At least 31 Alaska Native children died in federal boarding schools, according to new Interior report

At least 31 Alaska Native children died in federal boarding schools, according to the latest investigative report from the U.S. Interior Department.

The second volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report documented 973 Indigenous students who died in such institutions between 1819 and 1969. According to the authors, the true number is certainly higher.

“This information is not complete,” the report states. “The Department acknowledges that the actual number of children who died while in Indian boarding schools is greater.”

Though investigators reviewed some 103 million pages of U.S. government records, according to a letter from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, neither volume of the report accounts for children who may have died at institutions outside the scope of the report’s narrow definition of a “Federal Indian Boarding School.” For example, omitted from the tally are American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children who attended “Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories, and Indian boarding schools operated by religious institutions and organizations that received no U.S. Government support.”

One of the appendices for the latest volume lists the tribal affiliations of students known to have died in Federal Indian Boarding Schools, though the authors intentionally do not make public their names or what institutions they were enrolled in. Among the dead, it lists six Aleut/Unangan children, five Tlingit/Tlinkit and 10 “Eskimo.” Another 10 are listed only as “Alaskan,” with no specific tribal or cultural affiliation noted.

During the yearslong investigation, researchers also “identified 74 marked or unmarked burial sites at 65 different schools across the Federal Indian boarding school system based on available records.”

[Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in US government boarding schools]

Part of the impetus behind the boarding school initiative is a fuller accounting of the extensive efforts undertaken by the federal government to subdue and eradicate Indigenous populations, as well as recommending steps to ameliorate the far-reaching fallout from those efforts in Native communities. The report confirms there were 417 government-run schools in 37 states and territories, 22 of which were in Alaska, though there were far more small, typically religious facilities that fell outside the formal definition of a federal Indian boarding school used by investigators.

“I welcome the Interior Department’s second and final investigative report further detailing the U.S. Government’s role in operating the federal Indian boarding school system and its impacts on Native children and their families,” said Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who serves as vice chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in a statement. “These findings affirm my resolve to get the Truth and Healing Commission legislation signed into law. The more we understand the truth about this era, the more we are able to help all those affected find healing.”

The first volume of the Interior Department’s initiative was published in 2022 and compiled the first comprehensive official list of federal boarding schools in the United States. Department staff complemented their wide-ranging document review with listening sessions at 12 locations across the country, including the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage — testimony from which is included in the document.

“Unfortunately, (the Wrangell Institute) was a place that attracted pedophiles and many matrons, men and women, perpetrated themselves upon little boys and girls,” said one listening session participant in Alaska. Participants’ names are not included in excerpted testimony that appears in the report. “We saw girls going home in the middle of the school year pregnant and a lot of these children were like 11 and 12, 13 years old.”

The federal boarding school initiative was launched by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in the country’s history.

“We have witnessed a change in our nation’s understanding of these schools in a short period of time. Survivors and leaders have begun efforts to explain the legacy and impacts of Indian boarding schools on local communities across Indian country,” Newland wrote in a letter attached to the report.

Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. spent more than $23.3 billion on the federal Indian boarding school system, according to the report’s findings. Among the recommendations provided by the authors is a list of possible areas of investment for commensurate federal spending to spur healing and cultural revitalization, including community-based initiatives in Indian Country, family reunification, violence prevention and language revitalization, among others.