Department of Interior – ��Ӱ��

Investigation: Nearly 1,000 Native Children Died in Federal Boarding Schools

Marianna McMurdock — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 18:30:00 +0000

Nearly 1,000 Native American children died or were killed while forced to attend U.S. government-affiliated boarding schools, according to a by the Interior Department.

The children are buried in 74 unmarked and marked graves, as tribes assess repatriation of remains and protection options more than five decades after U.S. policy shifted away from the practice. Nearly 19,000 children were estimated to be kidnapped from their families, often at gunpoint, and enrolled in government schools with the aim of assimilation, decimating tribal cultures, and reducing land possession.

While the department acknowledged the figures are underestimated, the data provide the fullest picture of the system’s scale, marking the end of a to unearth the toll and legacies of the nearly two-century long U.S. policy. Research was obscured by inconsistent public record keeping and that many records are held by private religious institutions.

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The remains of 973 children were found at 65 schools and their surrounding communities, but the Department is withholding their locations “in order to protect against well-documented grave-robbing, vandalism, and other disturbances to Indian burial sites.”

The final report, released last week, also documented how the boarding school system negatively impacted genetics and for Native families, who for generations have had the nation’s highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, such diabetes, arthritis, and cancer.

“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in the report’s opening letter. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”

Oral testimonies from hundreds of genocide survivors, many sharing for the first time during a Road to Healing tour, catalog horrific physical and psychological abuse.

Children regularly witnessed each other raped in their beds and in bathrooms, by priests, teachers and school staff, according to the report, and seeing peers, aged 11, 12 or 13, sent home in the middle of the school year pregnant.

One Montana school implemented night checks, shining flashlights randomly into kids’ eyes as they slept. In some instances, kids were sent to sleep in basements as punishment, but “forgotten” for hours or days. Many more were subject to “outing,” sent to live temporarily with nearby white, often Quaker families, and used for free labor.

“I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and just wanting to go home,” a survivor from Michigan recounted. “And I remember one girl was a bedwetter, and they made her scrub the entire bathroom on her hands and knees with her toothbrush.”

On arrival, children were often stripped, their hair cut – against sacred cultural norms – provided uniforms and numbers.

“We [were] never called by our name, we were all called by our numbers. My number was 77, too because my sister was there before me and her number was 77… it was marked on everything you owned,” said one Alaska survivor.

Living thousands of miles from home with little hope of escape, children witnessed every aspect of their identities and prior life erased and replaced – belief systems, language, hair and dress.

Children walking grounds of the Sheldon Jackson School in Southeast Alaska (Library of Congress, 1900-1930)

“Food was also weaponized in Indian boarding school settings, in sharp contrast to traditional Native American practices of food as medicine,” the report stated. “Food that was seen by Federal Indian boarding school staff to be reminiscent of Native American culture was not allowed, and survivors frequently spoke of being forced to eat highly processed, unfamiliar, or spoiled food.”

A survivor from Alaska described the impact of suddenly eating only processed, canned meats and vegetables, and powdered milk and eggs: “Of course, we all got violently ill because our bodies couldn’t process changing our diet over from our traditional Native foods. 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.”

Over $23 billion, adjusted for 2023 inflation, was invested in the federal Indian boarding school system between 1871 and 1969. The figure omits child labor estimates which cut down operation costs: Children often maintained school infrastructure, digging for plumbing or maintaining roofs.

Students dig outside the grounds of Thomas Indian School (National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 1900-1930)

The U.S. government operated and supported , of which 210 were run by predominantly Protestant or Catholic religious groups, across 37 states and territories.

The final death and enrollment counts do not take into account records from the 1,025 “other institutions,” including day schools and orphanages which did not receive federal funding, where children were subject to similar abuses in pursuit of the government’s explicit policy goal of mass assimilation.

“I was told I wouldn’t make a good mother. And I would tell God when I have children I will love them and care for them. And treat them like a person, because in boarding school you’re not a person. You’re not even a human being,” said another survivor from Minnesota.

