"Riverside remains open but now champions Indian culture. 'It may be good now, but it wasn't back then,' Donald Neconie told Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. (Nick Oxford for The Washington Post)
When one of Neconie’s sons heard that Haaland, the nation’s first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, was making a trip to Riverside last summer to listen to boarding school survivors, he encouraged his father to go. At first, Neconie wasn’t interested. He’d been back only once and cried as he watched crews tear down an old dorm where he’d once lived with other Kiowas and boys from the Navajo and Hopi tribes.
Eventually, he changed his mind and testified at the school, which remains open but now champions Indian culture.
'It may be good now, but it wasn’t back then,' Neconie told Haaland. 'We were sodomized. ... And people knew that was going on and did nothing to stop it.'
He believes that Indian boarding school survivors should get not just an apology but reparations, like those given to Japanese Americans for their incarceration during World War II.
'I didn’t think I was an animal,' Neconie said, 'but they treated us like we were. … Nothing could ever make me forget — or forgive — what they did to us.”'
~ Dana Hedgpath
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/08/07/indian-boarding-school-survivors-abuse-trauma/
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