what? Human traffickers, as well as other undesirables, have noticed this. Native women and children are being stolen, sold into human trafficking, and murdered. Several goes missing every single day.