“The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us”

TEEN VOGUE

Nearly 1000 Native American Children Died in Abusive US Boarding Schools, Report Finds

Angie Jaime 8/1/2024

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An investigation commissioned by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland found graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools where Native American children were forced to assimilate into white, American society.  While the report found that at least 973 Indigenous children died while attending schools in the system, it also acknowledges that the actual number of deaths is likely higher.

“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.  These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” Haaland said in a statement.

In the 150 years between 1819 and 1969, thousands of Native children and youths were forcibly taken from their homes, as part of systemic efforts from the federal government and Christian religious leaders to eradicate Indigenous culture and identity.  The report estimates the U.S. federal government spent $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars over the 150 years that the government supported the boarding school system and similar assimilation policies.

It wasn’t until 1975 that tribal nations received the right to manage tribal schools, many of which were on tribal land, and parents could not prevent their children’s placement in off-reservation schools until the Indian Child Welfare Act passed in 1978.

“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,” Assistant Secretary and citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe) Bryan Newland said in the same 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. 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.”

The findings follow listening sessions held by Haaland throughout the U.S. over the past two years, in which dozens of boarding school survivors described what they endured while separated from their families.

“I thought there was no God, just torture and hatred,” Whirlwind Soldier testified during a 2022 event on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation led by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. “The only thing they didn’t do was put us in (an oven) and gas us,” she said, invoking Holocaust atrocities.

Within the report, Assistant Secretary Newland includes a number of steps that aim to support a path to healing the nation, including among its recommendations: issuing a formal apology from the U.S. government and “investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.”

The report, Haaland said, just the beginning of a long road to healing.