At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released July 30 by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.
The investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness, accidents and abuse during a 150-year period that mostly ended in 1969, officials said.
Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said.
The investigation findings follow a series of listening sessions across the U.S. over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.
“The federal government took deliberate and strategic action through boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures, and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a July 30 call with reporters.
“Make no mistake,” she added, “This was a concerted attempt to eradicate the quote, ‘Indian problem,’ to either assimilate or destroy Native peoples all together.”
In an initial report released in 2022, officials estimated that more than 500 children died at the schools. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, the last of which were still operating in the 1970s.
The schools often gave Native American kids English names, put them through military drills and forced them to perform manual labor, such as farming, brickmaking and working on the railroad, officials said.
The department found that over 150 years, the boarding school system consisted of 417 federally funded schools across 37 states or then-territories, including 22 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaiʻi. Most were run by religious orders, though some were operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, including the Wrangell Institute, which ran from 1932 to 1975.
At least 31 Alaska Native children died in the schools, according to the report.
One of the appendices for the latest volume lists the tribal affiliations of students known to have died in federally funded boarding schools, though the authors intentionally do not make public their names or the schools. Among the dead, it lists six Aleut/Unangan children, five Tlingit/Tlinkit and 10 “Eskimo.” Another 10 are listed only as “Alaskan,” with no specific tribal or cultural affiliation noted.
The Department of Interior has not reported finding any burial sites on the grounds of the former Wrangell school.
Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during listening sessions in Alaska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their native language, getting locked in basements, and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities.
In this final report, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland included some of the harrowing descriptions offered by survivors during the listening sessions.
A former student from the Wrangell Institute said the school “was a place that attracted pedophiles and many matrons, men and women, perpetrated themselves upon little boys and girls. And what I witnessed in the boys dorm were where matrons were sodomizing boys in their beds or in the bathrooms. We saw girls going home in the middle of the school year pregnant and a lot of these children were like 11 and 12, 13 years old.”
Nationwide, according to the report, students were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and the withholding of food. Many left the schools with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.
Donovan Archambault, 85, the former chairman of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, said beginning at age 11 he was sent away to boarding schools where he was mistreated, forced to cut his hair and prevented from speaking his native language. He said the experience led him to drink alcohol heavily before he turned his life around more than two decades later. He never talked about his school days with his children until he wrote a book about the experience several years ago.
“An apology is needed. They should apologize,” Archambault told The Associated Press. “But there also needs to be a broader education about what happened to us. To me, it’s part of a forgotten history.”
Haaland said she was personally “sorry beyond words,” but she suggested a formal apology should come from the federal government. She didn’t say if she would push President Joe Biden to issue one.
Religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, according to the new report.
By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The Minnesota-based group has tallied more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support.
U.S. Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church’s role in trauma the children experienced. And in 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with boarding schools in Canada. He said the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
Legislation pending before Congress would establish a “Truth and Healing Commission” to document and acknowledge past injustices related to boarding schools. The measure is sponsored in the Senate by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and backed by Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
“It is time the federal government takes responsibility for its harmful policies,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor last week. “Our commission will provide a Native-led process for communities to share the stories, share the truth, and pursue healing.”
The Anchorage Daily News contributed to this report.
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