Ricky White attended a residential day school in Canada in the 1980s. Now he lives in Fargo, North Dakota.“It’s only a matter of time…We’re days, hours, or weeks away from something like that happening here in the U.S.,” White, an Anishinaabe man from Naotkamegwanning First Nation in northern Ontario claims.
“Every community says that only half of the kids that went away to boarding schools came back…Of those kids who were killed, tortured, slaved, there’s a good guess there were many killed—and how do you hide that?” White said. “Well, we’re finding that out in Kamloops right now.”
The Carlisle School
The “schools” began operation in the 1860s and some were open until the early 1980s. Similar to Canada, the point of the boarding schools was not to care for the children.
It was to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people. And by all accounts, these children were subjected to terrible sexual and physical abuses. They also had harsh punishments for speaking their native languages or expressing their identities.
