Legacy of Native American Schools, Abuse as child linked to longer term homeless

Abuse as a child linked to longer term homeless ADELE HORIN 19 Apr, 2012

TWO-THIRDS of people in a national study of homelessness suffered physical or sexual violence as children or had been neglected or emotionally abused. About one-third had been sexually assaulted. The study by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research was commissioned by the federal government....

The research is based on interviews with 1682 people flagged by Centrelink and another group that had not been flagged as homeless but identified by the researchers as having characteristics that also made them highly vulnerable. It found those exposed to violence or abuse as children were much more likely to experience longer periods of homelessness over their lifetime. This was also true for people who had been in foster or residential care as children. ''It's clear the experience of trauma as children affects the length of time they are homeless,'' a researcher, Rosanna Scutella, said. Contrary to expectations, the study found homelessness was not usually a short, one-off experience. Rather most of the people in the study had long, if broken, histories of homelessness, and found it difficult to make a permanent escape. They cycled between homelessness, marginal housing and stable housing. http://www.bellingencourier.com.au/news/national/national/general/abuse-as-a-child-linked-to-longer-term-homeless/2526979.aspx


Soul Wound: The Legacy of Native American Schools

U.S. and Canadian authorities took Native children from their homes and tried to school, and sometimes beat, the Indian out them. Now Native Americans are fighting the theft of language, of culture, and of childhood itself.  By Andrea Smith March 26, 2007

....Dolphus is one of more than 100,000 Native Americans forced by the U.S. government to attend Christian schools. The system, which began with President Ulysses Grant's 1869 "Peace Policy," continued well into the 20th century. Church officials, missionaries, and local authorities took children as young as five from their parents and shipped them off to Christian boarding schools; they forced others to enroll in Christian day schools on reservations. Those sent to boarding school were separated from their families for most of the year, sometimes without a single family visit. Parents caught trying to hide their children lost food rations....

"Native America knows all too well the reality of the boarding schools," writes Native American Bar Association President Richard Monette, who attended a North Dakota boarding school, "where recent generations learned the fine art of standing in line single-file for hours without moving a hair, as a lesson in discipline; where our best and brightest earned graduation certificates for homemaking and masonry; where the sharp rules of immaculate living were instilled through blistered hands and knees on the floor with scouring toothbrushes; where mouths were scrubbed with lye and chlorine solutions for uttering Native words."....

The schools were part of Euro-America's drive to solve the "Indian problem" and end Native control of their lands. While some colonizers advocated outright physical extermination, Captain Richard H. Pratt thought it wiser to "Kill the Indian and save the man." In 1879 Pratt, an army veteran of the Indian wars, opened the first federally sanctioned boarding school: the Carlisle Industrial Training School, in Carlisle, Penn.

"Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit," said Pratt. He modeled Carlisle on a prison school he had developed for a group of 72 Indian prisoners of war at Florida's Fort Marion prison. His philosophy was to "elevate" American Indians to white standards through a process of forced acculturation that stripped them of their language, culture, and customs.

Government officials found the Carlisle model an appealing alternative to the costly military campaigns against Indians in the West. Within three decades of Carlisle's opening, nearly 500 schools extended all the way to California. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) controlled 25 off-reservation boarding schools while churches ran 460 boarding and day schools on reservations with government funds.

Both BIA and church schools ran on bare-bones budgets, and large numbers of students died from starvation and disease because of inadequate food and medical care. School officials routinely forced children to do arduous work to raise money for staff salaries and "leased out" students during the summers to farm or work as domestics for white families. In addition to bringing in income, the hard labor prepared children to take their place in white society — the only one open to them — on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder....

Rampant sexual abuse at reservation schools continued until the end of the 1980s, in part because of pre-1990 loopholes in state and federal law mandating the reporting of allegations of child sexual abuse. In 1987 the FBI found evidence that John Boone, a teacher at the BIA-run Hopi day school in Arizona, had sexually abused as many as 142 boys from 1979 until his arrest in 1987. The principal failed to investigate a single abuse allegation. Boone, one of several BIA schoolteachers caught molesting children on reservations in the late 1980s, was convicted of child abuse, and he received a life sentence. Acting BIA chief William Ragsdale admitted that the agency had not been sufficiently responsive to allegations of sexual abuse, and he apologized to the Hopi tribe and others whose children BIA employees had abused....

Dolphus, now director of the South Dakota Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, sees boarding school policies as the central route through which sexual abuse became entrenched in Native communities, as many victims became molesters themselves. Hopi tribe members testified at a 1989 Senate hearing that some of Boone's victims had become sex abusers; others had become suicidal or alcoholic....


A 2001 report by the Truth Commission into Genocide in Canada documents the responsibility of the Roman Catholic Church, the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the federal government in the deaths of more than 50,000 Native children in the Canadian residential school system.

The report says church officials killed children by beating, poisoning, electric shock, starvation, prolonged exposure to sub-zero cold while naked, and medical experimentation, including the removal of organs and radiation exposure. In 1928 Alberta passed legislation allowing school officials to forcibly sterilize Native girls; British Columbia followed suit in 1933. There is no accurate toll of forced sterilizations because hospital staff destroyed records in 1995 after police launched an investigation. But according to the testimony of a nurse in Alberta, doctors sterilized entire groups of Native children when they reached puberty. The report also says that Canadian clergy, police, and business and government officials "rented out" children from residential schools to pedophile rings....


While some Canadian churches have launched reconciliation programs, U.S. churches have been largely silent. Natives of this country have also been less aggressive in pursuing lawsuits. Attorney Tonya Gonnella-Frichner (Onondaga) says that the combination of statutes of limitations, lack of documentation, and the conservative makeup of the current U.S. Supreme Court make lawsuits a difficult and risky strategy.

Nonetheless, six members of the Sioux Nation who say they were physically and sexually abused in government-run boarding schools filed a class-action lawsuit this April against the United States for $25 billion on behalf of hundreds of thousands of mistreated Native Americans. Sherwyn Zephier was a student at a school run from 1948 to 1975 by St. Paul's Catholic Church in Marty, S.D.: "I was tortured in the middle of the night. They would whip us with boards and sometimes with straps," he recalled in Los Angeles at an April press conference to launch the suit. http://www.amnestyusa.org/node/87342