For more than 100 years, the United States forced tens of thousands of
Indigenous children into boarding schools to erase their cultures and
Natives as people.

For Deb, these policies touched her own life. Her grandparents were stolen
from their families, and many like them never returned home.

As Secretary of the Interior — the department that once ran the boarding
school system — she launched the Indian Boarding School Initiative to shed
light on these painful truths, a step forward on the long road toward
healing. In a powerful op-ed for the Washington Post, Deb wrote:

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“My great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
Its founder coined the phrase “kill the Indian, and save the man,” which
genuinely reflects the influences that framed these policies at the time.

My family’s story is not unlike that of many other Native American
families in this country. We have a generation of lost or injured children
who are now the lost or injured aunts, uncles, parents and grandparents of
those who live today. I once spent time with my grandmother recording our
history for a writing assignment in college. It was the first time I heard
her speak candidly about how hard it was — about how a priest gathered the
children from the village and put them on a train, and how she missed her
family. She spoke of the loneliness she endured. We wept together. It was
an exercise in healing for her and a profound lesson for me about the
resilience of our people, and even more about how important it is to
reclaim what those schools tried to take from our people.”

[ [link removed] ]To read the full op-ed and learn more about this tragic era in our
history, click here.

In solidarity,

Team Deb





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