I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and

“I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.” These are the words of Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement — a man whose voice became the echo of countless silenced generations. In this sentence, spoken not with anger but with the calm gravity of remembrance, he unveils one of the darkest chapters of modern history: the boarding school era, when Indigenous children across the United States and Canada were forcibly separated from their families and communities in the name of assimilation. What Banks describes is not merely a personal memory, but a wound carried by an entire people — the tearing of children from the arms of love, the cutting of roots that bound them to language, spirit, and identity.

The origin of this quote lies in Banks’s testimony about his early life, a story shared by tens of thousands of Native children in the 19th and 20th centuries. From the 1870s onward, government policies sought to “kill the Indian, and save the man.” Under this cruel vision, Native children were taken — often by force — from their families and placed in boarding schools far from their homelands. Their hair was cut short, their native languages forbidden, their ceremonies banned. They were punished for speaking the words of their ancestors. They were taught to despise what they were. The distance of “300 miles” in Banks’s story is not merely geographical — it is symbolic of the immeasurable distance between what was taken and what could never be returned.

In the voice of this child — four years old, bewildered and alone — there is the echo of humanity’s oldest sorrow: the loss of belonging. For to be taken from one’s home, from the rhythm of one’s people, is to lose not only comfort but identity. The ancients knew that a man without roots is a tree without fruit — that to know oneself, one must know the earth beneath one’s feet, the names of the winds, the songs of the ancestors. In tearing these children from their homes, the world committed not just cruelty, but spiritual theft. They sought to replace sacred memory with obedience, and community with loneliness. Yet, as history has shown, the spirit of a people cannot be erased — it may bend beneath the weight of oppression, but it does not break.

There is a story of Tecumseh, the great Shawnee leader, who once said that “a single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong.” Dennis Banks’s life became a living testament to this wisdom. Though torn from his family as a child, he spent his life gathering those broken twigs — uniting Native people across tribes and nations in a shared movement for dignity and rights. Out of the trauma of his youth, he forged a warrior’s resolve. He turned pain into purpose, and memory into movement. In founding the American Indian Movement in 1968, he and his brothers and sisters rekindled the ancient fire of unity, declaring that Native people would no longer be invisible, no longer silent, no longer severed from their heritage.

And yet, in remembering this pain, we must not look only backward. For what Dennis Banks describes still echoes today, not in the same form, but in the lingering shadows of displacement and disconnection. Many Indigenous families still struggle to rebuild the bonds broken by centuries of forced assimilation. Many still fight to recover lost languages, to teach their children the songs that were once forbidden. The work of healing — like the journey home from that boarding school 300 miles away — is long and sacred. But it begins with remembering, and with the courage to tell the truth, no matter how painful it may be.

Banks’s words also serve as a mirror to all who listen. For though his story is born of Native history, it speaks to every soul who has ever been torn from their roots, whether by war, exile, or the loss of love. It reminds us that home is not merely a place, but a connection of hearts, a web of memory and meaning that sustains the spirit. When we are taken from it — when we forget where we come from — we grow hollow. The task of every generation is to remember, to rebuild, to teach their children where the bones of their ancestors lie and where the fires of their people still burn.

The lesson, then, is both solemn and luminous: that identity is sacred, and it must be protected, even in the face of conquest and cruelty. For those who have lost it, healing comes through remembrance — through walking back, step by step, across those 300 miles of silence to the place where the heart first learned to sing. For those who still possess it, the lesson is to cherish it, to honor it, to pass it on as a flame that never dies. Let every people, every family, every soul hold fast to what is theirs — their language, their story, their way of being — for these are the roots from which all strength grows.

So, remember the words of Dennis Banks, spoken not in bitterness but in truth: “I was taken away from my family... 300 miles from home.” Let them awaken compassion within you. Let them remind you that every injustice begins by separating a person from their sense of belonging — and every act of healing begins by bringing them home again. For to know where you come from is to know who you are, and to know who you are is to stand unshaken, even when the world tries to uproot you.