U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, herself a Pueblo Native American, has launched an investigation into atrocities committed at Indian Boarding Schools.

This government policy affected thousands of Native American children for a century of our history, beginning in 1879 with the first school located in Carlisle, Pa. (It’s now on the campus of the Army War College there.) Before the government was done, there were over 350 such schools spread across the United States. In essence, it involved snatching Native kids from their tribes and sending them far away from their families, to educate them in the white man’s ways. This included shaving their long hair, replacing their Native American clothing with Western attire and forbidding the children from speaking their own native language — English only. The schools incorporated a very strict daily schedule and regular beatings for the slightest infraction. The countryside is littered with cemeteries of children who died at these schools from homesickness, abuse, overwork and unsanitary conditions.

The classic work on this topic is “Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928” by David Wallace Adams (1995, revised and expanded 2020). The last page, page 367, gives the author’s conclusion, “In the final analysis, the boarding school constitutes yet another deplorable episode in the long history of indigenous-white relations. For Native elders who witnessed the catastrophic developments of the 19th century — the bloody warfare, the near-extinction of the bison, the scourge of disease and starvation, the shrinking of the tribal land base, the indignities of reservation life, the invasion of missionaries and white settlers — there seemed to be no end to the cruelties perpetrated by whites. And after all this, the schools. After all this, the white man had concluded that the only way to save Indians was to render them culturally extinct. And so, the last great Indian war should be waged against children. They were coming for the children.”

The mission of the boarding schools was called “assimilation.” the slogan of the boarding schools was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The result of the boarding schools was and is generational trauma.

Generational trauma does not mean simply one traumatized generation. It refers to trauma passed down from one generation to the next.

As a practitioner of the shamanic healing method known as “Soul Retrieval,” I can attest that generational trauma does exist. When a person experiences any kind of trauma, part of their soul can split off and go to what is called non-ordinary reality. The shaman’s task is to journey there and retrieve the lost soul part(s) and return them to the person awaiting healing.

At times, the symptoms that prompt a person to seek healing do not seem to have any roots in the person’s memory of their current life. At those times it will often occur that the person’s ill feelings are traceable to something in the person’s past lives.

So it is that our Native American sisters and brothers today may very well be suffering from what happened to their ancestors, conceivably at these boarding schools — or anywhere else on the spectrum of suffering inflicted on the Native population by aggressive white settlement.

Bill O’Brien is a consciousness coach and shamanic practitioner. He and his wife Linda have lived in Shepherdstown since 2005. He can be reached at billobrienconsciousnesscoach@gmail.com.