In the thick of the summer, 10 high school and college students sat in the empty library of MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta — Red Cloud — High School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. There, they recited everyday phrases in Lakota, the language spoken by the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, one of the nation’s largest.

TaƋyáƋ niĆĄtíƋma he? Did you sleep well? 

OkĂłihaƋke k’uƋ heháƋ tȟabwaĆĄkate. Last weekend I played basketball.

Táku wičhókaƋ wótapi he? What’s for lunch?

The students were paid participants in the school’s annual summer language internship program, learning the language and culture to teach others — and posting videos of themselves speaking, translating and describing everyday activities in Lakota.

It’s part of MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s mission to preserve the 1,000-year-old language, which is in danger of being erased because it is to younger generations.

Opened in 1888, MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta (mah-PEE-yah loo-tah) was one of many boarding schools the U.S. government created to culturally assimilate and “” Native Americans. Roughly 19,000 children were taken from their families and forced to attend. The schools made the children use English names, cut their hair and prohibited them from speaking their language, according to a 2022 federal .

“Boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment such as solitary confinement; flogging; withholding food; whipping; slapping; and cuffing,” the report said. as a result of abuse and inhumane conditions.

While the Lakota population is more than 170,000 strong, there are fewer than , according to the Lakota Language Consortium. Most are in their 70s.

Ashlan Carlow-Blount, 17, didn’t grow up speaking Lakota, but discovered a passion for it in high school. She joined the internship to improve her speaking skills and share the language with other young people.

“Our ancestors couldn’t speak it — if they spoke it, it was like a punishment for them,” Ashlan said. “That’s why we lost our language, because they were so afraid to speak it and they didn’t pass it down. That’s why it’s important to us to [do this], because we have the opportunity to speak it freely now and then keep it going.”

The summer internship is the next step toward fluency for students who have completed other Lakota classes. For two months, they learn through singing, activities, group conversations and lectures. This year’s group began to — sometimes receiving thousands of views.

Learn some Lakota sentences with us!!

“Our summer interns kind of put [the program] on the map, and it was a good outlet for them to showcase what they’re learning and also showcase how language could be used in the day-to-day,” said Jennifer Irving, MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s communications director. 

Mya Mills, 17, said a lot of teens know basic Lakota words and speak some at home but aren’t fluent. The internship has helped her speak the language outside of school, and older adults have told her how much they appreciate students trying to bring Lakota back.

“That’s the point — for us still to try to keep it going,” she said. “Even when we’re around people who don’t speak it.”

MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta’s internship is only one piece of its mission to increase Lakota fluency, Irving said. The school of 500 students created a dual language immersion program in 2019 that has since expanded from kindergarten through eighth grade. About 90% of classes are taught in Lakota, so students can become fluent early on instead of catching up in later years.

The movement to revitalize and preserve native languages in schools has boomed in recent decades, Irving said. Immersion schools and language preservation programs have increased in and other states like , and . In December, the Biden administration published a 10-year , which called for action to address the U.S. government’s role in the loss of Native American languages. The program’s future is unclear under the Trump administration.

“I think 40 years ago, our education system in this country was very different — very much reading, writing, arithmetic,” Irving said. “We all see now, not just with tribal languages or Lakota language, but we see the benefits for students that are in immersion classrooms and in immersion schools.”

Researchers that Native American students in bilingual programs scored higher on English language standardized tests than those who received education in an English-only program. Including indigenous languages and culture in school curriculum have also been identified as ways to improve chronic absenteeism for Native American students, according to a from the national nonprofit Attendance Works.

The Minneapolis American Indian Center, which serves more than 35,000 Native Americans in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, created a in 2019 that teaches youth the Dakota and Ojibwe languages. Coordinator Memegwesi Sutherland said he’s seen students have “life-changing experiences” after being exposed to their language and culture for the first time.

“Most schools don’t offer much for a Native education,” he said. “Students who do take my class end up learning a lot — they want to reconnect with their people, relearn their language and culture, and sometimes their [college] majors change and they ask me how they can keep learning it.”  

Kiana Richards, a 2017 MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta graduate, became so passionate about Lakota while in high school that she earned an associate degree in the language. She joined AmeriCorps and worked as a MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta employee from 2018 to 2020. But she stopped speaking Lakota when the pandemic struck, and after several years realized her fluency had “completely faded away.”

Last year, she rejoined AmeriCorps to refresh her Lakota skills and teach students about the language and culture.

“I wanted to continue to keep doing this for the sake of my own self, my identity, my Lakota identity, and for the sake of me wanting to be an immersion teacher,” she said. “I want to encourage the [students] so much, because it is a part of who we are.”

Tylia Mad Plume, a 2023 MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta graduate, said she initially cared only about getting a decent grade in high school Lakota classes. But after an educator encouraged her to work with children, she joined AmeriCorps to help teach while taking language classes herself.

Both Mad Plume and Richards were fired from AmeriCorps this spring, when the Trump administration from the national service organization. The school used its own budget to hire them as staff for the summer internship.

Many MaȟpĂ­ya LĂșta staff come from AmeriCorps. Funding has since been reinstated to Democratic-led states that sued, but the school is still waiting for a solution as a named plaintiff in a lawsuit that seeks a in every state. 

