Stealing children
What was that about separating children from their parents?
Forcibly separating parents from children has a history; it is our history. pic.twitter.com/1OgxeCLF8V
— Martha S. Jones (@marthasjones_) May 26, 2018
In case you’re not familiar with the history – slave families could be broken up at any time at the pleasure of their “owners.”
Native American children were forcibly taken away to boarding schools at 6 yrs old. Beaten or worse,for not speaking English. I knew old Natives when I was a kid. Some talked with a lysp and had facial burns.
— Explorer David-Neel (@nevergop33) May 26, 2018
The lisp and facial burns were from torture for speaking their own languages at the schools.
A couple of pictures from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
Founded in October 1879, it was designed to assimilate students into the mainstream culture. It was housed in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.One from the Shawnee Indian Mission in Fairway, KS
+ STORY OF JULIA GOODELL ! pic.twitter.com/bE4WIXLrxJ
— Black Sparrow Hawk – KS03 (@CorbieCrow) May 27, 2018
If you don’t know about the Carlisle school, Google it to learn more about our history of taking children from their parents. This horror has been with us from the founding of our nation in various forms. We can’t change that history, but we can learn from it and demand change. https://t.co/nqQpcadW7o
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 27, 2018
Residential schools, the Canadian equivalent of the American “industrial schools”, stand as our shame. Children were stolen and tortured, forced to “assimilate”, but of course were not accepted once they aged out of the horrendous charnel houses that Canada’s politicians called schools.
The last such so-called school closed in 1996. Its last victims are younger than I am.
It’s a goddamned shame.
Stealing children you don’t think are being brought up right has long been a horrifying reality. Catholics used to steal Jewish children, baptize them, then bring them up Catholic. (My mother-in-law had to watch out for a family member who wanted to baptize my husband when he was a boy).
This is not meant as a criticism of child welfare, by the way. Child abuse is different than simply bringing your children up in a different faith, a different ethnicity, or a different language.