A year ago, the Department of the Interior concluded a first-ever accounting of the toll that Indian boarding schools inflicted on Indigenous people in this country over centuries. Nearly a thousand Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and Native American children were buried in 74 marked or unmarked gravesites across 65 school sites.
Another number also stood out: the $23.3 billion the U.S. government spent on a system of forced assimilation that subjected tens of thousands of children to torture and abuse — the bulk of which was at times paid for out of Native Nations’ trust funds from the sale of Indigenous lands.
In the wake of these revelations, a class-action lawsuit filed by the Washoe Tribe and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes alleges the $23.3 billion “barely scratches the surface” of the total losses to Indigenous communities imposed by the federal boarding school program between 1871 and 1969.
They say the tally does not account for funds generated by forced child labor, money removed from Native Nations’ trust accounts and the resulting economic harm of extracting children from their families and tribes.
The lawsuit, filed May 22 in a Pennsylvania U.S. District Court, calls on the federal government to show its receipts by preserving and publishing “all documents related to the Boarding School Program on an openly accessible electronic database,” as well as all documents used to prepare the Interior Department’s July 2024 investigative report “until a full accounting is provided and authenticated.”
An attorney representing the tribe describes this accounting as a key step toward economic justice for tribes.
“The United States forcibly separated Native children from their parents, and systematically sought to erase their cultural identity, killing, torturing, starving, and sexually assaulting many in the process and doing untold damage to generations,” the plaintiffs allege in their 68-page complaint. “And it made the Native Nations put up the money to pay for it all.”
The Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education are named as defendants. They have 30 days from the time of filing to respond to the complaint or seek a continuance.
Agency spokespeople said they could not comment on pending litigation, but in a statement noted a broader obligation to tribes.
“The Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs remain committed to our trust responsibilities of protecting tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources,” it said, “in addition to its duty to carry out the mandates of federal law with respect to American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages.”
Plaintiffs in the Pennsylvania case represent the thousands of students across 574 federally recognized tribes whose children were forced to attend boarding schools designed to strip them of their culture and language.
One of those children was a Wichita boy, Oscar Stephens, who is named in the suit. In 1905, the 10-year-old was playing by a creek near his home when he was taken by federal agents. He spoke two words of English at the time: “yes” and “no.”
“The United States stuck tribes with a bill for the Boarding School Program. at points, as much as 95% of the funding for Indian boarding schools came from ‘Indian trust fund monies.’ raised by selling Indian land.”
— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch
Oscar was initially sent to Oklahoma’s Riverside Indian School. Three years later, on Sept. 10, 1908, he was enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, weighing 94 pounds with “numerous scars,” the complaint reads.
Oscar’s student file notes he was routinely sent on forced “outings” — a euphemism at the time for children sent away from school to perform free labor.
“His head was shaved, and he was beaten for speaking his native tongue, the only language he knew,” court documents state. “Over the years as a young teenager he was routinely placed with families to do servile work — his file described him being sent to do housework for a family at the age of 14 — and routinely ran away.”
👉SEE Oscar Stephens’ student file from the Carlisle Indian School
Akin to apprenticeships or indentured servitude, the “outing system” was formalized by Richard Pratt, who opened the first federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a half-hour drive from Harrisburg, where the class-action was filed.
The lawsuit describes “outings” like the ones Oscar was sent on as central to the boarding schools’ mission. Indigenous children were relocated from schools to farms and non-Native homes to perform manual labor — earnings they often never saw that helped sustain the system of servitude.
In an 1895 letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, Pratt said the practice “brings the Indian youth directly in contact with good, wholesome, civilized life, and they absorb it rapidly, and it absorbs them, and they become a part of it.”
Chicago-based attorney Adam Levitt is part of the legal team that represents the tribes suing on behalf of boarding school students like Oscar.
He said there are many unique aspects of the suit brought by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes in Oklahoma and the Washoe Tribe in the Lake Tahoe region of Nevada and California.
Though they are asking for an accounting of boarding school spending, they are not yet demanding funds be returned to tribes.
“We need to know where the money went,” Levitt told The Imprint. “So this is not a reparations case, or a damages case. Whether money will at some point change hands stands to be seen.”
He described the early-stage case as long overdue, and the first-ever attempt to request such an accounting from the federal government.
In a 2023 ruling in the Brackeen v. Haaland case that unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch discussed the relevance of such an accounting.
“The United States stuck tribes with a bill for the Boarding School Program,” Gorsuch wrote, “at points, as much as 95% of the funding for Indian boarding schools came from ‘Indian trust fund monies,’ raised by selling Indian land.”
The plaintiffs acknowledged the work it will require to document and itemize boarding school expenses but noted “that such an accounting may be hard is no excuse.”
“The suffering so long inflicted cannot be undone,” the complaint reads. “But the law does not turn an uncaring eye toward historic wrongs. Justice demands a remedy. That remedy begins with an accounting.”
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