Dana Hedgpeth:
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Let’s step back for a minute and think about the time of when these schools were set up. It was at a time in the 1800s. They were created by the U.S. government and run in partnership with churches, religious groups, with one goal, to take children from their home, either forcibly or coerce them from their homes, in the name of assimilating them into white society. And that was the purpose of them.
The idea was to take the children away from their communities and strip them of their language, their culture, their ways, their customs, and, again, to keep them into assimilation. Many of these children were — to call them schools, as one of our sources said, they really weren’t schools. They were really work camps.
Children spent half the day in school learning basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the other half really in workshops, fields, manual labor. The idea was not to train them to be doctors or lawyers or accountants, but rather to be doing manual labor jobs.
