At least 973 Native American children died while in the U.S. government’s inhumane boarding school system as a result of abuse, disease and other factors, according to the final findings of a U.S. Department of the Interior investigation released on Tuesday.
The investigation into the federal boarding schools system that was active between 1819 through the 1970s was commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021 “to recognize the troubled legacy of past federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and shedding light on past and present trauma in Indigenous communities.”
It’s the first comprehensive effort by the federal government to acknowledge the impact of the boarding schools, whose sole purpose was to culturally assimilate Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children by forcibly removing them from their families, communities, languages, religions and cultural beliefs.
The report said it was able to identify, by name, 18,624 Native children who entered the federal boarding school system, but that number is believed to be larger. Since many were forced to take English names, it made tracking more difficult.
Many children did not return home after they were taken from their tribes and families, the report said.
There were over 400 U.S. boarding schools and related assimilation programs across 37 states that were funded by $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending. More than half of those schools supported by the government had a religious affiliation, federal officials said.
During the investigation, officials found at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at the former locations of 65 different schools.
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In addition to the investigation into the federal boarding school system, the department completed a 12-stop “Road to Healing” tour across the U.S. allowing survivors of the schools to share their trauma and experiences with federal government officials for the first time. Those experiences will be turned into an oral history project.
Secretary Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, detailed her own family history with the federal boarding schools in an op-ed published by The Washington Post.
The extensive abuse at the boarding schools that was uncovered throughout the investigation and detailed by survivors ranged from psychological to physical.
Children were regularly punished for speaking Native languages instead of English — even when they could not understand or speak English — often by having their mouths washed with lye soap, or varying types of corporal punishment that ranged in severity. The report said many survivors of federal boarding schools were so traumatized by these punishments that they would not allow future generations to learn their languages, sometimes resulting in the extinction of their Native tongue and other cultural practices.
Survivors said the schools were run more like military academies, forcing young children to line up and march for meals and go outside, as well as shave their heads when many tribes had cultural values in long hair or braids.
Some of the survivors recalled being locked in basements or broom closets, one person saying her grandmother still can’t sleep without a light on to this day as a result of the trauma.
Other survivors described being beaten for vomiting or having diarrhea after being forced to eat certain foods.
Survivors also detailed sexual abuse that occurred at the schools, including sodomy and rape that resulted in girls as young as 11 and 12 years old being impregnated, according to the report.
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“This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations — that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways,” said Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, who helped lead the investigation. “It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and Tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
Newland recommended a list of remedies from the government moving forward. Those include:
- Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government regarding its role in adopting and implementing national federal boarding school policies.
- Investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal boarding school system.
- Establishing a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of Native Tribes, individuals, and families affected by the federal boarding school system
- Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary objects who never returned from federal boarding schools
- Returning former federal boarding school sites to tribes
- Telling the story of federal boarding schools to the American people and global community
- Investing in further research regarding the present-day health and economic impacts of the federal boarding school system
- Advancing international relationships in other countries with similar but their own unique histories of boarding schools or other assimilationist policies.
