Indigenous Children Face Extreme Rates Of State Violence

By Britney Schultz in Truthout – The plight of Indigenous children recently made headlines, as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a damning report calling the country’s long-held policy of removing Native children from their families by force and placing them in state-funded residential schools “cultural genocide.” According to the report, even before Canada was founded in 1867, churches were operating boarding schools for Indigenous children, and the last federally supported residential school didn’t close until the late 1990s. In the US, Native children were subjected to similar policies for more than a century.Article VII of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 stated, “In order to insure the civilization of the Indians entering into this treaty … they, therefore, pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school.” -more-