Linette Hernandez is the daughter of Violet Fernando who was a victim and a student of the federal US Native American boarding schools. 

    “My mother said they would come with trucks, herd kids into trucks like cattle, and bring them to Tulalip,” said Hernandez,  “My mother figured she left a little bit later because her mother hid her because she didn’t want her to go to the boarding school.” 

Native families still need justice. For a long time nothing was done and nothing changed all the way up until around May, 2022 when Deb Haaland ,the first Native American United States Secretary of the Interior, stood up and became a voice for the ones who have suffered quietly for too long. Deb Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe.

   “The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old — are heartbreaking and undeniable,” Haaland said in a statement in May after a Department of the Interior Released an investigation report that outlines next steps in federal indian boarding school initiative.

What was known was that Catholic churches would come and  take native kids by the time they were 10 and transfer them by herds into trucks to these different federally run government boarding schools resulting in cruelty, terrible unfair treatment. The things that were said about the native people would soon cause lifetimes of endless trauma and PTSD for innocent children.

    “It was something the Indians had no knowledge of at that time, only their Indian Gods,” said Hernandez. “They all talked Indian, of course. The Catholic people didn’t understand Indian, and it was like, they said the Indian language was the devils’ language, and the Indian children at that time, they could not use their Indian language.” 

Students had to learn English.

  “This is what I get from other elders that went to the schools. It was super hard on them. The way she described it as putting the kids in the trucks like cattle and holling them away from their families. It was terrible, I can’t imagine.”

Many helpless children were taken.

“I feel like it affected her in a way,” said Hernandez. “She never forgot the treatment. It was not an easy life for these kids having to leave their families, learn another language learn a different way other than their culture. She talked about all her life.”

Hernandez says that she would talk about the punishments. 

“It was just a lot of punishing that they didn’t understand.”

For a long time nothing had been done and nothing changed all the way up until around May 2022 when Deb Haaland the first Native American United States Secretary of the Interior stood up and became a voice for the ones who have suffered quietly for too long.

  Many more helpless children were taken, some we knew who would not make it out.

 “Till this day she never did say anything good about in her lifetime,” says Hernandez. “It was trauma from the times she was probably around 10 to 12. She always felt like she was older than ten but grandma hid her as long as she could.”