Interior Dep’t to release new report on abuses in Indian boarding school program. The Initiative seeks to provide a comprehensive accounting of program of forced assimilation of Native American children & its legacy. Over a year after the U.S. Department of the Interior released the first volume of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, its second report will be made public later this year. The initiative is a partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a comprehensive history of the program and its legacy. Officials recently announced $4 million to fund oral histories and digitize records related to the program, which sought forced assimilation of Native people.
May 5th is National Missing and Murdered Indigenous People’s Awareness day. It came in response in 2017 to the murder of Hanna Harris on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and other abductions and killings of Native women across Montana and the United States. Charlene Sleeper is a MMIP advocate Billings. She says the movement reflects all missing persons and homicides in the United States, not only Native individuals. “The only difference is that we contend with the complexities of the Indian reservation system. So our judicial system works differently. However, all homicides and missing person cases are important to MMIP advocates,” Charlene said. Sleeper says MMIP events build community and allow people to grieve together for their loss.
Those are your headlines at this hour. I’m Colette Keith in the KIPI News center.
