United States / Genocides of Indigenous Peoples

"Walter Littlemoon speaks to students at Colorado State University." (Mike Kalush, The Rocky Mountain Collegian / The Thick Dark Fog)

New Documentary Tracks Cultural Genocide of American Indians
By Rose Aguilar
Truthout.org, November 24, 2011
"In 1892, US Army officer Richard Pratt delivered a speech in which he described his philosophy behind US government-run boarding schools for American Indians. 'A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,' he said. 'In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.' From 1879 until the 1960s, more than 100,000 American Indian children were forced to attend boarding schools. Children were forcibly removed or kidnapped from their homes and taken to the schools. Families risked imprisonment if they stood in the way or attempted to take their children back. Many of the country's 100 schools were still active up until the 1970s. Generations of children were subjected to dehumanization, cruelty and beatings, all intended to strip them of their Native identity and culture. The ultimate goal was to 'civilize' the children. A new documentary, 'The Thick Dark Fog,' shines a light on the traumatic boarding school experience through the telling of personal stories. The film focuses on Walter Littlemoon, a Lakota who was forced to attend a federal government boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in the 1950s. Littlemoon says his culture, language and spirituality were brutally suppressed. 'The government school had tried to force me to forget the Lakota language and I wouldn't do it,' he says in the film. 'We had a deep sense of preservation for our culture, so we would go and hide in order to speak Lakota. If we got caught, they were allowed to beat us with whatever they could, but we took that chance. The Lakota language is something that comes from deep inside of you. It comes from how you look at things and how you see things.' 'The Thick Dark Fog' profiles Walter's healing process and attempt to reclaim his heritage. 'It wasn't until my sixtieth year that I began to realize that there was more to me. Something was missing. It was like I was a nonbeing,' he says. 'I didn't know the medical words of multigenerational trauma or the complex post-traumatic stress disorder, so I called the problem what I felt it to be: the thick dark fog.' ... In 2008, the Canadian Government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help indigenous peoples tell their stories and heal.  What should the US government do to help indigenous people heal from the abuses they suffered in government-run boarding schools?"
[n.b. Thanks to Morgan Wood for bringing this source to my attention.]