A local tribal member was sent to an Indian Boarding School when he was just six years old.
Now he is speaking out about a painful experience that he didn’t talk about for decades.
Matthew War Bonnet, his parents, and his siblings were all sent to an Indian Boarding School in South Dakota.
Last October, some 72 years after he was forced to enroll, War Bonnet and thousands of other Native Americans received an apology from President Biden.
The legacy of what happened at those schools is still being felt
“And these are all of us kids that went to that school,” said Matthew War Bonnet holding an old picture.
These images of War Bonnet’s family reflect a painful chapter in American history.
“This guy right here?” War Bonnet asks, looking at a picture of his young self. “Oh, he’s the cutest of the bunch.”
But like his nine siblings and his parents before them, all were forced to enroll in an Indian Boarding School. For him, his brothers and sisters, it was the Saint Frances Boarding School in South Dakota.
And suddenly, he is that young child once more.
“When you’re six years old and someone someone takes a razor strap to you, that fear’s in you,” he said, his voice rising. “That rage is there when you see what’s happening.”
The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition estimates that since 1801, more than 500 Indian boarding schools operated in 38 U. S. states. Seventeen schools were in Washington State, from Spokane to Yakama to the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
The goal was to assimilate Native children into white society, robbing them of their languages, customs, and worse.
“My boarding school experience was very painful and traumatic.”
In 2022, War Bonnet testified before a Congressional committee on the heels of a first-ever federal study into the nation’s Indian boarding school system, the physical and sexual abuse, and the hundreds of student deaths.
Then, last October, this:
“I formally apologize as the President of the United States of America for what we did,” thundered President Biden. “I formally apologize.”
John Campbell and his siblings were spared the indignity of boarding schools. But his parents and their siblings were not so lucky. And they, too, returned, traumatized.
He was asked if Biden’s apology can make a substantial difference? “It made a lot of difference,” Campbell said. “People accepted it because you know they knew all the atrocities and traumatic effect on family members because they passed it on to each other.”
“I’m hoping that by talking about this and bringing that out that our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren can look at us in a different light,” said War Bonnet. “Not to see us as abusers but to see us wanting to get healthy, wanting us to become well again, and the struggles because of what happened.”
His wish is that the trauma ends here.
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