National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition aims to learn more about individuals’ experiences of child removal, the impacts these experiences have had on them and their descendants, and the methods that individuals are successfully using for healing intergenerational traumas.
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS), the First Nations Repatriation Institute, and the University of Minnesota are pleased to announce the launch of a new study, Child Removal in Native Communities: An Anonymous Survey.
Between 1879 and the 1960s, tens of thousands of American Indian and Alaskan Native children were forced to attend boarding school against their parents’ and tribes’ wishes. The goal of these schools was to eliminate the “Indian problem” that the United States had to its westward expansion by removing all traces of tribal existence — language, culture, spiritual traditions, communal and family ties, etc. and replacing them with European Christian ideals of civilization, religion, and culture. Today, Native communities continue to live with the impacts of the cultural genocide that was carried out in these schools. Impacts such as high rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, and sexual violence are directly linked to the historical trauma caused by colonization and forced assimilation.
The era of assimilative United States Indian boarding schools started to wane and eventually came to a close after government reports like the Meriam Report (1928) and the Kennedy Report (1969) found mistreatment and abuse to be rampant at the costly institutions. During this time, the federal government shifted its assimilative methods, using the Indian Adoption Project to transfer Native children from their homes and place them directly with white adoptive and foster families. The impacts of adoption and foster care closely mirror the intergenerational trauma of boarding school experiences.
The trauma of family and community separation, as well as the violently assimilative strategies of the boarding schools and adoption, affected these children, their families, and their communities so deeply that the effects of trauma can be seen intergenerationally. Research in epigenetics and historical trauma by scholars like Dr. Rachel Yehuda (2016), Dr. Kathleen Brown-Rice (2013), Drs. Judy Daniels and Michael D’Andea (2007), Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart (1998), and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Institute (2012) have found that trauma from experiences like boarding schools, adoption, and foster care may actually be woven into our DNA in addition to being transmitted through social processes and parenting practices. Descendants of boarding school survivors and out-adoptions are likely to have “intergenerational trauma”, which leads to high rates of PTSD and suicide (these rates among Native youth are 2.5 times the national average; Executive Office of the President, 2014).
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