Federal Government ‘Stuck Tribes With a Bill’ for Indian Boarding Schools, Lawsuit Alleges

By Nancy Marie Spears

Navajo students after entering the Carlisle Indian School in 1882. Photo courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

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.”

Navajo students before and after entering the Carlisle Indian School in 1882. Photos courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

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

Oscar Stephens Student File From Carlisle Indian School Download

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.”

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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. 

Adam Levitt

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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Indigenous People To Receive Payouts for Surviving Canada Child Welfare System, but Larger Systemic Reforms Remain Stalled

By Nancy Marie Spears

Starting March 10, Indigenous people who went through Canada’s child welfare system can apply for compensation for harms caused to them.

Approximately 300,000 Indigenous children and families who went through Canada’s child welfare system can apply for compensation for harms the system caused them. 

The Canadian press reports that $23 billion in payouts under a historic class-action settlement will take six to 12 months to process. Those taken as children between 1991 and 2022 from “reserves” and the northwestern territory of Yukon are eligible to submit claims, as are their caregiving parents and grandparents.

The Assembly of First Nations is helping citizens apply through its Get Ready campaign, announced in a press release earlier.  The national advocacy organization for Indigenous communities across Canada will educate and guide First Nations claimants to avoid scams and receive the assistance they need during the application and claims processing period.

“While no amount of money can make up for the harms done by Canada’s racist child welfare system, March 10 will be a historic turning point to address these past wrongs,” National Chief Woodhouse Nepinak stated. “The $23 billion compensation settlement is an important recognition of the heroic representative plaintiffs and everyone who took part in the long process of negotiations that brought us to this point.”

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The pending payouts stem from a 2007 class-action lawsuit over the discriminatory treatment of First Nations children and families. The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, an independent administrative body that hears complaints about discrimination, ruled on the matter in 2016. That ruling declared that families in Yukon and in reserves — the equivalent of a reservation in the U.S. — did not receive the same level of child and family services provided to other Canadians.

Yet as the claims process moves forward, a far larger and more systemic reform sought on behalf of Indigenous children and families remains stalled. 

A $47.8 billion payment to the First Nations Child and Family Services Program was initially approved last year, following an agreement between First Nations leaders and the Canadian government. The funding package designed to address the overrepresentation of First Nations children in Canada’s child welfare system would have covered a range of services to prevent child neglect and abuse and improve outcomes for young adults leaving the system. The agreement would have secured funding for 10 years, and addressed particularly high costs to deliver services in rural communities.

But in October, before the terms were finalized, First Nations leaders voted down the $47.8 billion settlement offer, amid complaints that it lacked transparency and accountability, among other concerns. 

Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society which has been a party to the case for years, said the deal reached last year would have been too “secretive” and unreliable.  Indigenous leaders “want to make sure the money is secure, and stops the discrimination now and forever,” Blackstock said.

Some Indigenous leaders are now seeking to renegotiate the deal, although there is an ongoing dispute over whether parties such as the Caring Society should be involved. 

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Meanwhile, national politics in Canada may have introduced an additional unknown. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — whose government presided over last year’s settlement agreement with First Nations that has since been rejected — has resigned, causing concerns over whether a new conservative government would honor future agreements. 

In December, the Assembly of First Nations revealed the results of a legal review it commissioned, warning that the $47.8 billion reform deal could be upended by a future government.

That worries Danielle Cranmer, citizen of the Acjachemen Nation and a clinical therapist and licensed social worker. She has been closely watching the child welfare lawsuits in Canada since many of her clients are from First Nations families.

“The Assembly of First Nations and other Indigenous governance bodies have every reason to scrutinize the potential ramifications of a government change,” Cranmer said. “If the current administration loses power, a new government could claim they are not bound by this agreement, further delaying or dismantling crucial child welfare reforms.”

Cranmer said ensuring long-term commitments to reforms are essential to addressing harms of the past and helping First Nations people heal. She’ll continue monitoring how the current case unfolds, in light of historic patterns. “This underscores the precarious nature of agreements made between Indigenous nations and settler governments — particularly when they hinge on political administrations that may not honor past commitments,” Cranmer said.

Blackstock, who is Gitksan First Nation and has decades of social work experience, agreed.

“That’s why it was so important to protect against a change of government by having these legal orders, instead of moving over to this final settlement agreement that didn’t hold Canada accountable and gave them such wide discretion,” she said. “Under an adverse government, that would put at risk a lot of the gains we’ve made for First Nations’ kids.”

Can anything be said with certainty about what lies ahead?

“The short answer is, we don’t know,” Blackstock said. “But what we do know is that the legal orders are binding on whatever political party is in the government.”

 

For more information on all classes under the settlement, visit www.fnchildclaims.ca.

 

Buried But Not Forgotten

 Colorado Archeologist Describes Her Work Honoring the Lives of Indian Boarding School Students

2/14/2025  By Nancy Marie Spears 

Colorado state archeologist Holly Norton led a team that used ground-penetrating radar, near-infrared photography and drones to search for remains of Native children who attended boarding schools. Provided photo.

To determine how many children might be buried on the former site of a Colorado Indian boarding school, state archeologist Holly Norton and her team traveled to a swath of land where a forgotten cemetery once stood. Using ground-penetrating radar, near-infrared photography and drones, they scoured a site as large as 68 football fields — roughly 90 acres of ankle-sweeping prairie grassland.

The search turned up signs of disturbed soil beneath the hard earth, rough shafts believed to have cradled small bodies. In all, Norton’s team reported finding the resting places of 31 children who had attended the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School more than a century ago. 

Norton, state archaeologist and deputy state historic preservation officer, led the one-year effort. The undertaking — part of a larger examination of the two former boarding schools in the state — was initiated by legislation that made clear the mandate: “In order to heal from the generational trauma, we must confront the past and shed light on the hidden cruelty.’’

Colorado’s work mirrors nationwide efforts to document the systemic abuse endured by Indigenous children who attend federally-operated or church-run Indian boarding schools — a forced assimilation attempt that began in the 1800s and endured for over a century. In 2022 and 2024, the Department of the Interior released its first-ever acknowledgment of the federal government’s genocidal policies, in reports that confirmed nearly 1,000 student deaths. Last year, President Joe Biden apologized for the government’s culpability. 

As part of the Colorado project, a 13-member team of archeologists, geophysical specialists and archivists spent hundreds of hours combing through roughly 5,500 pages of documents to build the backstory of students’ lives. 

The investigation focused on the Fort Lewis site in Hesperus and the state’s other federal Indian boarding school, the Teller Institute in Grand Junction. Children at both schools endured neglect and abuse, unsanitary conditions, and ravaging outbreaks of tuberculosis and trachoma, according to the report authored by Norton and published in June 2023.

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