Indian Country Must Push Back on Conservative Attempts to Whitewash Boarding School History

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Opinion. About thirty years ago, I made a deal with myself to read at least one book a year written by a conservative right-winger so that I could try to understand the rationale behind their positions on race relations and governmental policy. As the years flew by and the United States became extremely polarized, I stopped reading conservative writings because I found many of their arguments lacked merit and were, quite often, mean-spirited and laced with paternalistic attitudes towards people of color.

So this past Monday when one of my business partners sent me a link to an article entitled “Stirring Up Hatred Against Indian Boarding Schools: The Interior Department joins the movement to rebrand education as cultural genocide,” I read with some hesitation. Published by The American Conservative, the article was written by one of the magazine’s senior editors, Helen Andrews.

Andrews takes issue with the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report that was released on May 11, 2022. She accuses the U.S. Department of the Interior of making a big deal out of nothing.

“This attempt to create a national scandal over Indian boarding schools is a thoroughly political scheme contrived by activists to stoke outrage regardless of the facts. No surprise there, because that is what the issue has always been, from the very beginning,” Andrews writes.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/indian-country-must-push-back-214916402.html