Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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When the cruel practice of forcing Native American children into boarding schools finally ended in the 1970s, it may have seemed like the nation had moved beyond an ugly history of family separations that stretched back to the slavery era.
But then came President Donald Trump.
And now, with his administration’s barbaric separations of families at the southern border, Trump and his enablers have joined the ranks of generations of bigots in our culture who have weaponized children against their parents.
Trump, Kirstjen Nielsen, Stephen Miller — the dark architect of the separation policy — and others now stand alongside the most vile racists of our past with these actions.
This is an administration that not only split off children as young as 10 months old from their parents, but said in a recent court filing that it may never be able to reunite all of the separated families.
Let that sink in. Across the nation, there are thousands of children locked up in no-touch detention facilities who may never see their parents again, because of an administration that carried out massive-scale separations with virtually no regard for how to track those children and get them back in their parents’ care.
This is starkly reminiscent of slave owners breaking up families and selling off children to new owners, part of an orchestrated effort to ensure adults remained vulnerable and destabilized to thwart a sense of community or cultural continuity. As could be the case with today’s migrant children, many of those separated from slaves never saw their parents again.
For decades, the practice left slave families facing constant fear of being divided.
The Civil War ended that, but almost immediately the nation launched its barbaric practice of forcibly breaking up families by sending Native American children to boarding schools far from home. These were de facto indoctrination camps where the children were punished for speaking their native languages, forced to cut their hair and replace their native names with English ones, forbidden to wear native clothes, and in many cases subjected to physical and sexual abuse. They also were forced to give up their native religions and adopt Christianity. These children were routinely prevented from seeing their parents for years on end.
“They were taught that their cultures were inferior,” reads the website for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. “Some teachers ridiculed and made fun of the students’ traditions. These lessons humiliated the students and taught them to be ashamed of being American Indian.”
As with the separation of slave families, the boarding schools were a vile attack on civil rights and represented an outright attempt to divide families to control adult behavior.
More than 150 years later, we’re still dealing with the consequences of those terrible actions.
Now, with Trump, children are being weaponized to control a vulnerable population.
And just like the naked cruelty of earlier family separations, the actions of this administration will have repercussions for our nation — and for the families affected — that could last decades.
Don’t be misled by the administration’s occasional denials that the separations were designed for deterrence. The fact that some aides have bluntly stated otherwise tells you all you need to know.
What’s happened is a reversal of the enlightenment that had seemingly ended family separations for good, and the rekindling of a strain of American racism that threads back centuries.
This will be a major chapter of Trump’s hateful and bigoted legacy. And sadly, it will also leave another permanent dark mark on the nation’s history.
