Democrats To Unveil Bill Addressing Government's Cultural Genocide Of Native Americans

Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will introduce legislation Tuesday to make the federal government address the “intergenerational trauma” it has caused for Native Americans with its former Indian boarding school policy, a nearly century-long policy of forcibly removing Indigenous children from tribal lands and putting them into boarding schools to be assimilated into white culture.

Their bill, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy Act, would create a first-of-its-kind U.S.

“Native people are resilient and strong, but the painful and traumatic history of genocide and forced assimilation by the federal government lives on in our communities and our people have never been able to fully heal,” Haaland said in a statement.

The boarding school policy, which the federal government funded from 1869 into the 1960s, forcibly removed nearly 83% of Native children from their families and enrolled them in one of 367 boarding schools across 30 states.

Native communities still experience trauma from the policy, and there is a general lack of public understanding of the government’s cultural genocide of Native Americans, according to a 2018 U.S.

“The Indian Boarding School Policy is a stain in America’s history,” Warren said in a statement.