Norma Ryuko Kaweloku Wong told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday that her grandmother was forbidden from speaking the Hawaiian language in school and that the woman didn’t speak it again until the last two weeks of her life, when only the native tongue passed through her lips.
Her family was astonished.
“She did not tell us her story, and I did not grow up in the language,” Wong told the Senate’s Committee on Indian Affairs during a Washington hearing about the
Department of Interior’s investigation into the legacy
of U.S.-backed boarding schools for Indigenous people, including at least seven in Hawaii.
“I know my story is common among many native peoples,” the former state legislator and Gov. John Waihee policy director said in a video call from her home in Kalihi. “We all experienced forced-norming, the be-stripping of language and ways, separation of land, family and peoples. And the boarding schools were forced delivery agents for this national policy.”
U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, led the hearing, which also examined a bill, S. 2907, that proposes to create a Truth and Healing Commission on the Indian Boarding School Policies Act.
Schatz opened the hearing by acknowledging the shameful history of the Indian Boarding School era, which stretched from the early 19th century to the late 1960s. He pledged the committee’s commitment
to work with affected native communities.
“As Indigenous peoples of the United States, American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians were subject to the same cruel intent of federal assimilation policies and practices, and they continue to share in the impact and lasting inequities
of the federal government’s centuries-long drive to try
to erase native cultures. We must do all we can to right this wrong,” the senator said.
In May the Interior Department released a report that described how the boarding school era perpetuated poverty, mental health disorders, substance abuse and premature deaths in Indigenous communities. The report also detailed more than 500 student deaths linked to these
institutions.
The first-of-its-kind federal study asserts that the boarding schools in Hawaii, like elsewhere, were used as tools to suppress native language and culture and
to assimilate Native Hawaiians.
In emotional testimony, Interior Secretary Deb
Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo nation in New Mexico, said the country’s obligation to native communities means that federal policies should support and revitalize native health care, education, languages and the cultural practices “that prior Indian policies sought to destroy.”
“Federal Indian boarding school policy is a part of America’s story we must tell,” she said. “While we cannot change that history,
I believe our nation will benefit from a full understanding of the truth of what took place and a focus on healing the wounds of the past.”
Haaland said a yearlong tour of the country by her Interior officials featuring
listening sessions to hear the boarding school stories and experiences of Indigenous people will begin in Oklahoma.
“I am confident that together we can strengthen Indian Country and the Native Hawaiian community now and for future generations,” she said.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who introduced S. 2907, told the committee that over a five-year period the Truth and Healing Commission would develop
recommendations to the federal government to acknowledge and heal the trauma caused by the boarding school policies, which she called disgraceful. She added that she
expects one of the recommendations to be a hotline that will allow survivors and affected communities to tell their stories.
“This work will be painful but it is long overdue,” Warren said.
The first volume of the Interior Department’s boarding schools report identified 408 schools in 37 states and territories. Of the 106 pages of the report, only nine are dedicated to the boarding schools in Hawaii, including Kamehameha Schools and Hilo Boarding School, which was founded by missionaries in 1836 for Native Hawaiian male children.
