Why the U.S. needed to apologize for its 'Indian school' policy

If Charles Dickens had lived in, say, Indio instead of London, and if, instead of writing about the brutalities and indignities of an English boarding school in Yorkshire, he had written about the brutalities and indignities of an Indian boarding school in, say, Riverside, the national conscience might have been shocked to act a long, long time ago. Sherman believed that his namesake school would be “the redemption of a race.” The Fort Yuma boarding school opened in 1884 at the old military fort on the Colorado River in Imperial County. In a documentary called “These Are Not ‘Stories,” produced by the Museum of Riverside, the Sherman Indian Museum and UC Riverside, Rose Ann Hamilton of the Cahuilla Band of Indians described what happened to her mother, born in 1932 and a survivor of “a lot of dark years” at several boarding schools. The April 1900 L.A. Times announcement of the marriage of two Yuma Indian School grads noted that “both are full-blooded Indians … and both very much civilized.” In July 1942, the first all-Navajo platoon — many of whom may have ended up as the celebrated “code talkers” — finished Marine training in San Diego. The Associated Press story began: “Hang on to your scalps, Hitler, Hirohito and Mussolini, for 29 red-blooded young Americans are on the warpath … “ The Civil Rights, Chicano liberation, and American Indian movements of the 1960s, and new political engagement from Washington, D.C. — Robert F. Kennedy visited Sherman and other California boarding schools months before he was assassinated — finally locked the gates on many schools and their practices.