At least 973 Native American children died within the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, in accordance with the outcomes of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the federal government to apologize for the faculties.
The investigation commissioned by Interior Sec. Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the greater than 400 U.S. boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, however the causes of death included sickness, accidents and abuse during a 150-year period that resulted in 1969, officials said.
The findings follow a series of listening sessions across the U.S. over the past two years by which dozens of former students recounted the tough and infrequently degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.
“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 which can be foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a news release Tuesday.
In an initial report released in 2022, officials estimated that greater than 500 children died at the faculties. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the faculties, the last of which were still operating within the Sixties.
The schools gave Native American kids English names, put them through military drills and compelled them to perform manual labor, resembling farming, brick-making and dealing on the railroad, officials said.
Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during listening sessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Alaska and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their native language, getting locked in basements, and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and the withholding of food. Many left the faculties with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.
Donovan Archambault, 85, of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, said he was sent away to boarding schools starting at age 11 and was mistreated, forced to chop his hair and prevented from speaking his native language. He said he drank heavily before turning his life around greater than twenty years later, and never discussed his school days along with his children until he wrote a book in regards to the experience several years ago.
“An apology is required. They should apologize,” Archambault told The Associated Press by phone Tuesday. “But there also must be a broader education about what happened to us. To me, it’s a part of a forgotten history.”
The latest report doesn’t specify who should issue the apology on behalf of the federal government, saying only that it ought to be issued through “appropriate means and officials to reveal that it’s made on behalf of the people of the United States and be accompanied by daring and actionable policies.”
Interior Department officials also advisable that the federal government put money into programs that might help Native American communities heal from the traumas brought on by boarding schools. That includes money for education, violence prevention and the revitalization of indigenous languages. Spending on those efforts ought to be on a scale proportional to the $23 billion in inflation adjusted spending on the faculties, agency officials said.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and personal institutions that ran lots of the institutions received federal money as partners within the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, in accordance with the brand new report.
By 1926, greater than 80% of Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, in accordance with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The Minnesota-based group has tallied greater than 100 additional schools not on the federal government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support.
U.S. Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church’s role in trauma the youngsters experienced. And in 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with boarding schools in Canada. He said the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
Legislation pending before Congress would establish a “Truth and Healing Commission” to document and acknowledge past injustices related to boarding schools. The measure is sponsored within the Senate by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and backed by Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
“It is time the federal government takes responsibility for its harmful policies,” Murkowski said on the Senate floor last week. “Our Commission will provide a Native-led process for communities to share the stories, share the reality, and pursue healing.”