“I think it’s important to keep going, to keep the Lakota Nation sovereign, because it’s really scary with everything going on right now,” Mad Plume said. “You have to keep that because in history, for the people who didn’t keep it or the tribes who weren’t as strong in their language and culture, it’s gone.”

Richards said she’s excited for the future because while Lakota wasn’t passed down through generations in the past, she believes the current generation will bring it back. 

This is foretold in the Lakotas’ seventh generation prophecy, she said — a made in the 1800s by Lakota holy man that after generations of great suffering, the Lakota of the seventh generation — the current generation — will take back what little culture and rights remain to spur positive change for the future.

“Here we are in that moment,” Richards said. “I feel like it’s coming full circle, because now we’re teaching the [children] how to speak Lakota and some of them are more fluent than I am. It’s amazing to see, and that’s what encourages me and inspires me. It’s so important because it connects us to who we are, in our spirits, our knowledge.”

Correction: The name of the Twin Cities cultural center is the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

Their calls have been mounting for decades, but the remarks marked a milestone: the first time a U.S. President ever acknowledged and apologized for the system where federal agents removed children from their parents, often at gunpoint, sending them to schools thousands of miles from home, stripping families of their language and culture.

The exact number of children who were forced into boarding schools in the U.S. for over 150 years is unknown, due to poor record keeping, but nearly 19,000 have been confirmed. Physical, sexual and psychological abuse was rampant at the schools often run by religious institutions. Some children were referred to only as numbers, pre-teen girls were raped and sent home pregnant. Thousands never returned home.

Addressing the public on the Gila River Reservation outside of Phoenix, Arizona on October 25, President Joe Biden fulfilled a long-delayed promise to visit Indian country and called the boarding school system a “sin on our soul,” adding there was “no excuse” for how long-overdue the acknowledgement was and that “no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy. But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
The timing of the visit has also been noted as a to to cast votes for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. But many Native Americans are by government inaction to adequately protect lands, provide access to quality education and healthcare, and enact an .

Survivors and descendants both acknowledge how meaningful Biden’s speech was after centuries of fighting for recognition from the federal government, and call on the administration to act swiftly on the apology. 

“In his last two weeks in office, we demand that President Biden also pass S.1723/H.R.7227: The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act,” said the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit that has worked with survivors and Tribal leaders for over a decade to educate about the system and facilitate repatriations. 

The legislation would provide a path for investing in language and culture revitalization efforts, educating the American public on the system via museums or curricula, and establishing trauma-informed mental health resources. 

It would also enable subpoenas to be used to investigate the scale of the system: Catholic entities have been able to hold onto private records for decades, some of which contain the only known photographs or remnants of survivors’ ancestors. Reintroduced in both the Senate and House last year, the bill has yet to reach a vote. 

The mental and physical health concerns of survivors and lack of widespread reconciliation reached national spotlight earlier this year when the Interior Department released its final on the system, which revealed at least 1,000 Indigenous children died or were killed. The schools operated using over $23 billion federal dollars, adjusted for inflation. 

Thousands were subject to child labor to operate facilities and be “outed,” working without wage for white families near the schools.

Angelique Albert, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and chief executive of the nation’s largest direct scholarship provider for Native students, Native Forward, referred to the boarding schools not as places of education but as places of “extermination.” 

Just as slavery was used as the tool to harm Black people across the Americas, “education was the tool to harm us, to assimilate us. That’s the tool where we lost our children,” Albert said, adding that the apology is a testament to the work done by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American cabinet member and former recipient of their scholarships, to unearth survivor testimony and investigate the system. 

“She’s in the very position that implemented the boarding schools. Do you understand? It gives me chills,” Albert said, emphasizing how critical it is for the federal government to maintain close relationships with Tribal nations and put more funding behind college access for Native youth so their voices can be heard in positions they’ve been historically excluded from. 

While the apology, however late, is a “critical first step in the truth and reconciliation process for Native and Indigenous communities,” Albert stressed, “Indian boarding school policies are not a horror of the past — these institutions operated through 1969, and many Native people who were subjected to these cruel policies are still living today.”

The boarding school system, while the focus of President Biden’s remarks, was not the only widespread, forced removal of Native children. Throughout the 60s and 70s, over a third were removed from their families and overwhelmingly placed in non-Indian homes after discriminatory welfare investigations. 

In Washington, Native children were placed in foster care and adopted at rates 19 times greater than their peers. The practice was widespread until 1978’s Indian Child Welfare Act was passed by Congress, who stated “wholesale separation of Indian children from their families is perhaps the most tragic and destructive aspect of American Indian life today.” 

Native populations now face , including the highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, which researchers have linked to centuries of genocide, disinvestment and generational trauma. 

Following Biden’s address, an Indigenous collective gathered to pray, mourn, sing and in South Dakota, on the lands of what will soon be the , a “culture-based school” for Lakota, Dakota and Nakota children.

“, we took to the land and reminded the world that we are the children of survivors 
 We will honor our ancestors by holding this country accountable for what it has done to our people,” NDN Collective president Nick Tilsen said in a release. “The U.S. government tried to exterminate and erase us. We will continue to remind them they have failed at doing so, and the warrior spirit of our ancestors lives in all of us.” 

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.

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. 

“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. 

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.

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 DinĂ© 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.