Interior: Nearly 1,000 children died in boarding schools

WASHINGTON — Nearly 1,000 Native American, Alaska Native and Hawaiian children, including 60 from the Pacific Northwest, died while attending boarding schools set up by the U.S. government to erase tribal ties and cultural practices, according to a report released Tuesday by the Interior Department.

“For the first time in the history of this country, the U.S. government is considering its role in operating boarding schools that were designed to forcibly assimilate Native American children and is providing us with a path to healing the wounds those schools inflicted,” Bryan Newland, deputy assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, wrote this month in a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that accompanied the report.

The report calls on the federal government to apologize and “pave a path to healing.” Its recommendations include creating a national memorial to commemorate the deaths of children and educating the public; investing in research and assistance for Indigenous communities to heal from intergenerational stress and trauma; and revitalizing Indigenous languages.

From the early 1800s to the late 1960s, the U.S. government removed Native American children from their families and homes and sent them to boarding schools where they were forcibly assimilated.

According to an investigative report released Tuesday, nearly $25 billion was spent on a comprehensive operation, including running 417 schools in 37 states and territories where children were physically and sexually abused, forced to convert to Christianity and punished for speaking their native language. From 1857 to 1932, thousands of children passed through one of those schools on the Tulalip reservation.

The report listed by name nearly 19,000 children who attended federal schools between 1819 and 1969, though the Interior Department acknowledges there were more.

Accounting for the bodies of Native American children was a key goal of a federal initiative launched more than three years ago after Canada discovered the remains of 215 children at the site of a closed boarding school and announced similar action. Haaland, a Laguna Puebloan and the first Native American cabinet secretary, led the effort in the United States.

Tuesday’s report, the second and final from the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, found that 973 children died in Indian boarding schools and were buried in 74 sites, 21 of which are unmarked. The Interior Department said it is working with tribes seeking repatriation of the remains.

Although political support for the forced assimilation of children eventually waned, the effects of uprooting and abuse are still felt by Native communities, according to the report. Children have been left with lasting psychological trauma, and research funded by the National Institutes of Health has linked poor physical health among American Indian adults to their childhood attendance at federally run schools.

The department interviewed hundreds of survivors as part of its investigation. Some described widespread sexual abuse in schools, as well as routine physical abuse. One participant described having their parkas ripped off new arrivals and burned in a stove. Another recalled many children becoming “violently ill” from highly processed foods like powdered milk and canned meat, then beaten for soiling their bedding or clothes.

“I remember having my pigtails cut off; being washed like we were dirty; being talked to like we were dirty,” one anonymous participant from South Dakota said in the report. “We were dressed in uniforms.”

Others described long-lasting feelings of abandonment and shame, caused by the severing of family ties when they were taken away to schools.

“I think the worst part was at night listening to other kids crying into their pillows, crying for their parents and just wanting to go home,” said another anonymous participant from Michigan.

A study participant from Washington described how her sister, now a grandmother, still couldn’t sleep in the dark and would wake up screaming when the lights were turned off because she was routinely locked in a closet as a child.

The report pointed out that in addition to the lasting physical and psychological effects, many children were taught only agricultural, manual and household skills, which resulted in the destabilisation of the tribal economy due to the lack of formal education.

The report said that while “a shift in our nation’s understanding of the problem” has occurred rapidly — and the disturbing history of Native American boarding schools is now explored in books, television shows and movies — many communities have yet to heal.

“The new report provides critical information that is needed to understand the full history and impact of the federal boarding school era,” Beth Wright, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund who has worked on boarding school cases, said in a statement. “The next step is for the Department of the Interior to provide resources and funding directly to tribal nations that want to study, address, and tell their own stories about the impact the federal boarding school era had on their own communities and people.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

The report uses information from The Daily Herald archives.

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