Resistance was common, with runaways, secret language use, and challenges when government agents entered reservation land to take children.

A year after 104 children were taken from the Third Mesa of Hopi to attend Keams Canyon Boarding School, Hopi tribal leaders refused armed government agents. Nineteen leaders were taken as prisoners of war, locked up in an underground cell on Alcatraz.

Shower in the girls dorm on the Blackfoot Reservation, Cutbank Boarding School (Bureau of Indian Affairs, Morrow, May 1951)

Even after the residential boarding school system fell out of favor politically, forced removal continued with the Indian Adoption Project from 1958-68, when up to 35% of Native children were removed from their families after discriminatory welfare investigations and overwhelmingly placed in non-Indian homes.

The disparities, as intended, were clear: In Minnesota, Native children were placed in foster care and adopted five times as often as non-Indian families; in Washington, adoption rates were 19 times greater.

The practice was widespread until 1978 with passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, the first time Congress acknowledged, “wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today,” and denounced forced child removal and assimilation.

Last year, was challenged in the Supreme Court after white parents – who had already won custody to adopt a Cherokee and Diné child over a family from the Navajo nation, in opposition to ICWA’s protections to prioritize adoptions within their culture – filed a federal lawsuit alleging the law was discriminatory. Three other white couples followed. The court ultimately upheld ICWA . All of the children had Native relatives that wanted to raise them, but only one Ojibwe grandmother, after six years, won their custody battle.

In pursuit of healing and reconciliation with tribal nations, the report recommended investments in family reunification, education, first language revitalization, identification and repatriation of childrens’ remains, healthcare, and creation of public memorials or education to share information about the system.

– without assimilationist aims or systematic violence. A new Senate bill has bipartisan support and will soon reach a vote to establish a and over a six year period, which Native leaders have said is “long overdue.” Members of at least seven tribes in Arizona and New Mexico are now eligible to file claims against the Franciscan Friars of California for clergy sexual abuse.

“We’re not just people here on this earth taking up space,” said Department of the Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, addressing survivors and descendants during the Road to Healing tour. “We have an obligation to honor the legacy of our ancestors, so they didn’t starve in vain, so they didn’t die in vain, so they weren’t ripped away from their mother’s arms in vain.”

Below are a selection of survivor testimonies collected during the Interior Department’s Road to Healing tour:

“I would like to say my aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children. No children in the village.”
– Alaska

“My sister talked about being put in the closet with the mops and the brooms. And, to this day, she can’t sleep without a light on. She could be deep in her sleep, and as soon as somebody turns off the bathroom light, she wakes up screaming. And she’s a grandmother today. She doesn’t know where this comes from.”
– Washington

“Sometimes they would forget that they had put us down in the basement. Wouldn’t get out of there until early morning, and it was – maybe that’s why I’m afraid of the dark now. I don’t know. I leave the light on in my bedroom. Even today. That was a – that was hurt – hard for me. I still think about those nights when I had to sit in the basement. I was afraid of the dark. And I survived there for six years.”
– Montana

…They said ‘We’re going to run away and we’re going to go home and when we get home, we’ll send for you.’ … They waved to us and were just really happy… they didn’t know they were on – the school is on an island and the next morning, we went into the dining hall and they all came in … Their heads were shaven and they were all wearing little black and white prison suits and us girls just started crying.”
– Alaska

“The sad part about it is a lot of us had to watch the priest sodomize our classmates … Nobody wants to share things like that. I’ve learned how to be tough because you couldn’t cry. Couldn’t do that.”
– South Dakota

“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. They made them go through the shower, shave them, give them their uniform and a number … I probably cried when they took all their clothes down there and burned them in the furnace, all the beautiful, beautiful parkas and everything.”
– Alaska

“My grandpa’s last words were, ‘We’re going to experience some things,’ in Cheyenne… Culturally, our hair is sacred. ‘We do not cut our hair, but they’re going to do that to you. You get there, your black braids are not going to come home.’ And that was hard. My braids got cut off. Excuse me. Just remembering what happened to some of us first day of school.”
– Montana

