The impact of the school, which was shuttered decades ago, can be summed up in two statistics: In the 1800s, when federal agents were trawling the reservation for children, they complained that there were almost no adults who spoke English. In 1902, the government completed the construction of a boarding school on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colo. “Even though I’ve gone to so much counseling,” she said, “I still would always say, ‘Why am I like this? Why do I have this ugly feeling inside me?’”īy the turn of the century, a debate had erupted on whether it was better to “carry civilization to the Indian” by building schools on tribal land. “I don’t know if it was a broom or a mop, I just remember the stick part, and my aunt swung it at me,” she said, adding: “There was belts. Jacqueline Frost, 60, was raised by her Ute aunt, a matron at the boarding school who embraced the system and became its enforcer. He carves them and records in a homemade studio, set up in his home on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation in Towaoc, Colo. ![]() “I’m not going to give up.”ĭecades later, Mr. Tree’s not going to give up,” he said of the cedar. He said the lesson was clear, both in the need to comply and the need to resist. God speaks through air,” he said, of the music his grandfather taught him. He grasped even then how special the cedar flute and his native music were. When the boy brought the flute to school, his teacher smashed it and threw it in the trash. His grandfather taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of a cedar. “I didn’t think of it as abusive.”Ī less violent incident marked him more, he said. “I thought that it was part of school,” said Mr. Then the teacher picked him up a second time and threw him headfirst to the ground, he said. When he tried to get up, a teacher picked him up and slammed him against the wall, he said. As punishment, Norman Lopez was made to sit in the corner for hours at the Ute Vocational School in southwestern Colorado where he was sent around age 6. Those who survived the schools described violence as routine. Based on what those records indicate, the search for bodies of other students is already underway at two former schools in Colorado: Grand Junction Indian School in western Colorado, which closed in 1911, and the Fort Lewis Indian School, which closed in 1910 and reopened near Durango as Fort Lewis College. Many of the deaths of former students have been recorded in federal archives and newspaper death notices. Just last week, nine Lakota children who perished at the federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pa., were disinterred and buried in buffalo robes in a ceremony on a tribal reservation in South Dakota. ![]() That many children died in the schools on this side of the border is not in question. ![]() The discovery of the bodies in Canada led Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the department that once ran the boarding schools in the United States - and herself the granddaughter of people forced to attend them - to announce that the government would search the grounds of former facilities to identify the remains of children. “To this day, maybe that’s why I can’t sing.” “We couldn’t speak our language, we couldn’t sing our prayer songs,” he said. “When people do things to you when you’re growing up, it affects you spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally,” said Russell Box Sr., a member of the Southern Ute tribe who was 6 when he was sent to a boarding school in southwestern Colorado.
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