Thread by @churchanity_

'They never broke my spirit': Survivors of Indian schools on Menominee Reservation demand Catholic church to acknowledge abuse.+
@gbpressgazette #MassGraves #Canada

As the church bells ring twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., every day at St. Anthony’s in Neopit on the Menominee Reservation, advocate Lorraine Shooter said the post-traumatic stress disorder in some of the elders nearby becomes triggered.+

The elders had been students at St. Anthony’s School at a time when U.S. government and church policy was to forcefully assimilate Indigenous youth and separate them from their traditional culture and language.+

Shooter, who’s with the organization Menominees Against Dope, helped organize a vigil in Keshena Tuesday night for the survivors of abuse at Catholic schools and to demand accountability.+

Dewey Schanandore, 75, said he suffered regular physical abuse when he attended St. Anthony School from 1954 to 1962.+

“They call that being baptized in violence,” Schanandore said. He said the physical abuse was used as a kind of mind control to enforce a policy of assimilation.+

“They tried to remove our cultural awareness and replace it with European values,” Schanandore said as he described the techniques as torture. “With that in mind, they never broke my spirit.”+

He said he grew up with other Indigenous children who has also suffered physical abuse and some had suffered sexual abuse, especially at the boarding school of St. Michael’s in Keshena.+
#IndigenousResidentialSchool #SexualAbuseinChurch