From Native News Online by Levi Rickert
July 14, 2026
Opinion
The first lesson of Indian boarding schools wasn’t reading or writing.
It was silence. I was reminded of that during Labor Day weekend 2022 while talking with a tribal leader at a protest against Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline at the Straits of Mackinac. Weeks earlier, she had testified at the Interior Department’s Road to Healing event about surviving a Catholic-run Indian boarding school in northern Michigan.
She described years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse Native children endured there. But what struck me most wasn’t just what happened inside the school. It was that Catholic nuns warned Native children never to speak about what happened inside the school. If they did, terrible things would happen to them.
That conversation came back to me when I read the White House report, Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. Released quietly during the fireworks over the National Mall as the nation celebrated its 250th Independence Day, the 162-page report wasn’t simply another government publication. Its timing seemed almost symbolic: celebrate the nation’s birth while attempting to mute some of its most painful truths.
Read more at this link: History Can’t Be Patriotic if It Requires Silence