“Once I graduated, I had to go straight to the Marine Corps because I had no parents, nobody there when I finished … to this day, I know it affected my sister, because I haven’t seen her in probably 30 years, and she’s been in and out of prison ever since. She’s never been back to the Indian reservation … I don’t have a very good relationship with my mother, because by the time we started talking again she – there’s a lot of feelings that was brought up just because of separation.”
– California

“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. 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.”
– Arizona

“I don’t remember ever getting a hug from my mom. I don’t remember, ever, my mother telling me she loved me. I remember getting whipped with a switch and finally being able to go live with my father because they didn’t live together anymore … He never did anything like that. He said, ‘That’s because of the schools.’”
– Washington

“To this day I can still see that nun standing and she said, ‘Here,’ she gave me a bag and I said, ‘Oh, what is it?’ ‘Oh, it’s from your brother.’ ‘Oh, is he here?’ ‘No, he’s dead.’ I could still see her standing there and I was still a little girl. And I thanked her.”
– Minnesota

“I said to Sister Naomi, I think I’m going to go home now. She leaned way over into my face and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, you’re going to be here for a long, long time.’ So, I choked back my tears and I hid inside myself.”
– Michigan

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

Federal Probe into Native Boarding School Deaths Likely a Severe Undercount

Asher Lehrer-Small and Marianna McMurdock — Fri, 13 May 2022 21:20:00 +0000

Less than 5% of known facilities account for over 500 child deaths, the Department of Interior’s report revealed

Born and raised on Navajo and Ojibwe reservations, three of endawnis Spears’s four grandparents were among the estimated hundreds of thousands of Native children separated from their families, their tribes and their traditions and forced to attend government-run Indian boarding schools.

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A federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officer took Spears’s maternal grandmother at just 6 years old from Arizona to the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico. The agency threatened the young girl’s parents with possible jail time if they did not surrender her.

Her paternal grandmother was sent across state lines from Minnesota to Kansas, where she was forced to attend Lawrence’s infamous Haskell Indian Training School, unable to return home for nearly a decade.

After hiding from federal officers for years, agents took her maternal grandfather at 14 to Fort Wingate, Arizona and forced him to cut his hair, pray to a Christian god and speak English, though Navajo was the only language he knew at the time. The teen repeatedly tried to run away, and staff punished him by forcing him to spend days on end in the school’s basement without food. Spears’s parents shared these stories with her over the years.

“These legacies and these histories are so intimate to us as Native people,” said Spears, who now lives in Hopkinton, Rhode Island and serves as Brown University’s . “We carry them in our DNA.”

endawnis Spears stands for a family portrait with her children and husband, who is Narragansett, at a Narragansett tribal event. (Heather Mars)

At least 500 Indigenous children died while attending federally operated Indian boarding schools, according to a May 11 . Just 19 facilities, a small fraction of the 408 government-supported schools identified, account for that tally — meaning the death total is likely a severe undercount.

For 150 years, up until the late 1960s, the U.S. government stole Indigenous youth from their communities, often without parents’ consent, and sent them to Indian boarding schools where they were forced to use English names, wear Americanized haircuts and perform military drills. Many children suffered and , and an unknown number died, often .

Students attend class at the Carlisle Indian School in Eastern Pennsylvania, from an 1895 school pamphlet. (John Leslie/John Choate/Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections)

The long-awaited report represents the first time the federal government has attempted a systematic accounting of the facts and consequences of the Indian boarding school system it perpetuated.

“I’m glad to see it on the news. I’m glad that there are people asking these questions because our Native families, our Indigenous families in this country carry these stories with them every day,” Spears told ��Ӱ��. But the process is only beginning, she added.

“We’re just learning the full scope of the truth. … People always want to jump to reconciliation and they want to skip over the truth-telling part. We need to sit in the truth for a while.”

