Today, September 30 is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, in what is now known as North America. It’s a day dedicated to recognizing the trauma that residential Indian boarding schools inflicted on Native children, their self-esteem, and their communities. We observe this day to remember that these stories are not distant history, but living memories carried in families like mine all across the continent.
When you think of cultural displacement and assimilation in the US, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s a black and white image from the past; an unsmiling encounter of two cultures, remnants of a distant past described by a museum plaque that’s easy to ignore. Or maybe it’s just a page in a textbook describing segregation as ancient history.
For me, I think of my mother as a young girl boarding a bus with her siblings that would take her far from her home, her language, and her brothers and sisters. Or my grandmother before her who went to a similar place, to a different school with the same purpose–to indoctrinate Native children into white, Christian culture through a western education, and in the process “kill the Indian, save the man”, to quote Captain Richard Henry Pratt.
While Indian boarding schools have only recently become more visible in popular media, these stories have been all too familiar among Native families for generations. Beginning in the 1870s, federal and church-run schools sought to militarily assimilate Native children in an attempt to “solve the Indian problem.” Although the last federally operated school closed in 1996, the impact is not sealed in the past. Many institutions tied to this legacy remain, and the consequences of cultural erasure continue.
Native American children were removed from their homes, often for years at a time, and coerced to surrender their ways of life in exchange for white, Christian culture at government and church operated schools. The children were made to cut their hair, abandon their language and clothing, and adopt white culture through force, continuing a centuries long tradition of colonization. There were children who were harmed or died trying to run away. The full truth of abuse, neglect, and violence is tragically deeper than this piece can hold, but what matters here is remembrance–to recognize that the harm lives on today, woven through families like mine.
The history of Native American boarding schools is complex. Just as Native peoples are not a monolith, experiences were not identical. There are stories of loss, anguish, punishment, and fear, but also stories of strength, determination, love, and learning in conditions of tenuous care. That complexity does not erase the core truth that these schools were designed to separate Native children from their cultures, families, and identities.
Shimásání (my maternal grandmother) remembers hiding from missionaries on the Navajo reservation as they searched for children to take away. She, along with the other children, crouched in hiding while the adults persuaded the missionaries to leave. I am grateful she was hidden successfully, because I don’t know what would have happened to her — or if I would even be here today.
Years later, as a young adult, she chose to attend Intermountain Indian School, which closed in 1984. She speaks of that time with some gratitude, recalling peers who learned trade skills and returned to the reservation with knowledge. Her story carries both survival and adaptation, a pattern that repeated in the next generation.
After starting her family, my grandmother was approached with another assimilation program, this time through the LDS church. It claimed to offer an education and religion her children could not fully access on the reservation. Wanting the best for her six children, she enrolled each one into what became known as the Indian Placement Program.
The repercussions of this program afflicted my mother for years. I grew up hearing her describe the bus ride north–eight years old, clutching her siblings–and heading to live with a family she had never met, in a place where she could not speak her language. Though she and her siblings were all “on placement,” they were split into separate foster homes and forbidden from seeing one another.
My mother and one of her younger sisters, only blocks apart, would try to meet in secret. Each time, they were caught and reported by the children in their foster homes, and then forced apart again. The pain of being denied her sister’s arms is a wound she still remembers.
When summer came, my mother returned home to the reservation and was reunited with her family, a reunion many children before her were never granted. But each fall, she boarded that bus again, back to Utah, back to her foster family. I’m grateful that her foster family treated her with kindness and care, yet even their goodwill could not undo the pain of being taken from her own family and culture. The placement program itself was designed to weaken those ties, and its impact still lingers.
These missions claimed to “civilize” and “save,” but the cost was generations of broken promises, unhealed families, and broken cultural ties.
I share the stories of my dear grandmother and mom not to belabor their pain that they’ve worked so hard to overcome, but to remind us that the trauma of displacement does not belong to history alone. It reaches into the present day. Into my family. Into my life. And into so many others.
While these stories span years and generations, what remains the same is the intent and outcome. Today, as we remember Indian boarding schools, we honor the generations who endured them. Not as relics of the past, but as living stories carried in our families and communities. What remains the same is the wound carried across generations, and with it, the responsibility to remember so healing can begin.
As it stands today, there remain few to no commemoration of the schools that were spread across Canada or the US, and the LDS church often struggles to address and confront the full harm of their program. In her book Becoming Kin, indigenous author Patty Krawec writes, “We need to listen to the histories we weren’t told to remember things buried beneath the histories we were.” These stories are closer than you think. Today, I encourage you to take time to uncover the histories of the schools in your state, hear the voices of survivors, and remember the children who never came home. Remembrance begins with listening, and listening can lead to healing.
