Brought Plenty remembers the day she was taken out of class and sent to boarding school, away from her grandparents’ house where she lived.
“I was sitting up in the corner by one of the windows, and I saw two men come walking in the door,” Plenty said. “They had the black suits on with a white shirt and black tie, walked in the school and he was talking to the teacher. Then she pointed at me, and they just came over and each one of them grabbed me by my arms and walked me out.”
Plenty was just 6 years old at the time. She is now 70, and the experiences at the Pierre Indian Boarding school in South Dakota are ones that still stay with her. At that time, Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families by the federal government and placed in boarding schools to culturally strip them of their identities, languages, and beliefs.
Since Interior Secretary Deb Haaland made the reckoning and accounting of federally-run boarding schools a priority during her administration, hundreds of Indigenous people like Plenty have come forward to testify about their experiences during their time in the boarding schools.
All of them experienced things like Plenty did: both physical and mental abuse, including the pain of being separated from their families. Many boarding school survivors just started talking about the years of abuse they endured for the first time. Those experiences are passed down to children and other family members in the form of intergenerational trauma.
Tribal and spiritual practices that are from the survivors’ tribal nations, traditional forms of healing-like ceremony, and the sense of community are what some psychologists who are part of the Society of Indian Psychologists say are important to healing.
Read more at Newsy.com.
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