Sexual abuse of Native American children in boarding schools revealed in new report

Dana Hedgepeth:

I would say Clarita Vargas, who went to school, a Catholic school, in Omak, Washington.

And Clarita came forward, and she was one of several dozen victims in a major lawsuit that was eventually settled. But what really stood out about Clarita’s stories, and what the lawyers noticed immediately, were the movie nights, as the lawyers always called them.

Clarita went there as a young girl. And unfortunately, like many other children, she was lured. A priest named Father Morse would invite her to his office on Sundays for movie night. And if you can imagine what it was like to be lured to the movies as a young child, there were no special things for it, they were lured with candy canes or chocolate bars or chocolate chip cookies at Christmas, where the children were then abused.

And the striking thing about this story, unfortunately, is that it didn’t just happen to Clarita. It happened to the other young girls at the same school. And then when the lawyers investigated and went to other reservations and talked to other people, they found that there were similar cases: luring children with candy, they were literally abusing them, taking these defenseless children out of their homes, separating them from their families, and robbing them of their culture.

And it was a pattern of abuse that was taking place, not at this school but at dozens of other schools.