Andrew Windyboy, belonging to the Chippewa Cree nation, has experienced the traumatic experience of residential schools for indigenous children. Between the mid -1960s and the early 1970s he attended two institutes: the Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota and the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota.
The ban on speaking the mother tongue
From the first day, Windyboy found himself in an environment hostile to his identity. “I was not allowed to speak my mother tongue or practice my native uses,” he says.
Every time he pronounced a word in Cree, the language he had grown with, he suffered punishment.
It was my first language, I knew no other language … and every time I spoke, I was hit.
Public humiliations
The punishments were not only physical, but they also aimed to destroy dignity. Windyboy recalls that he was forced to wear “this great white cone on which” Dunce “was written” and having to bring him to the other children, who laughed at him.
They cut his hair and made him kneel in front of the entrance door, so that anyone who entered could shine him:
They passed, rubbed my head and laughed about me because they had caught me to speak.
The loss of language and identity
After years of punishment and violence, Windyboy ended up stopping speaking Cree. “I lost my language, I lost my native language,” he confesses. The only element he managed to preserve was his indigenous name, which means “old man an eagle”.
A wound also spiritual
For the people of Windyboy, the language is not only communication, but a bridge with the spiritual world.
When we talk to our spirits, they don’t understand English, he explains.
The loss of the language also meant an interruption of that ancestral bond.
Memory and justice
Windyboy hopes that his testimony serves to ensure that similar abuses do not repeat:
I hope nobody should go through this.
The memory of those years is indelible for him:
It was a difficult period of my life, I will always remember it ».
For him, the way they were treated indigenous children is “a terrible shame” and a wound that requires recognition, memory and justice.
@greenme_it Andrew Windyboy, survivor of the Chippewa Cree tribe, tells the violence suffered firsthand in residential schools for indigenous children, where native languages were prohibited and identity was brutally canceled. . . . #indigeni #nativiammericani #chippewacree #storievere
♬ Original sound – Greenme
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