Indigenous people’s concerns and demands must lead the way as we move beyond apologies

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Kathleen DuVal is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American and Indigenous history. Her latest book, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, was the winner of this year’s Cundill History Prize.

In October, U.S. President Joe Biden issued a formal apology for “one of the most horrific chapters in American history,” the government-funded residential schools that tore Indigenous children from their homes and subjected them to abuse, resulting in the deaths of thousands of children and traumatic disruptions for countless families. Two Canadian prime ministers, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, had already issued similar apologies, and Pope Francis has apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential schools.

It is essential that North America’s non-Indigenous people learn about the residential schools and their tragedy and destruction; it is equally important that we recognize that Native nations survived genocide. Generations upon generations of Indigenous people suffered intense efforts to destroy them. Residential schools are the most poignant example, but the U.S., Canadian and Mexican governments also banned self-government and Indigenous religious ceremonies and language, and stripped away land and the right to hold land communally through policies of allotment and termination in the 19th and 20th centuries. Native nations truly might have disappeared if not for their people’s absolute determination to remain not only Indigenous people but distinct nations.

After all, it is Native nations who have pushed for these formal acknowledgments and apologies as well as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the U.S. Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. As boarding-school survivors and other Indigenous leaders have pointed out, apologies are empty without action. The Department of the Interior report that led to Mr. Biden’s apology includes calls for government funding for community-driven healing, family preservation and reunification, violence prevention, K-12 and college education, and language revitalization. Because of both the evil of residential schools and the heroic survival of Native nations, citizens of the countries that tried to destroy them owe the recompense and rebuilding they demand.

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Some time in the 1930s, members of the Mau-Tame Club posed for a picture. They arranged themselves so that each woman’s buckskin dress and headband, with their distinctive beadwork, were visible. Like most Kiowas, these women lived on what was left of their reservation in Oklahoma, but the picture was taken in Gallup, N.M. Mau-Tame means “Showing the Way” in Kiowa, and the club had been started in 1921 by the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs to encourage Kiowa women to learn how to keep house like white women, one of countless assimilation efforts. But by the 1930s the Mau-Tame Club was showing a more Kiowa way, promoting the sale of Native art by its Kiowa members and women from nearby Native nations in Oklahoma. Club members such as the ones in the picture travelled to the annual Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial to dance and to sell their beadwork purses, moccasins and cradleboards.

The Kiowa art historian Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote explains that when women wore their own beadwork in intertribal gatherings such as the Gallup ceremonial, non-Native customers and observers might have assumed they were displaying a generic Indianness. But in fact, a woman’s beadwork reflected her individual and family Kiowa style. In Oklahoma, when Kiowas gave a pair of beaded moc­casins away or traded them for a horse to another Kiowa or someone from a different Native nation, they confirmed networks of com­munity. They established a distinct southern Plains identity within Indian Territory with their long-time allies, the Comanches and Plains Apaches, and also the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Wichitas and Caddos, based on parallel histories as well as artistic traditions, in­cluding beadwork and silverwork. Along with Native peoples throughout the continent, they worked for Native rights. And at the same time, they resolutely remained Kiowa, even as the United States continued to try to destroy them. Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote recalls puzzling as she looked at the photograph of the Mau-Tame Club and held a silver cup made by her grandfather, etched all around with a warrior on horseback chasing a bison: “Was this part of how Kiowa people remained, well, Kiowa people?”

Residential schools were a major assault on Native nations. Assimilationists targeted the children. They took them away from the supposedly terrible res­ervations and placed them in boarding schools, often purposefully far from home. Richard Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, declared that his school’s purpose was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Reformers separated children as young as 5 from their parents and grandparents and made them take new names and wear strange clothes. They forbade them from speaking their own languages or practising their own religions. As boarding-school survivors remember and later investiga­tions and hearings have exposed, many children were taken by force and, once in schools, faced horrific mental and physical abuse at the hands of people with far too much unregulated power. Former stu­dents recalled being starved and beaten. Thousands of children died at school, never to return home.

But Native communities had always educated their children, and they continued to do so as best they could. Boarding schools tried to make chil­dren non-Indigenous, but, as Ojibwe historian Brenda J. Child explains, their families and communities “refused to allow govern­ment boarding schools to supplant their essential roles in child rearing.” Many families of boarding-school survivors spent every summer trying to un-teach the lessons of the white school. A Shawnee survivor recalled his grandmother’s summer teachings: “She said that we are to prepare ourselves to live in the white world, to be like the white people. ‘But don’t believe their words. You are Shawnee. Your heart will always be Shawnee,’ she said.”

Indigenous families and communities lobbied for day schools and boarding schools on reservations rather than far away, and were eventually able to influence school conditions and curriculums. Some gradu­ates became teachers and staff in the schools, gradually and quietly changing their emphases. They reversed policies that forbade students from visiting their families often and started such initiatives as the Seneca Indian School’s Grandmother and Grandfather Pro­gram, in which education by tribal elders became part of students’ school-sanctioned learning.

Under damaging and demoralizing cir­cumstances, Native nations retained their sense of themselves as sovereign communities. Native women and men quietly continued older ways of speaking, healing, working, eating and making art, preserving the seeds of the coming resurgence of sovereignty and renaissance in language and culture that would begin in the 1930s and is accelerating today. Despite the tremendous losses of the past two centuries, Native nations have survived, not only as the descendants of once-powerful peoples but as nations within the nation-states of the United States, Mexico and Canada. As Comanche scholar Paul Chaat Smith notes, “Our survival against desperate odds is worthy of a celebration, one that embraces every aspect of our bizarre and fantastic lives, the tremendous sacrifices made on our behalf by our parents and grandparents and their par­ents.”

Recognizing the tremendous work and determination that went into preserving Indigenous cultures, identities and structures through those generations should be an essential part of acknowledging the residential-school era. Indigenous families and communities did heroic work. They prevented assimilationists from winning. And recognizing that work should also remind us today that Indigenous people and their nations must be the central voices in reparation efforts. Behind Mr. Biden’s apology was the years-long work of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of Laguna Pueblo, and her staff, many of whom are Indigenous, as well as the hundreds of boarding-school survivors who spoke during her “Road to Healing” tour. Indigenous people’s concerns and demands must lead the way as we move beyond apology. As the U.S. report recommends, “actions should be rooted in what we have learned and set forth in this report, as well as in consultation with Indian Tribes and the people impacted by these schools.”

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