U.S. Indian Boarding Schools: A Legacy of Survivance

Speaker: Suzan Shown Harjo

The boarding school system was viewed as an alternative to killing all Indians - a goal which proved both illusory and too costly - and was supported by both the “civilizationists” and many “exterminationists.” Enforcing an English-only/Christian-only curriculum with corporal punishment, boarding schools immersed hostage-students in “Civilization” and isolated them from their people, cultures, languages, values, lands, waters, and ways, while using them to control their strong families at home. Generations of Suzan Shown Harjo’s family survived these schools, but some did not. Join Suzan to discuss the impact of these schools on those who attended them and on Native Peoples today.

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) is an effective advocate for Native Peoples’ treaty, human, and civil rights, who has helped recover more than one million acres of Native lands. Also a poet, writer, lecturer, and curator, she lived in New York City and worked at the Pacifica Network’s free speech flagship, WBAI-FM radio station, where she was the first woman department head responsible for filling one-third of the air time with arts and cultures programming. She co-produced the first national Native news show with her husband, Frank Ray Harjo (1947-1982).

In 1974, her family moved to D.C., where she was news director of the American Indian Press Association and then worked on national policy issues for the National Congress of American Indians, where she later served as executive director, and for the Native American Rights Fund. A political appointee and legislative liaison in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, she coordinated the yearlong review and reports of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

Harjo is founding president of The Morning Star Institute, a national Native rights organization, and a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian. She began work in the 1960s to protect sacred places, to free ancestral remains and cultural patrimony from collectors, and to end “Indian” stereotyping and mascoting in advertising, sports, and place names. By the time the Washington NFL team ended its former name in 2020, most of the “Indian” names and mascots in sports were removed, but many remain and continue to be challenged.

In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.

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