Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Madam President, I rise today in support of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act and in remembrance of the thousands of Native children who died and suffered in these schools.

Thousands of children were ripped from their families in the name of assimilation. Thousands of children were the victims of physical and sexual abuse. And thousands of children were forbidden from practicing their culture and speaking their Native languages.

The operation of Federal Indian boarding schools by the U.S. Department of the Interior is one of the darkest chapters of American history, a chapter whose consequences are still being felt deeply by boarding school survivors, their families, and Tribal communities.

The Federal Government funded more than 400 Indian boarding schools over the course of 150 years, one of the earliest being the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where Wampanoag children from my own home State of Massachusetts were stolen from their families, sent hundreds of miles away, and subjected to cruel and inhumane assimilation practices.

When Captain Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School in 1879, he imbued it with this model:

Kill the Indian, save the man.

But we know all too well that these boarding schools did only the former. They acted as a violent means of assimilation and an essential tool in the U.S. Government's dispossession of Native people's aboriginal rights, land, and culture. Children as young as 4 years old were subjected to systemic, violent abuse.

The Department of the Interior's recent investigation found that children were renamed from Native names to English names; had their hair cut off; were discouraged or prevented from using their languages, religion, and cultural practices; and organized into units to perform military drills.

The Department of the Interior has since identified marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 schools. This is just the tip of the tragic, horrifying, unacceptable iceberg of our history.

In a confidential message to Congress, Thomas Jefferson said about Native people that ``when they withdraw themselves to the culture of a small piece of land, they will perceive how useless to them are their extensive forests, and will be willing to pare them off from time to time.''

He directed Congress--Thomas Jefferson--to ``encourage them to abandon hunting'' so that ``the extensive forests necessary in the hunting life, will then become useless.''

What was once a plot to take Native land also became the foundation of our Nation's century-long legacy of forced assimilation, displacement, and, ultimately, attempted eradication of Native language, culture, and the people themselves.

We have not simply a moral responsibility but a legal obligation to the welfare of Tribes across the country to uphold treaty rights and to recognize the dark history of our own country. And this obligation cannot be met without securing truth, justice, and healing for every Native person, family, and Tribe affected by these genocidal policies.

In Massachusetts, we have seen the healing process in action. After centuries of forced assimilation led to the extinction of the Wopanaak language, members of the Mashpee, Aquinnah, Assonet, and Herring Pond Wampanoag communities came together to widely reintroduce and reengage with their ancestral language.

Today, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe's school serves as a shining example of how Native students can thrive when they are surrounded by their language and their culture and not stripped of it.

But Tribes should not be left to fight alone to recover what was stolen from them by the American government. Passing the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act would be an essential step to turn the American government from an historic enemy to a future ally in righting these wrongs.

So I thank Senator Schatz. I thank him for his great leadership on these issues and for his excellent staff. I thank Senator Murkowski for organizing this floor time for us to bring attention to this part of American history that we must never forget; and Senator Warren for introducing this important legislation that begins to put us on a path of truth and healing.

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