In the beginning…NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS AS COLONIAL INSTITUTIONS
On September 30, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) has called for all persons of conscience to honor a National Day of Remembrance for U.S. Indian Boarding Schools. This call to action and prayer aligns with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation that is honored in Canada for residential school survivors. In Canada, it is also called Orange Shirt Day to honor the history of how one girl’s treasured orange shirt was taken away from her by the residential school personnel. The orange shirt now represents awareness for the children who died or went missing at these institutions.
“How is your community going to tend to these issues?”
Through accountability, resilience and prayer.
Indian boarding schools in North America began in Mexico.
Children of the governing families of the indigenous polities that survived the initial invasion and genocidal war against them in the cities and villages around Mexico-Tenochtitlan were forcibly schooled in the continent’s first colonial boarding schools setting the model for settler colonial domination through compulsory schooling across the hemisphere for centuries.
As a part of the colonial wars on Indigenous Peoples, boarding schools were designed to weaponize childhood and children.
The Spanish Inquisition in North America is well documented by court records kept in the Mexican National Archives. Several cases involve the use of indigenous boarding school survivors against their own families as spies and witnesses to testify against targeted indigenous Mexican political leaders.
In 2018, Semillas Anahuacalmecac co-founders Dr. Juan Gómez Quiñones and Dr. Reynaldo Macias helped us design a unit of study in American Indian tribal law on the history of boarding schools rooted in the Spanish Inquisition. Several selected quotes that follow relate to the colonial history and foundations of boarding schools in Mexico.
The Spanish Inquisition “trials” in Mexico of Don Carlos Ometochtli Chichimecateuctli and Martin Ocelotl, subjected both to torture. The first was burnt alive at the stake by the Inquisition’s colonial court in Mexico. Both ended in death. The records of these cases and so many more shed light on the role of boarding schools in Mexico.
This period of history is critical to the national formation of the Mexican Peoples. The Spanish Inquisition of Indigenous Peoples, specifically, indigenous leaders and familial descendants that survived the genocide of an estimated 25 MILLION people killed in central Mexico within the first 75 years of the Spanish invasion, were then subjected to over 300 years of colonization of the most concentrated and weaponized form. This, only to be followed by the destiny manifested through war to establish a US political and economic hegemony across the hemisphere.
“Don Carlos Ometochtli was the son and grandson of legendary pre-Hispanic leaders of Texcoco, a major colonial city and one of the three partners in the preconquest Aztec Alli- ance. Though he was also accused of bigamy and idolatry, Don Carlos received his death sentence for the crime of heretical dogmatism and was the only indigenous leader to pay with his life at the stake in Zumárraga’s Inquisition.”
“Texcoco was the most powerful city-state of the Acolhua tribal group that settled in the Valley of Mexico on the east side of Lake Texcoco in the thir- teenth century. In 1427, the leader of the Texcocans, Nezahualcoyotl, formed the Aztec Alliance with the Mexica of Tenochtitlán, the city-state founded on an island in the middle of the Valley of Mexico lake system, and the Tepaneca, whose main city was Tlacopán, to the northwest.”
After 1521, the Spanish colonizers established the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, a Christian boarding school for the indoctrination and proselytizing of noble indigenous sons away from their families.
The Franciscan priests “preferred to recruit 10- to 12-year- olds for instruction at the colegios because of the children’s obvious intellectual malleability.”
“When the college was first founded (1536) it established guidelines for admitting 100 youths 10 — 12 years old, from each cabecera. (Spanish. town). From Gerónimo. Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica. indiana, 4. vols. (Mexico. City: Editorial. Salvador. Chávez. Hayhoe, 1945).
“Six years of the tribute of Texcoco was used for the building and support of the monastery and college at Tlatelolco,”
“The morals campaign (of the Spanish Inquisition) had a little help in the native communities in the form of indoctrinated noble children. For years, the Franciscans compelled the celebrated indigenous chiefs to send their noble sons to Christian convents for education and training in Christianity. By the early 1530s, the Franciscans began placing these child-enforcers back into the villages to take over religious practice from their elders and, effectively, to spy on their families.”
Think “Hitler Youth”…
This practice of boarding school indoctrination as a part of the political and military domination of central Mexico reportedly began with the practice of schooling the children in the 1524 — 26 period and by 1529 the Spanish Church was sending the children out to proselytize and spy on the adults.
Boarding schools as used to colonize Indigenous Peoples and destroy the intricate layers of familial, genealogical and political bonds among native families established the pattern and practice of family separation and the alienation of children from their parents, families, peoples, cultures and religions.
Today, we recognize these traumas also have no borders.
Living survivors and ancestors teach us that through resilience and healing, the Indigenous human spirit is stronger than the colonial project to dominate our persons and Peoples.
Here, organizations like the The Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition can help lead the way in understanding how schooling is perpetuates past harms. ““The reality is that so many teachers in Indian Country are not Native, and often end up going into communities with really good intentions…but then there’s not just that cultural divide, but (it) presents all of these challenges (and) requires a remarkable volume of vulnerability,” Torres said.”
Torres goes on to say, “The focal point here is to move away from schooling — the schooling is more like programming — and move towards education,” from https://nativenewsonline.net/education/the-vast-majority-of-americans-don-t-learn-about-indian-boarding-schools-growing-up-these-native-leaders-and-educators-want-to-change-that?fbclid=IwAR3PpbT9qWmFnuvXqD4I9m9maxOZjvsNDGNu9q1jYjsmuYumuRwx1xORCjk
We are ready to listen to survivors, living and past.
We call upon all government authorities and international bodies of human rights to bring to light the depth of the evidence and impacts of the conspiracies to dominate Indigenous Peoples by decimating our childhood.
Let no grave of a child killed at the hands of boarding school predators go unaccounted for.
May the dead and the living find healing and reckoning through us all.
We join the international calls for justice, truth and healing for boarding school victims and survivors across Semanawak Tlaltikpakampa Turtle Island North America.
We call on all Indigenous authorities to replace compulsory government schooling including boarding schools today with autonomous indigenous nation controlled systems of education.
“Educar es sembrar las Semillas del Pueblo”
To learn more please visit:
https://boardingschoolhealing.org/
https://illuminatives.org/carousel-slide/addressing-historical-trauma-the-indian-boarding-school-era/
https://irshdc.ubc.ca/orangeshirtday/
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/4752/text
https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-haaland-announces-federal-indian-boarding-school-initiative
Source Citation: The 1539 Inquisition and Trial of Don Carlos of Texcoco in Early Mexico, Article in Hispanic American Historical Review88(4) · November 2008 with 139 Reads
DOI: 10.1215/00182168–2008–001