Haaland tour casts light on Native boarding school abuses

Image: KKCO

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland will visit Oklahoma on Saturday for the first stop on a yearlong nationwide tour to hear about the painful experiences of Native Americans who were sent to government-backed boarding schools designed to strip them of their cultural identities. Haaland will meet with former students and their descendants on Saturday at the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, about 80 miles southwest of Oklahoma City.

Although most of the boarding schools closed long ago and none still exist to assimilate Native children into white society, some like Riverside still function as schools, albeit with drastically different missions that they say aim to celebrate the cultural backgrounds of their Native students.