A federal report released Tuesday calls on the U.S. government to formally apologize for the abuse and trauma inflicted by its Indian boarding school system, in which more than 900 Indigenous children died.
The federal government developed the Indian boarding school system as the centerpiece of a nearly two-century-long policy of forced assimilation. Tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly abducted from their families and sent to far-away boarding schools where they were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their languages. Many children were beaten, starved, and abused in these schools.
“The federal government—facilitated by the Department I lead—took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian 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,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a news release Tuesday.
Reach of Boarding Schools More Widespread Than Previously Reported
The Interior Department reviewed more than 100 million pages of federal records and participated in listening sessions with hundreds of boarding school survivors across the country in a three-year investigation of federal Indian boarding schools.
The findings show the boarding school system was even larger than previously understood. Expanding on the first report released in May 2022, this second volume increases the number of federal Indian boarding schools in the U.S. from 408 to 417 across 37 states or then-terrorities.
It also identifies 18,624 Indigenous children by name who were forced to attend the schools. But the actual number of students is greater.
By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children—over 60,000 children—were attending boarding schools run by the federal government or by religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
At least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different schools across the federal system are identified in the report, which nearly doubles the number of Indigenous children who died while attending boarding schools.
Researchers have confirmed that at least 973 Indigenous children died in schools operated or supported by the federal government. Individual causes of death were not specified but the report said they included disease and abuse.
These figures are an undercount. As the report acknowledges, the actual number of children who died and the number of potential burial sites is greater.
Accounting for Generations of Harm
The report shares survivor accounts that illustrate how students’ traumatic experiences in Indian boarding schools—some of which operated into the 1960s—continue to harm them, their descendants, and their communities to this day. Intergenerational trauma, lasting impacts on physical and mental health, and debilitated tribal economies are among the present-day harms identified in the report.
“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” said Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, who led the research team. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”
The department makes a number of recommendations to address the enduring trauma of the federal Indian boarding school system.
At the top of the list is that U.S. government should formally apologize for its forced assimilation policies that harmed generations of Indigenous children, their families, and their communities.
Such an acknowledgment should include a recognition that the United States operated or supported public-private partnerships with religious institutions and organizations to carry out its policy; that many Indian children suffered physical, sexual, and emotional abuse at these institutions, and that many Indian children died; and that these harms continue to impact American Indian and Alaska Native individuals and Indian Country.
Noting that the federal government spent more than $23 billion in today’s dollars on the boarding school system between 1871 and 1969, the report also calls on the government to invest an equivalent amount toward addressing the present-day impacts of that system on families and communities.
“For the first time in the history of the country, the U.S. Government is accounting for its role in operating Indian boarding schools to forcibly assimilate Indian children, and working to set us on a path to heal from the wounds inflicted by those schools,” Mr. Newland wrote. “The most important thing is that our work to tell the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with action.”