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?

THIS WEEK’S PODCAST

Buried Secrets: America’s Indian Boarding Schools Part 2

In the late 1800s, Catholics built a boarding school on the Pine Ridge Reservation called Red Cloud Indian School.

Today, a descendant of the Lakota leader Chief Red Cloud is among members of the community demanding reparations and answers.

“In my heart, in my soul, I feel like the best thing that they can do is to exit the reservation, return all property, and pay us,” Dusty Lee Nelson told us.

The truth about US Indian boarding school policy and its connection to the Catholic church is starting to emerge. President Joe Biden recently apologized to Native people for the government’s role in the schools, in a historic step toward reconciliation.

In the second half of our two-part collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today), which originally aired in 2022, members of the Pine Ridge community put pressure on the Catholic church to share information about the boarding school it runs on the reservation.

A Quote to Remember

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. But rather than criminalizing him, the detective investigating the case charged Taylor with lying.

The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault.

When Taylor realized the police wouldn’t protect her, she resolved to protect herself. The next time she was raped, she collected her own evidence.

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