Boarding schools abused many Native children. Kansas leaders, help uncover the truth

November is Native American Heritage Month, a time to celebrate the rich ancestry and important contributions of our nation’s first people. It is also the perfect time to call attention to the long-overlooked history of Native boarding schools in the United States.

A new report released by the Interior Department this year has helped bring this dark chapter of U.S. history into the light. Beginning in the 19th century, Christian churches, in collaboration with the U.S. government, established hundreds of boarding schools for Native American children. The purpose was to “civilize” or “assimilate” these children by forcing them to adopt English names rather than their given names, disallowing the use of their Native languages and religions, cutting their hair and requiring them to participate in extensive military drills and manual labor. The documented physical and mental abuses experienced by these children include withholding food, solitary confinement and physical punishment.

Haskell Indian Nations University, based in Lawrence, was founded in 1884 as one such boarding school. It has now evolved into a federally operated tribal university. Today, visitors to Haskell can view a jail and a cemetery with more than 100 graves of children, a somber reminder of the trauma inflicted on Native American families in the area.

The Kansas City Star recently reported on an upcoming joint investigation of another boarding school on Kansas soil. The Kansas Historical Society is contracting with the University of Kansas Center for Research to search the site of the Shawnee Indian Methodist Manual Labor School, located in Fairway. It had 16 buildings and nearly 200 students a year, ranging in age from 5 to 23. Established in 1839 by the Methodist minister Thomas Johnson, for whom Johnson County was later named, the 12-acre property where this school sat will soon undergo a ground-penetrating radar survey to search for unmarked graves.

As a practicing Quaker, the need for reconciliation is important to me and my faith community. It is time to recognize Quakers’ complicity in this unspeakable act of oppression that has led to continued discrimination and inequity. Quakers were staunch proponents of assimilating Native children and ran more than 30 Native boarding schools, advocating for removing children from their families and supporting this form of cultural genocide.

My faith community is beginning to explore what reconciliation for this traumatic era could look like. Kansas’s lawmakers should too. I am calling on Reps. Ron Estes, Jake LaTurner and Tracey Mann, as well as Sens. Roger Marshall and Jerry Moran, to join Rep. Sharice Davids in co-sponsoring S. 2907/H.R. 5444, the bipartisan Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies in the United States Act.

This long overdue legislation would establish the first formal commission in U.S. history to investigate and document the policies and practices of these federally-sponsored, faith-run institutions. It wouldn’t bring justice on its own, but it would be a critical first step.

It is time for the Kansans, and especially Christians, to acknowledge and investigate the historic trauma caused by the forced removal and relocation of Native American children to boarding schools.

Although the trauma cannot be undone, we can start the work of revealing the truth, with the goal of healing and reconciliation with the people of tribal nations.