Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
[Oleksa:]
The point being that these students are simply removed in August and are gone for the entire school year without any telecommunications to connect them to home. And this was, of course, deliberate federal policy. It was the same assimilationist notion—we’ve got to train these people how to be real Americans, speak English, cut their hair, put on a coat and tie, get a job, and ideally never return to their home villages.
[Lindberg:]
Basically same as Indian tribes.
[Oleksa:]
Exactly. Now what this introduced into the community is a level of anxiety. What are they doing to our children? Where have they gone? Will they ever come back? And tragically some of them didn’t, because they didn’t have immunity to a lot of communicable diseases that some of them caught in the boarding schools, and all of those boarding schools have graveyards, cemeteries where the children who didn’t survive were—and then the mother got a telegram from the Bureau of Indian Affairs—“Very sorry to alert you, but your daughter in Chemawa, Oregon has died of influenza, and we’ve buried her there.” And the end of the story. Which means that the other parents who have students at Chemawa, Oregon are all anxious about theirs, so it’s a community-wide sense in the first generation of frustration and confusion, and culminating in anxiety.