More than 900 Native American children died while being forced to attend Indian boarding schools, according to a new federal report that urges the U.S. government to formally apologize for the enduring trauma inflicted by its systematic effort to assimilate the children and destroy their culture.
More than 900 Native American children died at U.S. boarding schools
The U.S. government should apologize for policies that traumatized generations of children and their families, a new federal report urges.
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“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,” wrote Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland in a letter presenting the report to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary.
The report is the second and final by the department examining 417 federal boarding schools that operated from 1819 to 1969 across 37 states. It built on the department’s May 2022 report to further document the scope and impact of Indian boarding schools in the United States, and it makes recommendations for the federal government to reconcile the traumatic legacy.
In the new report, Newland’s team of researchers said they identified 18,624 Native American children who were forced to attend the schools, but noted that the number of students was greater. The report also estimated that the federal government spent more than $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars over 98 years to implement the Indian boarding school system, similar institutions and associated assimilation policies.
In 2021, Haaland — who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe of New Mexico and whose own relatives were sent to boarding schools — launched an investigation into the network of U.S. boarding schools after the discovery of suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada. In the United States, generations of Native American children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools hundreds of miles away to be assimilated into White society. Children were stripped of their names and instead often assigned numbers, their long hair was cut, and they were beaten for speaking their languages, leaving deep emotional scars on Native American families and communities. By 1900, 1 out of 5 Native American school-age children attended a boarding school.
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.— Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian affairs
The Washington Post, in a year-long investigation published in May, found at least 122 priests, sisters and brothers assigned to 22 boarding schools since the 1890s were later accused of sexually abusing Native American children under their care. Most of the documented abuse occurred in the 1950s and 1960s and involved more than 1,000 children.
About two weeks later, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a formal apology for the church’s role in inflicting a “history of trauma” on Native Americans. The document said, “We all must do our part to increase awareness and break the culture of silence that surrounds all types of afflictions and past mistreatment and neglect.”
The Interior report noted the Catholic Bishops’ apology but said there is no indication that the bishops support the idea that Pope Francis apologize to Native Americans in the United States for the abuse and mistreatment of children at boarding schools, as he did in Canada. The pope traveled to Canada in 2022 and apologized for the church’s role there in the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time.”
The pope has remained silent about the abuse at Catholic-run Indian boarding schools in the United States. About half of the 417 federal Indian boarding schools were operated by a religious institution or organization, according to the report. At least 80 of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church or its affiliates. On a call Tuesday, Haaland told reporters that “it would be a really wonderful gesture” if the pope apologized to Native Americans in the United States.
The government, the report said, should acknowledge its role in running the Indian boarding school system in which many Native American children were physically, sexually and emotionally abused and hundreds died. The report also called for the U.S. government to issue an apology to the individuals, families and Indian tribes that were harmed by the 150-year boarding school policy.
In the spring, Deborah Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and the chief executive of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, met at the White House with Tom Perez, a senior adviser and assistant to President Biden, and asked for a presidential apology for the widespread mistreatment and abuse that Native American children suffered at boarding schools. Parker’s group has documented more than 100 former boarding schools in addition to the 417 identified by the federal government, most of them run by religious groups and churches.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the new report or its push for an apology.
The report documented 973 deaths, including 189 children who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federal Indian boarding school located off a reservation and established in 1879 in Pennsylvania.
Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe), said in the call with reporters that the Interior Department was unable to identify the names of many children who died, nor the reasons for their deaths. But he said many died amid outbreaks of disease. For other children, “it’s very likely that many of those kids died of abuse or the aftereffects of the abuse,” Newland said.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said the Interior Department’s revelation that 136 children from his tribe died while at boarding schools served as a haunting reminder of the generational damage done to tribal languages and culture.
“Those are grandmas and grandpas that never came home,” said Nygren, whose grandmother was taken from her home on the Navajo reservation and sent nearly 700 miles away to Sherman Institute, an Indian boarding school in Riverside, Calif. “They were deported from their reservations to try to take the Indian, to try to take the Navajo, out of them. The government took these kids and they never returned to their families. It’s just devastating and it ruined 136 families.”
Haaland’s three-year investigation cost $21 million and involved a review of about 103 million pages of U.S. government records at the American Indian Records Repository in Lenexa, Kan., and nine National Archives and Records Administration facilities across the country.
But the department said some records are no longer available. Some schools burned down and those records may have been destroyed.
The report’s recommendations included that the federal government should consider returning some former boarding school sites to tribes.
The historical trauma of federal Indian boarding schools and other assimilation-related policies “often impacted several generations” and continues to fuel high suicide rates, drug abuse, alcoholism, and poor parenting among Native Americans and their communities, the report said, citing several studies.
“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,” Haaland said in a statement.
After their first report in 2022, Haaland and Newland spent more than a year traveling from Oklahoma to Alaska on what was called “The Road to Healing” tour. At 12 stops, for up to eight hours a day, they listened to stories of emotional, physical and sexual abuse told by survivors and their descendants.
In this final report, Newland included some of the harrowing descriptions by survivors. One former student from Wrangell in Alaska 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.”
A survivor from a school in South Dakota said: “The sad part about it is a lot of us had to watch the priest sodomize our — so, had to watch our classmates become sexually assaulted. So that’s — nobody wants to share things like that. I’ve learned how to be tough because you couldn’t cry. Couldn’t do that.”
In Michigan, a boarding school survivor recalled the chilling sound of children crying.
“I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home,” the survivor said. “And I remember one girl was a bedwetter, and they made her scrub the entire bathroom on her hands and knees with her toothbrush.”
And in Alaska, another survivor spoke of the planes coming to take the children and send them hundreds of miles away.
“I would like to say my aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village.”
