NEW YORK, Oct. 17 (Xinhua) -- After her mother died when Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier was just four years old, she was put into a Native American boarding school in South Dakota, the United States, and told her native Lakota language was "devil's speak," reported The Associated Press (AP) on Saturday.
She recalls being locked in a basement at St. Francis Indian Mission School for weeks as punishment for breaking the school's strict rules. Her long braids were shorn in a deliberate effort to stamp out her cultural identify.
"I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred," Whirlwind Soldier testified during a Saturday event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, as the agency confronts the bitter legacy of a boarding school system that operated in the United States for more than a century.
Starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the United States enacted laws and policies to establish and support the schools, said the report.
The stated goal was to "civilize" Native Americans, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians, but that was often carried out through abusive practices. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal funding and were willing partners.
Most closed their doors long ago and none still exist to strip students of their identities, but some still function as schools, albeit with drastically different missions that celebrate the cultural backgrounds of their Native students, it added.
