WASHINGTON — Schooling Secretary nominee Linda McMahon advised senators in a latest correspondence that the U.S. authorities’s darkish, 150-year legacy of forcing tens of 1000’s of Native American kids into white assimilation faculties is “a key example” of why schooling needs to be domestically managed.
McMahon, a billionaire and President Donald Trump’s earlier administrator of the Small Business Administration, on Tuesday offered members of the Senate Committee on Health, Schooling, Labor and Pensions with written solutions to questions senators despatched her after her affirmation listening to final week. Her responses are usually not at present public, however HuffPost obtained a duplicate of her solutions to pick out questions referring to tribal schooling.
Her feedback counsel that not solely does she not appear to know the federal authorities’s position in offering tribal schooling, however she doesn’t appear to understand that the overwhelming majority of Native American kids obtain their schooling by way of applications run by the federal Division of Schooling ― which she is on monitor to supervise.
“What is your understanding of the events that took place during the Indian boarding school era?” reads one of many senators’ inquiries to McMahon.
From 1819 to 1969, the Inside Division ran lots of of boarding faculties nationwide, with one aim: to eradicate Native American tradition and assimilate Native kids into white society. The U.S. authorities forcibly eliminated children from their households and and tribal communities, and shipped them off to far-away boarding faculties. Tens of 1000’s of kids endured in depth psychological, bodily and sexual abuse. Some died. Others disappeared.
The ethos behind these faculties, as articulated by the founding father of one of many flagship boarding faculties, Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt, was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”
In her response, McMahon stated she condemned this chapter in American historical past – after which instructed the federal government’s genocidal marketing campaign wouldn’t have occurred if Native American kids had been receiving schooling from inside their native communities.
“I condemn the actions of U.S. government officials who removed Indian children from their homes, against the wills of their parents and families, to force them to attend boarding schools, in many instances in other states,” she stated. “This is a key example of why local communities should direct education systems, not Washington bureaucrats.”
In truth, the U.S. authorities’s coverage of assimilating Native American kids into white tradition was pushed not just by a handful of bureaucrats sitting in a Washington, D.C. constructing, however by systemic racism and the Christian church. A number of denominations had lengthy been urging the federal government to undertake this coverage as a method to reprogram Indigenous children and erase their cultures. These church buildings ran most of the Indian boarding faculties themselves.
As one instructing fellow on the College of Chicago Divinity College put it in a 2022 essay in regards to the rise of those boarding faculties, “Cultural assimilation and conversion to Christianity were effectively synonymous concepts.”
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McMahon also seems to incorrectly believe that most Native American children today get their education through the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Education, not the Department of Education.
“What role do you believe the Department of Education plays in fulfilling the federal trust responsibility?” reads one other query from a senator.
“The federal government has an obligation to provide appropriate educational facilities to recognized tribes,” McMahon said. “While the vast majority of this work is carried out by the Bureau of Indian Education at the Department of the Interior, the Department of Education does maintain grant programs that support tribal education.”
She repeats this claim throughout her responses. But fewer than 10% of Native American college students attend Bureau of Indian Schooling faculties, that are in rural communities on reservations and infrequently the one choice. About 90% attend conventional public faculties funded by Division of Teaching programs.
Spokespeople for the White House and the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment about Trump’s education secretary nominee flubbing basic questions about tribal education.
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The Senate HELP Committee is scheduled to vote Thursday on whether to advance McMahon’s nomination to the Senate floor for a confirmation vote.