The May report represents Volume I of an investigation that Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and the agency’s first Indigenous head, unveiled in June 2021. The effort is intended to provide a basis through which the U.S. may reckon with past brutality by locating gravesites — many of them unmarked or — repatriating children’s remains and offering resources to affected families.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland delivers remarks at the 2021 Tribal Nations Summit in Washington, D.C. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

“It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal,” said the secretary, who’s own grandparents were also subjected to the boarding school system.

Indigenous scholars underscore that this first report only conveys a small fraction of the violence wrought by these schools, scores of which were operated by the Catholic Church and various Protestant groups at the government’s behest.

“Basically every school had a cemetery,” Preston McBride, an Indian boarding school historian and a Comanche descendent. “There are deaths at or deaths because of virtually every single boarding school.”

“The United States doesn’t even know how many Indian students went through these institutions, let alone how many actually died in them,” he added.

In his own research, he has documented over 1,000 child deaths at just four boarding schools. He estimates the toll over the entire system’s century and a half of operation may be .

The Department of Interior declined to comment on whether it believes that to be a plausible estimate, though the report’s authors note they expect “continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

“Each one of those individuals is a story, had a story, has a story. And each one of those individuals did not have the opportunity to continue their traditions, to continue their culture, their language, to have a family — to be able to pass down the knowledge, the practices, the language that they inherited from generations past,” Samuel Torres, deputy CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told the 74 after the investigation was first launched.

Spears said her grandparents did not talk about witnessing deaths at the boarding schools, perhaps to protect their family from that horror.

Amazingly, her grandfather, George Kirk, who suffered deprivation and torture at the hands of the U.S. government, later went on to help the country win World War II. Kirk became a famed , one of 29 U.S. Marines whose skill at transmitting over 800 messages without error in a coded version of their native tongue proved a critical advantage to Allied forces.

“The very language he was starved for speaking, later helped save this country,” Spears said.

Spears’s grandfather George Kirk, right, operating a portable radio in the South Pacific, 1943. (National Archives)

To bring the boarding school history to light, the Interior Department’s research team is working through the review and electronic screening of roughly 500 million pages of documents held in the American Indian Records Repository in Lenexa, Kansas.

Most of the staff who have worked on the report are themselves Indigenous, .

“It’s been an exhausting and emotional effort for them to confront this horror on a daily basis to bring this information to you,” said Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland, who led the investigation and is a member of the Ojibwe nation. “This has left lasting scars for all Indigenous people. There’s not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn’t been affected by these schools.”

As the team continues its investigation, they hope to further clarify the U.S. government’s role in supporting the Indian boarding system, determine the location of more burial grounds associated with these schools and identify the names, ages and tribal affiliations of those buried there. They have already identified over 50 marked and unmarked gravesites.

The Interior’s investigation, the beginnings of what may become a public, centralized archive, will continue with

The report follows a similarly disturbing and builds on years of Native-led activism to unearth the truth behind U.S. boarding school policies. Since its founding in 2012, the Boarding School Healing Coalition has filed for the, conducted their own, supported survivors, and led in Eastern Pennsylvania.

“I don’t think the impact [of the Investigation] can be underestimated. This is such a big part of American history that has not been talked about,” Jim Gerencser, a Dickinson College archivist who co-founded a, told ��Ӱ�� last year. Many people have reached out to him looking for in-depth archives of boarding schools, family information or sources to incorporate in their .

Carlisle has become one of the most studied U.S. boarding school sites, in part due to its size and founder’s infamous propaganda to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The site forcibly enrolled over 10,000 children from 142 Native nations over the course of 40 years.

Spears and her husband Cassius Spears Jr. — first councilman for the Narragansett tribe and nephew of former councilwoman, Tomaquag Museum leader and educator — have worked to reclaim many of their Native ways of life for their children. Her boys grow their hair out long and have pierced ears. They teach their kids about humans’ relationships with plants and non-human animals. They learn words and prayers in Native languages.

“I make decisions everyday to give my children what my grandparents couldn’t have,” said Spears.