The Department of Interior, led by Secretary Deb Haaland, has acknowledged that at least a thousand children died as part of the US government's decades-long program to systematically eradicate indigenous culture through its system of boarding schools, often administered by religious institutions.
"This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations: That federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways," Newland, a member of the Bay Mills Indian Community, said in a statement.
Of course, as a child I was forced to listen to geriatric bigots celebrate a similar program in which native youth were taken from their homes and placed with LDS white suburban families as part of a program of cultural and religious assimilation. The most egregious proponent of such cultural imperialism was Spencer Kimball, LDS church president from 1973 to 1985, who never encountered anyone with indigenous American (or even Polynesian) ancestry who he wouldn't proclaim to be a "Lamanite."
It's truly astounding how he openly made profoundly racist statements in the guise of a sustained prophet, seer, and revelation in LDS General Conference -
“The work is unfolding, and blinded eyes begin to see, and scattered people begin to gather. I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today as against that of only fifteen years ago. Truly the scales of darkness are falling from their eyes, and they are fast becoming a white and delightsome people.
The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos; five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation.
At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl — sixteen — sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents — on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather. There was the doctor in a Utah city who for two years had had an Indian boy in his home who stated that he was some shades lighter than the younger brother just coming into the program from the reservation. These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated.“
