American Indian Residential Boarding Schools: Historical Trauma and the Role of Government, Churches, and Tribes in Healing Indigenous Communities

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Native Americans and Indigenous tribes in North America faced systematic destruction of their cultures, genocide, and extreme abuse. With wars against Native Americans, forced relocation from their historic lands, and mandatory residential boarding schools where Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their parents, the social fabric of Native American communities was destroyed. These travesties were government sanctioned and enacted by churches. The American Indian Residential Schools serve as the most recent and egregious factories of abuse. The policies and actions enforced against Native Americans left a generation plagued by abuse leaving a broken society with intergenerational trauma. This paper will reflect on the role of the Government and churches, in the destruction of Native American culture and the imposition of trauma on their communities and will assess the role of the Government, Churches, and Tribes in the holistic restoration of Native American communitie