This is the best summary I could come up with:

Taken from their homes on reservations, Native American children — some as young as 5 — were forced to attend Indian boarding schools as part of an effort by the federal government to wipe out their languages and culture and assimilate them into White society.

When one of Neconie’s sons heard that Haaland, the nation’s first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, was making a trip to Riverside last summer to listen to boarding school survivors, he encouraged his father to go.

The social workers arrived at the family’s one-room shack in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1955 and gave Jim LaBelle’s mom a stark choice: give up her two boys for adoption or send them to an Indian boarding school.

LaBelle, whose Iñupiaq name is Aqpaiuq, which means “fast runner,” was fluent in his language when he left home, but after he saw other students being slapped and shaken when they were given commands in English they couldn’t understand, he learned to keep quiet.

During his first few weeks at the boarding school, LaBelle said, he and many of his bunkmates got sick from the salted meats and cans of processed vegetables and powdered milk they were served instead of their traditional diets of walrus, seal, moose, salmon, wild potatoes, celery and blackberries.

For years, Brought Plenty, who went on to work as an HIV educator, teach art and library sciences at elementary schools in the Dallas area and raise four children, struggled with bouts of depression.

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