16th episode of the utopia3 podcast with Christine Diindiisi McCleave.
Christine Diindiisi McCleave is the executive director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, an NGO based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA that is working closely with the U.S. Dept. of the Interior on the recently announced Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
In the this interview, we will talk to Ms. Diindiisi McCleave about her own journey to the directorship of the National Native American Boarding School Coalition, the history of Indian boarding schools in the United States, goals and challenges of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, the politics - and nomenclature - of truth commissions, and how indigenous sovereignty intersects with human rights.
More information :
This past May, the discovery of the remains of 215 indigenous children in a mass grave near the former grounds of a residential Indian boarding school in the Canadian province of British Columbia brought the shameful history of the Canadian Indian Residential School system to international media attention. Less media attention, however, has been given to the history of the Indian residential school system in the United States. Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th centuries, both the U.S. and Canadian governments - in cooperation with the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations - perpetrated a deliberate policy of indigenous cultural genocide by frocibly removing indigneous children from their national homelands and placing them in boarding schools meant “civilize” and assimilate them into white society; to estrange them from their language and their culture; to, as Col. Henry Pratt, founder of the flagship federal Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania infamously put it: kill the Indian to save the man.
In June of this year, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland - the first indigenous cabinet secretary in United States’ history - announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies in the United States.
Instrumental to the federal initiative is Christine Diindiisi McCleave, the executive director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, an NGO based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA whose mission it has been since 2012 to lead in the pursuit of understanding and addressing the ongoing trauma created by the U.S. Indian Boarding School policy. As executive director of the coalition Diindiisi McCleave - who is a dual citizen of both the Ojibwe Turtle Mountain Nation in Minnesota and the United States - has petitioned both the US federal government and the United Nations to officially commence investigations into the history of Indian boarding schools in the United States, and is still working to pass legislation to convene a federal U.S. Truth and Healing Commission, based on the Canadian model, which would document the intergenerational effects of boarding schools through witness testimony.
Interviewer : Jonathan Matthew Schmitt
Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
