Ed Markey: “I rise today in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act and in remembrance of…”

“I rise today in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act and in remembrance of the thousands of Native children who died and suffered in these schools. Thousands of children were ripped from their families in the name of assimilation. Thousands of children were the victims of physical and sexual abuse. And thousands of children were forbidden from practicing their culture and speaking their Native languages. The operation of Federal Indian boarding schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior is one of the darkest chapters of American history, a chapter whose consequences are still being felt deeply by boarding school survivors, their families, and Tribal communities. The Federal Government funded more than 400 Indian boarding schools over the course of 150 years, one of the earliest being the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where Wampanoag children from my own home State of Massachusetts were stolen from their families, sent hundreds of miles away, and subjected to cruel and inhumane assimilation practices. When Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in 1879, he imbued it with this model: Kill the Indian, save the man. But we know all too well that these boarding schools did only the former. They acted as a violent means of assimilation and an essential tool in the U.S. Government's dispossession of Native people's aboriginal rights, land, and culture.…”