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These are said to be actual tiny child handcuffs once used by the U.S. government to restrain captured Native American children — to drag them away from their families and send them to Indian boarding schools, where their identities, cultures, and languages were systematically stripped away. Haskell’s Cultural Center & Museum, located on the campus of Haskell Indian Nations University, tells the full — and often cruel — story of Haskell’s painful past. Opened in 2002, the Center’s permanent exhibit, Honoring Our Children Through Seasons of Sacrifice, Survival, Change and Celebration, features artifacts, photos, and letters from the school’s early days. Among these is a heavy lock and key from the small on-site jail once used to punish students. Soon, these handcuffs may join those displays — adding their chilling testimony to the brutal truth of the motto: “Kill the Indian, save the child.” Not much is known about the handcuffs. They were donated in 1989 by a non-Native man who told Bobbi Rahder, then director of the Haskell Cultural Center, that they were used to restrain children being taken to boarding schools. The man said his father had kept them for years but no longer wanted them. Rahder remembers how relieved he seemed to hand them over. He disappeared soon after, and repeated efforts to contact him failed. Mysterious donations happen often at the Center — but these tiny shackles were different. “I was shocked and afraid to touch them,” Rahder recalled. A modest ceremony was held the next day at the school’s medicine fire. Women from the Creek and Choctaw Nations made a tiny quilt in which the handcuffs were reverently wrapped before being stored away for more than twenty years. Elders blessed them and advised that they remain hidden for a time — too painful to face. Yet as word of the handcuffs spread in recent years, students and faculty began discussing how crucial it is to acknowledge them. They are tangible evidence of the brutal policies that tore generations apart — a small but powerful reminder of a history too often buried or whitewashed. Today, there are no firm plans for how or when the handcuffs might be displayed. But many agree that they should be. They speak for all the children taken, all the families broken, all the spirits that endured. They tell the real story of who truly paid the price for us to be here today — and who the real savages were. “They tell the REAL story of who truly paid the price for us to be here today.” May we never forget. — Courtesy of Native Americans Honoring Our Ancestors and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown