WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
This story was originally published by ICT, a close partner of Noeledrich.
The U.S. Department of the Interior released its final investigative report Tuesday on the ugly history of federal Indian boarding schools, calling for a formal apology from the U.S. government and ongoing support to help Native people recover from the generational trauma that endures.
The second — and concluding — report from the department’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative also calls for return of lands that once housed the boarding schools, and construction of a national memorial to honor the children who were separated from their families and forced to attend schools that sought to wipe out their culture, identity and language.
The overarching theme of the boarding school initiative report and recommendations is that of healing for Indian Country, with a list of specific ways the federal government can tangibly assist tribal nations and peoples.
“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 that are foundational to Native people,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, said in a statement released with the report.
“These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” said Haaland, who became the first Native person to be included in a presidential cabinet when she was tapped by President Joe Biden to lead the department.
“The Road to Healing does not end with this report – it is just beginning,” she said.
The report and its recommendations were authored by Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community.
“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 in a statement.
“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,” Newland said. “It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
Ruth Anna Buffalo, president of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said the report is a good step but that more research and effort are needed.
The coalition has led efforts to bring the facts of the boarding school era out of history’s shadows, focusing its efforts on the people most impacted by the schools — especially the Native ancestors who died at the schools but remain uncounted.
“The report is important for the families of those directly affected, for those left with no answers,” said Buffalo, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. “It’s a heavy topic that deserves to be handled with love and care. … Our ancestors were very spiritual people and I find it hard to comprehend how they were treated in such a way.”
The wounds of the era hit home for Buffalo and her family.
“Unfortunately, it’s a common thread for the First Peoples of these lands,” to have personal, lived experience with boarding school era trauma, she said. “There is much more work that needs to be done.”
Hundreds more deaths
The Department of the Interior’s final report of the Federal Boarding School Initiative largely makes good on promises from its initial report issued in May 2022, which called for continuing the investigation into the scope of the federal boarding school system.
Haaland’s initiative and the launch of the investigation in 2021 represented the first official U.S. effort to acknowledge the existence of the boarding school era and its negative impact on Native peoples.
The initial report for the first time included historical records of boarding school names and locations, and the first official list of burial sites of children who died at the schools.
The latest report, which officials said included a review of more than 100 million pages of documents, expands on those findings to report that student deaths at boarding schools are nearly double what had previously been reported, increasing from an estimated 500 to 973.
The estimated number of identified boarding schools also increased, from 407 to 417, and the number of “other” institutions such as orphanages and asylums with similar missions of assimilation increased from 1,000 to 1,025.
Researchers verified the identity of 18,624 students who attended boarding schools from 1819 to 1969, and identified 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at schools versus 53 sites shared in the first report.
Notably, the latest report contains additional findings and recommendations that are more specific than those found in the past document, and in all cases, authors stated that the actual numbers in all categories will likely increase as research continues.
The latest report comes as Congress is making progress on legislation in the House and Senate that would create a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies with authority to investigate not just federal schools but also private and church-run schools.
A series of recommendations
The latest report outlines a series of eight recommendations that appear to be guided, at least in part, by steps that Canada took in response to that country’s Indian residential school history, which closely mirrors the U.S.
Unlike the U.S., however, which has only recently recognized such a history existed, Canada began its work with an apology in 2006 before moving on to reparations and other substantive actions.
The U.S. commission would be patterned after the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created as part of the 2008 Indian Settlement Act. Canada eventually paid to residential school survivors more than $3 billion in reparations, which are notably absent from the U.S. initiative’s recommendations.
The Canadian government also collected survivor stories, provided traditional and mainstream mental health supports, issued a government apology, collected and made boarding school records publicly available and helped locate unmarked graves of children who died and were buried at the schools.
The U.S. Indian boarding school system served as a model for Canada and operated far more schools, with 417 schools compared to 139 in Canada.
Haaland and Newland traveled the country on an historic “Road to Healing” tour, with 12 stops that provided Indigenous survivors the opportunity to share for the first time with the federal government their experiences in federal Indian boarding schools. Transcripts of the tour, which finished in late 2023, are available on the Federal Boarding School Initiative website.
The Interior Department also launched an oral history project documenting and making public experiences of generations of boarding school survivors. Funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition is interviewing survivors for what will be a collection of first-person narratives that will be shared with the public.
“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,” said Newland. “It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
Ongoing efforts
The report also states that the Department of the Interior is working with tribes to repatriate or protect human remains and funerary objects from Indian boarding schools sites located on U.S. government lands, and will do so under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The efforts will include remains at the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where nearly 180 students who died at the school are buried. The site is controlled by the U.S. Army.
The Land Back recommendation will also be ongoing, with calls for return to tribes of the Indian lands that the government provided to religious organizations and states for the purpose of building schools. In many cases, the lands were to have reverted back to tribal ownership if organizations stopped operating schools.
Churches and other organizations, however, continue to hold some of this land today long after boarding schools closed. In an independent investigation, ICT found that Catholic entities may continue to hold more than 10,000 acres of these lands.
The report also identifies 127 treaties made between the federal government and tribes in which boarding schools figure highly, and calls for the U.S. to make good on its promises in treaties and other legislation to provide quality education for Native Americans as well as essential Indigenous language preservation curriculum.
Report highlights
The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative’s second and final investigative report released Tuesday, July 30, 2024, by the U.S. Department of the Interior includes eight recommendations from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, who authored the report. Here are recommendations:
*Apology: The U.S. government should acknowledge its role in a national policy of forced assimilation of Native children and issue a formal apology to individuals, families and tribes that were harmed by U.S. policy.
*Investments: The U.S. should invest in tribal communities in five key areas: individual and community healing; family preservation and reunification, including supporting tribal jurisdiction over Indian child welfare cases; violence prevention on tribal lands; improving Indian education; and working to revitalize First American languages.
*A national memorial: The U.S. government should establish a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate the experiences of Native people within the federal Indian boarding school system.
*Repatriations: The government should identify children interred at school burial sites and help repatriate their remains
*Return school lands: The government should work to return the federal Indian boarding school sites to tribal ownership.
*Tell the story: The government should work with institutions to educate the public about federal Indian boarding schools and their impact on communities.
*Further research: The government should study how policies of child removal, confinement and forced assimilation have impacted generations of families, particularly the present-day health and economic impacts
*Advance international relations: The government should work with other countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand with their own similar but unique histories of boarding schools and assimilationist policies, to determine best practices for healing and redress.
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