Brian Schatz: “I want to thank everybody for being part of this series of very compelling speeches about the atrocities that the U.S.…”

“I want to thank everybody for being part of this series of very compelling speeches about the atrocities that the U.S. Government perpetrated against the first peoples of the United States. For over 150 years, the U.S. Government stole hundreds of thousands of Native children from their families and communities and forced them into federally run and supported ``boarding schools,'' often far away from their homes. These institutions, by design, worked with efficient, brutal, and systematic diligence to force Native children to abandon their culture, abandon their language, and abandon their very identity through unspeakably cruel punishment, abuse, and neglect. As one school superintendent noted: ``Only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.'' These inhumane policies were part of the government's longstanding colonial project to rob Native people's land through assimilation. The goal was to ``civilize'' Native children by killing the Indian in him and saving the man. That was the motto at the time: Killing the Indian and saving the man. These were not faraway bad guys. These were employees and agents of the U.S. Federal Government.…”