Unearthing the horror of Native American boarding schools

Back in May, the remains of 215 children were discovered on the grounds of a former residential (boarding) school in Canada that was used to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. Soon after, over 750 unmarked graves were discovered at another residential school. Given the historical brutality of such schools in their treatment of Indigenous children, it is widely suspected that similar gravesites exist at residential schools across the US and Canada. Investigating these atrocities will require a significant commitment from the US and Canadian governments, and atoning for the (continued) evils wrought upon Indigenous people will take an even more significant commitment from all of us. In our first segment for this week’s episode of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc talks about all this and more with Mary Annette Pember, an award-winning journalist and photographer whose work appears regularly in Indian Country Today and other outlets like In These Times. Pember, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Wisconsin Ojibwe, recently authored an article for the Goodman Institute for Investigative Journalism on how the Catholic Church stole $30 million from Native families, and another article in The Atlantic exposing the horror of Indigenous children being stolen from their homes and put in boarding schools.In our second segment, we bring you the latest installment of our ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” which highlights the diverse voices of Jewish activists, artists, intellectuals, and others who are speaking out against the Israeli occupation. In this installment, Marc and his guests, professor Mira Sucharov and Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton, raise difficult questions regarding the different personal and political meanings of Zionism. Mira Sucharov is associate professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and the author of The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace. Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton is a world-renowned opera singer and currently serves the Jewish congregation of Or Haneshamah in Ottawa.Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-marc-steiner-show--4661751/support.