Back in the early 1960’s, I attended one of those schools in Montana for four years. The school had been available only to tribal kids, but was opened to whites and my folks scared up the tuition to send my brothers and I. The school was run by Catholic nuns. We wore uniforms - white shirts/blouses and dark blue or black trowsers/skirts.
After the total defeat of the natives some decades earlier, the culturally nomadic tribes were restricted to reservations. Alcohol and sex were the main respites. My tribe buddies were a tough group. Drinking at recess - the school was first-thru-eighth grades - wasn’t uncommon. Tattoos were common. Getting beat up was commono.
The tribe kids loved the nuns, who were tough as leather, because so many tribal parents were completely AWOL and the nuns cared.
Years later, when the tribe became wealthy after a lengthy lawsuit with Montana Power, nearly all the heads in the tribal positions were men and women who’d been students alongside me.
Your comment reminds me of similarly uninformed comments when this story first aired a couple of years ago. Your faux outrage is noted and rejected. Grow up. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
Uninformed? You're talking about the 1960's. I'm talking about the laws that created the schools in the late 1800's and lasted until 1918. One would hope the tribal schools had improved since 1918.
Like the black community, the Native-American community exhibits the same destructive behaviors that have been handed down through the generations. Black grandmothers, like Native-American grandmothers end up raising their grandchildren. There is a wicked cycle of drug and alcohol use that exists in both communities. Lifestyle choices play a big role in how we live our lives, and how long we survive. Many of those young native girls that have gone missing were sadly involved in prostitution. Did they have such a horrible self-esteem that they felt that was all that was available to them? Sometimes I feel like I'm living in the medieval period, where for many peasant women, the only option for survival was to go into the sex trade. None of the problems on the reservations are new. They've been around for a long time. Same thing with the black neighborhoods, but why is it that despite all the government programs provided for those people, that as a whole, their communities can't break those vicious cycles?
My mother was born in Canada. My 2nd great grandmother was half-Mohawk, born in Canada. I have no idea what her life was like in Canada before she met and married my 2nd great-grandfather, Englishman John Way.