THE WEEKLY REVEAL

Hello! In this issue:

• In partnership with ICT, we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children.
• Florida Sheriff Grady Judd says his top priority is to prosecute child predators. So why did his department go after a 12-year-old victim instead?
• The many contradictions behind Donald Trump’s victory.

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THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 1

In the early 1990s, Justin Pourier was a maintenance man at Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. One day, he says he stumbled upon small graves in the school’s basement. For nearly 30 years, Pourier would be haunted by what he saw and told no one except his wife.

“Those are Native children down there…hopefully their spirit was able to travel on to whatever is beyond this world,” Pourier says. In 2022, he urged school officials to search the basement for the graves.

The hunt for unmarked graves of Native children isn't happening just at Red Cloud, now called Maȟpíya Lúta. It’s one of more than 400 Indian boarding schools across the country that were part of a program designed by the federal government to “kill the Indian and save the man”—those were the actual words of one of the architects of the plan to destroy Native culture. In a historic first this fall, President Joe Biden apologized to Native Americans on behalf of the United States for the country’s past Indian boarding school policies.

This week on Reveal, in a two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), we expose the painful legacy of boarding schools for Native children with ICT reporter Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Ojibwe.

OUR LATEST

The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle

In 2016, 12-year-old Taylor Cadle made a disturbing allegation: She told the Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida that her adoptive father was sexually abusing her and had been since she was 9.

Prosecuting child predators has been one of the office’s core missions, according to Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. He’s sent deputies to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in his county. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015.

One might think that would make Taylor’s adoptive father a prime target. But rather than criminalizing him, the detective investigating the case charged Taylor with lying.

It was clear to Taylor that the police were not going to protect her from her abuser. The next time she was raped, the child would have to protect herself.

Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports, and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, now-21-year-old Taylor simmers with fury about the detective’s investigation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”

Read the story.

A Quote to Remember

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