Resolution submitted to the Minnesota House of Representatives asking the state to formally apologize for years of abandonment, mistreatment, and abuses.

WHEREAS, since the founding of the state hospital institutions, now called regional treatment centers, in 1879, tens of thousands of Minnesotans with mental illnesses and developmental and other disabilities (primarily mental retardation) have been removed from Minnesota communities and committed to live in state institutions where many of these Minnesotans have died and been buried in unmarked graves or graves that bore only a number; and
WHEREAS, residents of these state institutions were forced to labor without compensation in peonage systems that have since been ruled unconstitutional or were abandoned to lives devoid of purposeful activity; and
WHEREAS, residents of these state institutions were subjected to medical experiments and procedures without their consent, including the routine subjection of women inmates to involuntary sterilizations; and
WHEREAS, residents of these state institutions were subjected to shock treatments, frontal lobotomies, aversive drug therapies, isolation, and pain-based treatment programs; and
WHEREAS, thousands of children grew up in these state institutions learning none of the comforts, joys, and cultural ways that are learned in family life; and
WHEREAS, thousands of parents whose children required intensive care were forced to make painful decisions about institutionalizing their children or to provide all the care and education they required themselves, and in the process incurring immeasurable financial, career, social, and familial burdens; and
WHEREAS, parents of persons with developmental disabilities were advised by Minnesota's medical professionals to institutionalize their children, to break their familial bonds by making them wards of the state irrespective of the family's and community's ability to support and nurture these children; and
WHEREAS, these fellow Minnesotans were portrayed by Minnesota public officials as subhuman organisms, as deviant individuals to be feared by society, as eternal children unaccountable for their behavior and incapable of speaking for themselves or shaping their own lives, which greatly diminished their fellow citizens' ability and willingness to accept them for their own unique qualities; and
WHEREAS, institutional care for persons with developmental disabilities has been scientifically demonstrated to be detrimental to people's basic development, including social development, development of self-determination, and the development of the basic skills of daily living; and
WHEREAS, Minnesotans once viewed this institutional treatment as acceptable and subjected tens of thousands of citizens to it; and
WHEREAS, Minnesota's state institutions are closing and, through this process, their history and the acknowledgment of our collective responsibility for it may be forgotten; and WHEREAS, people who were relegated to state institutions and their families have never received a formal apology from the state; NOW, THEREFORE,
BE IT RESOLVED that the State of Minnesota makes a public apology to all persons with mental illness and developmental and other disabilities who have been involuntarily committed to state institutions, acknowledging that it regrets this history of involuntary institutionalization of persons with those disabilities, and that it commits itself in their memory to move steadfastly to ensure that all Minnesotans with developmental disabilities who in the future turn to the state for assistance will receive the appropriate assistance they need.
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