Jerilyn DeCoteau (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa) offers this slide presentation about the federal government’s policy of family separation and forced assimilation of Native children and the ongoing impacts on her family and on American Indian* communities and tribes today. Jerilyn is co-founder of Right Relationship Boulder and spent her career with the Native American Rights Fund. She currently serves on the supreme courts of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and the Pueblo de San Ildefonso. She is past President of the Board of Directors of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. The Coalition was created to develop and implement a national strategy that increases public awareness and cultivates healing for the profound trauma experienced by individuals, families, communities, American Indian and Alaska Native Nations resulting from the U.S. adoption and implementation of the Boarding School Policy of 1869.

“The heritage passed down to Native Americans is often too painful to name. Not reported in textbooks, and often not spoken of by boarding school survivors, is the chilling fact that for generations Native American children were forced to attend boarding schools far away from their homes for the purpose of destroying all that is Indian in them,” writes Jerilyn in “Claiming Our Heritage from the Boarding School Experiment.”