The Interior Department has concluded an unprecedented yearslong review finding nearly 1,000 children died, separated from their tribes and families, with many buried across hundreds of institutions created for ‘forced assimilation.’
The federal government has concluded a comprehensive inquiry into one of the American continent’s darkest and most tragic episodes: The more than century-long tactics to forcefully assimilate Native American children separated from their families and tribes into hundreds of so-called Indian boarding schools.
In a rare and sweeping admission, the federal agency that oversaw that network is now calling for a formal national apology to the descendants of those who died or suffered rampant abuse and trauma in this system.
The 105-page volume announced Tuesday builds on information the Interior Department uncovered in May 2022 as part of its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. It significantly increased the number of student deaths to nearly 1,000, and tallied and detailed the federal dollars going into federally-run and church-operated schools and burial sites. The department also confirmed the massive public investment and priority the young United States once placed on this human toll: More than $23 billion from taxpayers in today’s dollars and more than 150 treaties with tribes baked the schools into the national infrastructure.
“The most important thing is that our work to tell the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with action,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, noted in the report. “As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past. Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”
These volumes — and the Interior Department’s oral history project — represent the first-ever comprehensive attempt by the federal government to recognize and document the experiences of survivors as well as tracking the impact of generations of genocidal policies against Indigenous children and their families.
In the process of publishing these two volumes in the last two years, Interior Department staff and contractors painstakingly sifted through approximately 103 million pages of U.S. government records and met with Indigenous leaders and government officials to compile the findings. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, through her “Road to Healing” tour that began in Anadarko, Oklahoma, participated in listening sessions with hundreds of boarding school survivors at 12 locations across the country. The experiences of some of those individuals are included in this second volume.
Many of the employees who worked on the project were Indigenous, said Sec. Haaland, the first Indigenous woman in a U.S. cabinet and a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe. It’s a dramatic contrast to the way the agency operated for nearly two centuries: as an anti-Indigenous driving force in advancing these policies.
The report notes that “Indian education” was a treaty right, and a priority in the relations between tribes and the U.S. government — as evidenced by the 100-plus treaties that “explicitly include Federal Indian boarding schools or general Indian education provisions.”
“I think of my mother standing on that sidewalk as we were loaded into the green bus to be taken to a boarding school. And I can see it – still have the image of my mom burned in my brain and in my heart where she was crying. What does a mother think? She was helpless.”
— Road to Healing tour participant from Arizona
“I am immensely proud of the hundreds of Interior employees — many of them Indigenous — who gave of their time and themselves to ensure that this investigation was thoroughly completed to provide an accurate and honest picture,” said Sec. Haaland. “The Road to Healing does not end with this report — it is just beginning.”
The final report builds on findings in the first report, released in 2022, adding to the nation’s understanding of the federal policies of the Indian boarding school system. The initial findings accounted for 500 child deaths across 19 schools, while the updated list of boarding schools now includes 417 institutions across 37 then-territories or states.
The children’s death tally has doubled.
Nearly 1,000 children — 973 Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Native American children buried in 74 marked or unmarked gravesites across 65 different school sites — died while attending schools operated by the federal government.
And the total does not include children who died whose records weren’t available or who attended “Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories, and Indian boarding schools operated by religious institutions and organizations that received no U.S. Government support.”
The atrocities occurring within school walls range from abusive to culturally genocidal, with matrons, priests and other school employees using various methods to erase the cultures and identities of tribal children.
In Alaska, children were given a number that was haphazardly written on everything they owned — that is, all the non-cultural items they were allowed to keep.
The Anaktuvuk Pass Eskimo from Central Alaska “came in after we did, they had all their parka, their caribou pads,” an Alaska Native participant, who spoke to Haaland during her stop in that state, said in the report. “They came in, they stripped them down, put all their clothes, the food they bring in, dry caribou, salmon, and stuff like that, they put it all on the side. I think I probably cried when they took all their clothes down there and burned them in the furnace, all the beautiful, beautiful parkas and everything.”
Another Alaska participant described being forced to eat Western processed foods. “We all got violently ill because our bodies couldn’t process changing our diet over from our traditional Native foods. And we had vomiting, we had diarrhea, we had both and we were often punished for soiling our pants or clothing or bedding and we got beaten for that.”
Other participants from South Dakota and Oklahoma described watching classmates being sodomized by priests, and throwing “green stuff” all over them that “stung like hell.” Others from those states called the torture not just physical, but psychological as well.
“It was warfare against Indian children,” explained a South Dakota participant. “So the littler children, when they got bigger, they could beat up little children for crying, and the nuns looked the other way. That was part of their strategy.”
Other survivors of boarding schools and their descendants outlined ways the schools negatively impacted their relationships with parents, children and communities.
“I experience feelings of abandonment because I think of my mother standing on that sidewalk as we were loaded into the green bus to be taken to a boarding school,” said a participant from Arizona, according to the report. “And I can see it — still have the image of my mom burned in my brain and in my heart where she was crying. What does a mother think? She was helpless.”
“...we continue to heal as the full story of that dark chapter is brought to light. Through truth, reconciliation, and our traditional ways of knowing, we can take healing even further.”
Cheyenne Brady, Center for Native American Youth
The report outlined eight recommendations to guide the path the nation should take to heal from this history. They include a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government for its role in implementing these policies and investing in responses to the present-day impacts of the system.
“I want you to imagine a Native community with no kids left, just the parents and grandparents,” Brian Schatz, Chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said about boarding schools’ impact at a legislative hearing last week. “Imagine not just the trauma for that group of children who were abducted, but what kind of community is left there? As a parent I would be absolutely catatonic for the rest of my life.”
The report’s recommendations include establishing a national memorial to commemorate survivors and descendants; repatriating the remains of children and objects — including the boarding school sites themselves — to tribes; investing in further research on the economic and health impacts perpetuated by the schools; documenting survivors’ experiences; and finally, building relations with countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada to see what can be learned from similar but unique assimilation policies there.
The goal, the report states, will be to exchange “best practices for healing and redress” between federal and Indigenous governments in the aftermath of “Indigenous child removal through boarding schools and predatory foster care and adoption practices.”
“The federal boarding school program created immeasurable trauma for our people that is an active piece of our everyday lives,” said Cheyenne Brady of the Sac and Fox Nation, who is the Associate Director of Youth Programs at the Center for Native American Youth. “The resilience of our ancestors has been passed down alongside that trauma, and we continue to heal as the full story of that dark chapter is brought to light. Through truth, reconciliation, and our traditional ways of knowing, we can take healing even further.”
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