The Boarding School Legacy

The National Native Children’s Trauma Center, NCARC’s parent organization, would like to encourage CAC professionals (and anyone else who is interested) to check out our series of blog posts on the Federal Indian Boarding School System. The series has been timed to correspond with the ongoing activities of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, launched last year at the direction of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member and the first Native American cabinet secretary in history. The Boarding School Initiative’s initial investigative report was released in May and is a must-read for anyone who is not fully aware of the scope, purposes, or daily reality of the boarding school system. The Interior Department is currently hosting gatherings where boarding school survivors are invited to share their testimony, which will inform further work under the Initiative.

The NNCTC blog series includes the following essays:

• In “The Things They Carried,” policy expert Patrice Kunesh offers a personal meditation on the lasting damage of the boarding school system, linking it to present-day child welfare practices.

• In “The Bravery of Our Relatives,” NNCTC and NCARC staff member Kimee Wind-Hummingbird reports on the first stop of Secretary Haaland’s listening tour to gather survivor accounts of their boarding school experiences.

• In “We Have the Bodies,” NNCTC cultural consultant Shannon CrossBear reflects not just on the loss of those children who never returned from boarding school but also on the losses of those who did.

At NCARC, we firmly believe that knowledge of these and other histories shared by Tribal communities across the country should be considered a core competency for CAC professionals who serve American Indian and Alaska Native children and families. We hope you will take the time to read our colleagues’ work and think about how these histories should affect our present-day practices as child-serving professionals.