Let Us Not Forget the Native Americans

 I was a high school senior when I read Dee Brown's I Buried My Heart At Wounded Knee. So Is America Ready to Face the Truth About the Atrocities Against Indigenous Children? caught my eye.

On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland revealed at the National Congress of American Indians’ annual midyear conference that the federal government, led by her department, will “undertake an investigation of the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of federal Indian boarding schools. The announcement comes on the heels of a continent-shaking discovery made three weeks ago by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, which found the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried in a mass grave outside of Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. That horrific announcement was followed by another on Wednesday evening, when Cowessess First Nation revealed that it had discovered 751 unmarked graves at Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. In the wake of the discoveries, Indigenous leaders in Canada and the United States called for more accountability and transparency from the settler governments that perpetrated these acts, as well as the religious institutions that often welded themselves to the schools’ assimilationist missions.

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Haaland’s review will seek to grapple with this violent legacy. But it is long, long overdue, making any impulses to praise this initiative feel a bit hollow. Federal officials in the Interior, the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court have known about these programs; after all, it was their predecessors who ensured that these schools were provided with the necessary funding, maintenance, and purported legality to function. That it took the first Native interior secretary to initiate such a review seems less a mark of progress and more an indictment of the apathy of those who came before her.

Meanwhile Indiana's Attorney General opposes critical race theory, manufactures a spurious crisis in Indiana schools, as if there had never been racism in America. The Republicans do like ignoring diseases, don't they?

The question that should hang over this review is not whether Haaland’s Interior will be willing to ask the right questions or adequately consult with tribal nations. By all accounts, her team is well equipped to produce a thorough and sensitive review and series of appropriate recommendations for reconciliation. Rather, the defining question that will face the Interior and the entirety of the federal government once this report has been filed is twofold: How open will Congress and the White House (especially their future Haaland-less versions) be in implementing the Interior’s recommendations, and just how far back is the U.S. willing to peel the veneer of American exceptionalism and actually reckon with its role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples?