Hochul to apologize for 'atrocities' at former New York state-run Native American boarding school

Gov. Kathy Hochul will make what is believed to be the first trip by a sitting New York governor to Seneca Nation Territory next week, when she will apologize to the Seneca people and thousands of former Indigenous students and descendants for what she said was New York’s role in separating them from their families and forcing them to assimilate at the Thomas Indian School in Western New York’s Cattaraugus Territory.

Hochul’s Tuesday visit includes meetings with survivors of atrocities committed at the residential boarding school, which the state owned and operated from 1875 to 1957, she and Seneca President J. Conrad Seneca announced Friday morning.

“The atrocities that our children suffered at the Thomas Indian School have remained hidden in the shadows for far too long,” Seneca said in a statement Friday. “At long last, our people will hear, directly from the Governor, the words we have waited lifetimes for the State of New York to say — ‘We’re sorry.’”

The U.S. operated or supported 408 national Native American boarding schools across 37 states between 1819 and 1969, according to a 2022 U.S. Interior Department report, which detailed rampant physical, sexual and emotional abuse at many of the schools.

Native American children who attended the boarding schools were stripped of their cultural identity and suffered abuse, violence, hatred and in at least several hundred cases, death, at the hands of school officials, according to the report.

The school system discouraged American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian languages, religions and cultural practices and used corporal punishment to enforce rules, according to the more than 100-page report, which included information on marked and unmarked burial sites at or near school facilites, the identification of children and investigating abuses.

Seneca’s father attended Thomas Indian School, and his grandmother was removed from her family at the age 11 and forced to attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, Hochul noted.

“I know the pain and the trauma because I have seen it and felt it in my own family, just as countless families have borne that pain and carried it every day for generations,” Seneca said.

Hochul said her visit will fulfill a pledge she made to Seneca in Albany earlier this year.

“No words or actions will ever be able to undo the pain and suffering of the Seneca people and other Indigenous peoples across the State, but by visiting the Seneca Nation and the site of the Thomas Indian School we will mark a new day in our relations,” Hochul said in a statement.

SOURCE: https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/news/2025/05/16/hochul-to-apologize-for-new-york-state-s-actions-at-ex-native-american-school

Accounting for those who never made it home from Indian Boarding Schools

January 20, 2025 By Art Hughes 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

 

Seven children died in the first year of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s operation.  Another 220 died over the school’s next 38 years.  They are among the more than 3,100 students a year-long Washington Post investigation finds died while separated from their families in Indian Boarding Schools.  Their tally is three times that of the recent investigation by the U.S. Department of Interior. 

Many of the deaths are attributed to illness, accidents, or neglect.  Others have no official explanation or remain suspicious.  We’ll discuss the Post’s investigation and why having an accurate accounting is important.

GUESTS

Jim LaBelle (Iñupiaq), board member for the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

Benjamin Jacuk (Dena’ina Athabascan and Sugpiaq), researcher at the Alaska Native Heritage Center

Dana Hedgpeth (Haliwa-Saponi), reporter at the Washington Post

 

An apology, a long time coming

October 25, 2024 By Art Hughes 

President Joe Biden took the historic step to formally apologize for the federal government’s role in the failed Indian Board School era.  The first-of-its-kind acknowledgement comes after Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the final report from a three-year investigation that included formal listening sessions from boarding school survivors and their relatives.  The report documented at least 18,000 Native children who were sent to distant live-in schools where they were forced to abandon their languages and cultures.  They were subjected to extensive physical and sexual abuse.  Nearly 1,000 children died while attending the institutions far from their families.  We’ll hear from Sec. Haaland and others who have been working on building the infrastructure of healing from the Boarding School Era.

President Joe Biden’s remarks from the Gila River Indian Community, Arizona and Remarks from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland before Pres. Biden’s boarding schools apology:

LISTEN:  https://www.nativeamericacalling.com/friday-october-25-2024-an-apology-a-long-time-coming/

 

President Biden to Make Historic Apology for Federal Indian Boarding School System

The presidential apology fulfills the first of eight recommendations made in the Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report, Volume II, released by the Interior Department in June 2024. The 105-page report was penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) at the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo), the first ever cabinet secretary in U.S. history.  

“This is incredibly meaningful to have a sitting president admit the wrongdoings of the government, and I'm just honored to see this happen during my lifetime,” Haaland said in an interview with Native News Online. “I'm incredibly grateful to the president. He is courageous, he's kind, and he really is committed to Indian Country.” 

 

https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/president-biden-to-make-historic-apology-for-federal-indian-boarding-school-system

The Times is Now... A Virtual Conversation on the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission...

 

Webinar on the U.S. Truth & Healing Commission Bill on 9.27.23

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) hosted a virtual conversation on the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act (S. 1723). 

NABS is joined by U.S. Congresswoman Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) and a guest panel featuring Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), Dallas Goldtooth (Lower Sioux Dakota Nation), Mato Wahuyi (Oglala Lakota), and Georgeanne Growingthunder (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes). 

Learn how you can advocate for the U.S. Truth and Healing Commission Bill. 

 Learn More: https://boardingschoolhealing.org/truthcommission/

 Explore our Advocacy Toolkit: https://sites.google.com/nabshc.org/nabs-truth-and-healing-toolkit/home

Why a Truth and Healing Commission

We have a right to know the truth of what happened in Indian boarding schools in the United States.

Over the course of a century, hundreds of thousands of our children were taken or coerced away from our families and Tribes and forced to attend government-sanctioned Indian boarding schools.  These schools were tools of assimilation and cultural genocide, resulting in the loss of language and culture and the permanent separation of children from their families.  To date, there has never been an accounting of:

• the number of children forced to attend these schools;
• the number of children who were abused, died, or went missing while at these schools; and
• the long-term impacts on the children and the families of children forced to attend Indian boarding schools.

We have a limited amount of time to hear directly from survivors and record their stories.  A Congressional Commission is needed to locate and analyze the records from the 523 known Indian boarding schools that operated in the U.S.  A Commission would also bring together boarding school survivors with a broad cross-section of tribal representatives and experts in education, health, and children and families to fully express and understand the impacts of this federal policy of Indian child removal.

 

War against the children | NABS REPORT: US operated 523 boarding schools

 

The US government, Native American children and boarding schools

Holly Richardson 9/1/2023

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There are now over 500 Native American boarding schools accounted for in the United States. Eight were in Utah

By  Holly Richardsonhrichardson@deseretnews.com

In this photo taken in 1906, provided by the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, teachers and students gather for a portrait at Tunesassa School in Tunesassa, New York. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it will digitize 20,000 archival pages related to Quaker-operated Indian boarding schools. The records will provide a better understanding of the conditions that children received at these schools.  IMAGE: Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College via AP

“They went after our language, our culture, our family ties, our land. They succeeded on almost every level,” Ben Sherman told The New York Times. “Don’t try to tell me this isn’t genocide.”

Sherman, now 83 and a retired aerospace engineer, is also a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who spent four years in a Native American boarding school in South Dakota. Sherman believes that after the “shooting wars” by the United States government against Native Americans had subsided, the government was “not done with war, so the next phase involved war against the children.”

Enter Native American boarding schools.

‘Vast and entrenched’

“From small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts,” Native American boarding schools took in children from across the country.

Incomplete records and scant government attention let the stories of these schools largely fade into oblivion. For many students of those schools and their families, the trauma “never went away.”

Recently, however, more concerted efforts are being made to identify the schools and the children who went there, as well as those who never left. Last year, the Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Deb Haaland, released a report identifying 408 schools in 37 states, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii, from 1819 to 1969.

On Wednesday, the nonprofit National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition announced that they had identified another 115 schools, bringing the total to 523 in 38 states. They identified one additional school in Utah, bringing this state’s total to 8. They found 22 more in Hawaii, bringing that state’s total to 29. They found even more in Oklahoma, the state with the most schools identified, now standing at 95.

Most of the additional schools did not receive federal funds, but were run by religious groups and churches, reports The Washington Post.  Many were Catholic, Presbyterian or Episcopalian, but also included small congregations of Quakers, Congregationalists and others.

Scattering the children

Richard Henry Pratt, a military officer who fought in the 1870s to forcibly remove multiple tribes from the Southern Plains, dreamt of abolishing all Native American reservations and “scattering the entire population of Native children across the country, with some 70,000 white families each taking in one Native American child,” reports The New York Times.

While he was not successful in bringing that vision to fruition, he started down that road by creating the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. The school took in Native American children from as far away as Alaska and tried to “civilize” them. In 1892, Pratt delivered a speech at a convention, where he said,

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

Pratt then praised the benefits of slavery for Black people and said it was now the responsibility of the United States to “civilize” Native Americans.

The “civilizing” process, or “assimilation” was, as Pratt described by wanting to “Kill the Indian in him,” a brutal one. Children’s hair was cut off, their native apparel burned. They were dressed in Western apparel, their names changed and their religion changed. They were “hired out” to do menial jobs, with the schools retaining any fees received.

Moderating a panel at the Leonardo in Salt Lake City last year, Utah State University student Taylor “Cheii” Begay said, “This assimilation process, the boarding school era, it was a war tactic.”

“They tried to kill us”

For noncompliant students, punishment could border on torture. Being whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails, being paraded naked for other students to beat with belts, being thrown into walls, doused with fire hoses, having food withheld, being publicly humiliated and more. Sexual abuse was rampant, report both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The New York Times reports that in 1891, the Grand Junction News printed an exchange between the superintendent of the Grand Junction Indian School in Colorado and the secretary of the Interior. The superintendent informed the secretary that one of the boys at the school could not fit his foot into the government-issued shoe because he had six toes. “What shall I do?” asked the superintendent? “Off with his toe!” came the reply. So, off came the toe.

Not every student counts their time at Native American boarding schools as traumatic. For some, it was not, including Cris Polk, from the Yakama Tribe of Washington, who told KSL earlier this year that those were the best four years of her life, and where she met her lifelong best friend.

Andy Merrick, chairman of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, met his wife at Intermountain Indian School. They celebrated their 43rd anniversary this year.

“I love this place. I love the mountains and the memories I have here,” Merrick said to KSL. “One of the best times of my life was out here in Utah.”

Truth and healing

Those with fond memories are the exception. By 1928, the Meriam report detailed how children were “malnourished, overworked and harshly disciplined.” Forty-one years later, in 1969, a U.S. Senate report reported on the failures of the system. That report spurred support for the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975 and then the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a challenge to ICWA in a decision praised by tribes and Utah’s elected officials, including Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch summed up the importance of ICWA, stating that it “secure(s) the right of Indian parents to raise their families as they please; the right of Indian Children to grow in their culture; and the right of Indian communities to resist fading into the twilight of history.”

When Deb Haaland was appointed the first Native American to head the Department of the Interior, she brought with her boarding school legacies. Her grandparents were stolen from their families as children and she grew up hearing their stories. Her great-grandfather was taken to the infamous Carlisle Indian School. She cried with her grandmother as her grandmother shared her loneliness and sadness at being separated from her family.

“Acknowledging these painful truths and gaining a full understanding of their impacts” will help heal painful “threads of trauma and injustice,” she wrote in 2021. Over the past year, she has been around the country on a “Road to Healing Tour.”

Last year’s report was one of two. The second report will focus on the number of children who died at the boarding schools. Investigators expect that number to be in the “thousands or tens of thousands.” With sparse records of the children, or even where the cemeteries are located, the final number is likely to remain unknown. At least one excavation in the United States this summer found no remains.

Holly Richardson is the editor of Utah Policy

**

NABS launches digital map with new research of 523 U.S. Indian boarding schools

We are honored to announce the release of new research findings and our first-ever interactive digital map of Indian boarding schools in the United States. In 2020, NABS released a list of 367 Indian boarding schools, which at the time was the largest and most extensive list available to the public. Since then, there have been various efforts by the Department of the Interior (DOI) and religious institutions to identify their involvement in the establishment and operation of Indian boarding schools nationwide. Our latest research identified a total of 523 Indian boarding schools in the United States. This is the largest known list to date, containing both federally operated boarding schools and church-run schools. This latest research can be explored through a new interactive international map where people will be able to find information on all 523 known Indian boarding schools in the United States, alongside known Indian residential schools in Canada. This tool helps visualize the magnitude and deliberate effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples across North America.

523 Total Indian boarding schools that operated in the U.S. from 1801 to present

NABS hopes this new research and tool will inspire researchers, educators, and policymakers to gain a better understanding of the impact and scope of Indian boarding schools. Ultimately, we hope it will help survivors, descendants, and Tribal Nations in charting a pathway forward.

This project was made possible through a partnership with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

Read more about this work in The New York Times and Washington Post.