Description
Ashley Fairbanks from the White Earth Nation and raised in Minnesota, is an Anishinaabe artist, writer, organizer, and digital strategist. She has her own design practice, trains people on anti-racist work, does strategic communications and design, and runs social media and narrative work for campaigns and nonprofits. She is also the author of This Land.
Education is a powerful tool, one that allows us to better understand the world around us. But these same tools can also be used to mislead people, and to exert control with ulterior motives. For nearly 100 years, the U.S. Government used boarding schools to remove Indigenous kids from their families and erase their traditions—to attempt to replace their culture with white, European cultures. Children were often taking by force, and were punished for speaking their native languages. The practice was not discontinued until the 1940s, and survivors of these schools have been speaking out about their experience for decades.
This painful history and the resilience of Indigenous communities who persist despite this widespread attempt at their erasure show us what the U.S. Government was willing to do to gain total power, and only by learning the true history of boarding schools can we truly understand the history of our country. Audience: Ages 10+.