Government admits Indian school harms

The U.S. Department of the Interior this week announced next steps on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, launched in June 2021 by Secretary Deb Haaland as the first-ever comprehensive effort by the federal government to recognize the troubled legacy of past federal Indian boarding school policies with the goal of addressing their intergenerational impact and shedding light on past and present trauma in Indigenous communities.

The final volume of the investigative report came with the first acknowledgement by the government that it caused harm by forcing the boarding school system on Native people.

Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland led the second volume of the investigation, which builds on the initial volume published in May 2022 to significantly expand on the number and details of institutions to include attendee deaths, the number of burial sites, participation of religious institutions and organizations, and federal dollars spent to operate these locations. It also includes policy recommendations fto continue to chart a path to healing and redress for Indigenous communities.

“The federal government … 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 that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland said. “The road to healing does not end with this report — it is just beginning.”

“For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children,” Newland said. “This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations — that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways.”

Volume 2 updates the official list of federal Indian boarding schools and maps to include 417 institutions across 37 states or then-territories. It provides detailed profiles of each school and confirms that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federal operated or supported schools. It also identifies at least 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different school sites, and estimates that the U.S. government made appropriations available of more than $23.3 billion in 2023 inflation-adjusted dollars between 1871 and 1969 for the federal Indian boarding school system as well as other similar institutions and associated assimilation policies.

The department was able to identify, by name, 18,624 Indian children who entered the Federal Indian boarding school system and its 1,025 institutions. The number does not represent a comprehensive list of all children who attended Federal Indian boarding schools, but rather reflects the number of students the department was able to identify.

The report also touches on national Indian policy coordinated with the Child Welfare League of America in the 1950s to advocate for state social workers on Indian reservations to adopt out Indian children to non-Indian families. The public-private partnership was named the Indian Adoption Project, and hundreds of Indian children went to non-Indian families between 1958 and 1968. “As Congress has determined, studies demonstrated that approximately 25-35 percent of Indian children were forcibly removed from their families by state and private child welfare agencies, that such removals were often unwarranted, and that over 85 percent of those Indian children were placed in non-Indian homes,” the report said. “The disparity between Indian and non-Indian removal was stark.” In Minnesota the foster care or adoption placement rate of Indian children was five times greater than the non-Indian rate.

In the process of publishing the two volumes, the Interior Department reviewed approximately 103 million pages of federal records. Haaland and Newland also met with government officials and Indigenous leaders from Australia, Canada and New Zealand to understand the processes they used to address the legacy of similar assimilation policies, to include boarding schools and institutions. 

The report includes eight recommendations that aim to support a path to healing the nation, including:

• Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government regarding its role in adopting and implementing national federal Indian boarding school policies.

• Investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.

• Establishing a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of Indian Tribes, individuals, and families affected by the federal Indian boarding school system.

• Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary objects who never returned from federal Indian boarding schools.

• Returning former federal Indian Boarding school sites to Tribes.

• Telling the story of federal Indian boarding schools to the American people and global community.

• Investing in further research regarding the present-day health and economic impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.

• Advancing international relationships in other countries with similar but their own unique histories of boarding schools or other assimilationist policies.

Part of the invesitagive process included an oral history project to document and make accessible to the public the experiences of generations of Indigenous children who attended the federal Indian boarding school system.

“I share these stories because we need to remember my aunties, we need to remember everyone that endured all the horrific treatment, the abuse, the violence, everything that they all went through,” said one Minnesota respondent. “Because we need to be the truth tellers. We need to be the change makers. All those who are brave enough and courageous enough for sharing the truth.”

“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” Newland said. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”

To read the report, visit www. doi.gov