It’s bid whist for the Native American boarding school survivors, Congress

By Monica Tsinagini

Editor’s note: Monica Tsinagini is from Názlíní, Arizona. She is Tódích’íi’nii and born for Nahiłii. Her maternal grandfather is Mą’ii Deeshgiizhnii and her paternal grandfather is Nahiłii.

On the 5th of November of this year, I awakened to another email from an organization of which I have been a member for almost its entire existence, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS). In its usual diplomatic and academic tone, the message requests essentially that all members contact their respective congressional “leaders” and motivate these people to bring the “Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act” (S.1723/H.R. 7227) to the forefront for a congressional vote before the current administration ends.

Needless to say (or perhaps it needs to be said, hence, the present open letter), no one needs to wait on Congress to make strides on our behalf for us to have an international impact. The current administration wasted 46-months on the compartmentalization of intergenerational atrocities and even added insult to indignation by allowing the bill to languish and not follow its own inherent processes to advance it in the form of a procedural vote.

While working in India, I had already written three or four personal letters of support for the Indian Boarding School congressional acknowledgement effort up to that point (in addition to all the innumerable correspondence and documents that I wrote more than 20 years ago in my undergraduate student years on the subject, before NABS existed), I set out on an internet search to better understand the culmination of NABS’ efforts on the Hill to date.

Before I set out to write yet another letter addressed to any politician, it was required for me to confirm that the impediment of this bill was due to no fault of our collective efforts as survivors and heirs. From its inception, we endured the modifications of the original terminology from the “Truth and Reconciliation” outline (per the verbiage used in the original South African blueprint presently practiced in the Canadian acknowledgement) to the non-invasive, more polite “Truth and Healing” title – the tone of which sounds more like a treatment program rather than a national confession intended to break the deafening silence that keeps the bolts locked on the country’s skeletons in the closet. Still, the time keeps ticking and the world keeps turning while we await a remedy from the U.S. Congress about something that worldwide indigeneity already knows.

At the start of the present effort, former students, known as survivors, and their heirs cried their eyes out in public to arouse compassion from these politicians so that they would get some advancement in Congress. I convinced myself that the important thing was that former students (survivors) that were kept as prisoners in buildings that have long since been demolished were still alive to record their memories and participate a congressional effort for redress. I began to read the Senate Report from the Committee on Indian Affairs of July 7, 2024 (Report 118-187) to put procedure, chronology, and structure to the memories of the progression efforts of survivors and heirs.

I remembered that from the comfort of my home in India back in 2021, I watched Matthew Warbonnet recount on different occasions his agonizing memories on various video platforms. So, when I read his name in the report, the images I remembered from his video recorded talks came to mind. So did the images of other contributors, like Sandra White Hawk and Deborah Parker, also from NABS. When I first watched their many video testimonies from the other side of the world, I struggled to understand the goal of expressing such raw emotion in public when the objective of these talks and hearings was to pass a redress pathway for the U.S. government to make amends for what it had done to permanently distort the Indigenous populations of the territories over which it (they) eventually gained (and continue to have) full control. From my view, the bill lacked a critical element that made the South African model a success – the confessions and recounting of the memories of the oppressors.

Having lost my own mother (a student of Brigham City Intermountain Indian School) to AIDS back in 2002, when I was 28 years old, and my mother’s youngest brother, an Alaska resident, who died of cancer back in 2021 while I was living in India during the throes of the Covid pandemic in 2021, I fully supported the need for the students themselves to recount directly their memories. We still need to capture their oral histories as quickly as possible in real time. The supporting documentation that matched the timelines of personal testimonies is required to solidify a firm foundation and extract more of the complete truth. The original South African model of “Truth and Reconciliation” requires active confessions and recounts of those who carried out plans and policies. Our pending bill only confirms the existence of an American Indian Records Repository (AIRR), but does not go into details about the subject of access to these records.

As I continued to read through the report, I couldn’t help but to half-laugh to myself about a reference brought to memory in an article entitled “The Rookie” by the comedian W. Kamau Bell in which he says than an “efficient way to cause problems and noodle around all day is to become a member of Congress.” Here we have a collective effort of Indians from all different points of view and walks of life who have one unifying factor – the collective harm imposed upon us and our antecedents by the intentional and deliberate structures of U.S. government policies. Still today, academics refer to the use of “strong institutions” as a critical distinction of the U.S. government and an ingredient of its success when compared to other world governments.

If Indians are still walking planet Earth who can recount these horrific memories, it is certain that U.S. citizens are still alive who can recount memories of their role in administering government policies. Now, Indians await the institution of the U.S. Congress to act benevolently on their behalf and pass a bill that will essentially institutionalize the mitigation of the current and pending intergenerational effects that have been kept secret for decades. Is further bureaucratization of the Indian to mitigate the effects of the boarding school policies the desired result here? Could the remedy lie in the privatization of these efforts rather than the further bureaucratization (and compartmentalization) of Indian livelihoods? Do Indians even realize there are Indians in a country called India that have already decolonized?

A cover of silence is kept in place and the questions have only been made public in the recent past. What happened to the students who were shipped away and never came home? What happened to the babies that students birthed at these schools from sexual violations? One of the objectives of these efforts to create a congressional bill was to begin to break the enduring cover of silence that has been kept in place that still functions as a sort of security blanket that prevents the full scope of harms from coming to light.

It is astonishing that the bill includes a fiscal support with a payout of 90 million dollars over the course of six fiscal years which amounts to a payment plan intended to mitigate all intergenerational effects in all forms. From the legacy of student rapes to the student physical abuses – from the student disappearances to the girls who gave birth in these schools who never held the children to whom they gave birth – from the deliberate undereducation to the years of free and low-cost outsourcing of domestic and manufacturing labor – for the legacy of all successful and unsuccessful assimilation outcomes, the U.S. Congress will pay Indians a sum of 90 million dollars, payable in six easy installments of 15 million dollars a year for the next six fiscal years. To compare, Patrick Mahomes of the American National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs (yes, pun intended) currently is to be paid 450 million dollars over the course of ten seasons, which amounts to an average of 45 million dollars per 18-week football season. It is no wonder that Indian impoverishment is perpetuated by such governmental compartmentalization.

Now that we are at the end of this current administration, the most valuable thing that has come of it was the funding to preserve our Diné Bizaad (el idioma “Navajo”). Domination of this Indigenous language will open windows to domination of other Indigenous languages, just as domination of Spanish opened doors for my mother, which subsequently opened doors for me to obtain higher studies earlier and easier in life.

Domination of the Spanish language made the other Latin languages easier for me to read, write understand and speak. For the current generation, Diné Bizaad will be our branch to understand other Indigenous languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, Mandarin (Putonghua) and thousands of others. It does not take an act of Congress to value our inheritance of Navajo language and our commitment as one Navajo tribe going forward needs to be in dominating our language for at least the rest of the present century.

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