The Kansas Historical Society plans to search the grounds of a former Native American boarding school to determine if any children were buried there. The site in Fairway, Kansas, housed students from several tribes in the 1800s and early 1900s. It was one of many schools across the country designed to assimilate Indigenous children into white American culture and Christianity. Leaders of Native American tribes want to determine if children were buried in unmarked graves at the site.
The federal government is demanding that the state remove double-stacked shipping containers placed to fill gaps in the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, saying they are unauthorized and violate U.S. law. The Cocopah Indian Tribe in southwestern Arizona welcomed the call to take down the containers in the latest rift between the Biden administration and Republican-led border states over how to prevent illegal border crossings.
After her mother died when Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier was just four years old, she was put into a Native American boarding school in South Dakota, and told her native Lakota language was “devil’s speak,”. She recalls being locked in a basement at St. Francis Indian Mission School for weeks as punishment for breaking the school’s strict rules. Her long braids were cut off in a deliberate effort to stamp out her cultural identity. “I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred,” Whirlwind Soldier testified during last Saturday’s event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as the agency confronts the bitter legacy of a boarding school system that operated in the United States for more than a century.
