On the Topic of the Lost Lecture...

Frankly speaking, I was rather shocked by how much of the material I was familiar with. Specifically, I learned about the specific instances of cultural genocide, e.g. cutting hair, changing names, etc., through a similar documentary in APUSH. The punitive measures for children who did not assimilate seamlessly were extremely harsh, and these reeducation camps were cited as one of the major factors that contributed to the calculated eradication of indigenous cultures. With that prefaced, there were still a number of bits and pieces of information from the lecture that I was either not made aware of at the same time I learned the rest of the information, or that I simply forgot.

Firstly, I was surprised by the fact that these reeducation camps kept running through the 1960s, as its recency is chilling to think about. Another part of my surprise came from a separate event in the 1960s: The Civil Rights Act. If you were to survey a random person on when they thought the US had the most significant shift to social equality, they'd probably respond with 1964 and the passage of The Civil Rights Act. Even though The Civil Rights Act didn't address indigenous peoples, it did represent a paradigm shift in public and, to an extent, systemic opinion of minorities. In that sense, the 1960s are probably the last decade you'd think would house cultural genocide, but there it was unabashed.

In a similar vein, I was appalled by the recent discoveries of mass graves for indigenous children. Just generally, I find the permanent harm of children to be inexcusable, but I guess those who murdered them didn't care enough to see them as humans in the first place.