The Truth Inside Indian Boarding Schools (1928/2025) w/ Dana Hedgpeth

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's February 24th. This day in 1928, a major report is issued highlighting conditions inside the so-called Indian Boarding Schools, which were set up by the US Government in the middle of the 19th century to "Americanize" Native American children.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie are joined by reporter Dana Hedgpeth to discuss what the report found, and how little reform took place inside these schools despite generation after generation of abuse and secrecy.

Dana is one of the author's behind a massive new investigation in The Washington Post that uncovered new records and tried to paint a picture of the true level of deaths and suffering inside Indian boarding schools.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.0	This day, February 21st, 1928, an 847-page report starts to paint a deeper picture of just how devastating the effect of Indian boarding schools was in this country's history.
0:24.7	The report was submitted to the Secretary of the Interior and was the first general study of Native American conditions since the 1850s.
0:32.1	The report found generally that the federal government was failing at its goals of protecting Native Americans,
0:37.9	protecting their land, their resources, both personal and cultural. And a lot of this was related
0:43.1	to this practice of so-called Indian boarding schools, where students were Americanized,
0:48.1	but also suffered greatly. So here to discuss what we know and don't know about the Native American
0:53.5	boarding schools are, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.
0:59.6	Hello, Jody. Hey there. Now, as I introduce our guest listeners, let me reset the timeline a little bit for you because let's take a look here. A lot of those schools were set up in the mid-1800s. The report we're talking about
1:10.9	today was in the 1920s. The schools lasted until about the 1960s or so. And here we are in the
1:17.0	2020s and we are still learning new information. In fact, it could be that some 3,000 Native American
1:24.0	children died while in custody of the U.S. government in these schools.
1:27.9	And that number comes from a new investigation in the Washington Post, came out just in the last
1:32.3	couple months. It's a number that is much higher than has been in any other report.
1:37.6	Dana Hedgepeth is a journalist who has been at the Washington Post for 25 years.
1:41.4	She is also an enrolled member of the Hollowas-Sopony tribe of North Carolina.
1:46.1	She was one of the main reporters behind this new investigation and is here to discuss her reporting
1:50.2	and this practice of native boarding schools. Dana, welcome to the show. Thanks for doing this.
1:54.6	Thanks for your incredible investigation.
1:56.8	Thanks so much for having it.
1:59.0	So I want to get into what you found in your study and then, of course, the history of boarding schools.
	...

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