For Alaskan trying to bring home relative from boarding school cemetery, Biden’s apology ‘is one start’

Eleanor Hadden’s face was dimly lit by the glow of her television on Friday’s still-dark morning in her living room in South Anchorage. On it, President Joe Biden was squinting into the Arizona sun, addressing a crowd of tribal leaders and members at the Gila River Indian Community — and also people like Hadden, watching from their homes across the country. Biden was making history as the first president to apologize to Indigenous Americans for what he emphatically called “the most horrific chapter of American history”: the Indian boarding school era.

“I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did,” Biden said. “Quite frankly, there’s no excuse this apology took 50 years to make.”

From the 1800s through the 1970s, the federal government mandated the removal of tens of thousands of Native children from their communities, and sent them to one of the more than 400 Indian boarding schools it operated or supported across the country, according to a federal initiative that investigated the history of assimilation policies.

Researchers found records of at least 74 unmarked or marked school burial sites, and 1,000 students’ deaths, though Biden said that the true number is expected to be “much, much higher.”

Hadden’s great-aunt, Mary Kininnook of Ketchikan, was among them. Mary was 14 years old when she died at the nation’s flagship Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in 1908, according to her school record. She has been buried there ever since, according to her family and local archivists at the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

“Lost generations, culture and language,” Biden said. “Lost trust. It’s horrible, horribly wrong. I’d like to ask ... for a moment of silence,” Biden said. “To remember those lost, and the generations living with that trauma.”

In Hadden’s house, the only noise that could be heard was her husband Ron’s footsteps overhead; she’d just asked him to retrieve tissues.

“An apology is one start,” Hadden, who is Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian, said afterwards. “What do we do with it, after that?”

Across Indian Country, tribal leaders and former boarding school students are spreading similar messages of gratitude for Biden’s recognition while asking for government accountability to help build back what it stripped away.

[Native Americans laud Biden for historic apology over boarding schools, but want action to follow]

For the last 57 years, Hadden and her late mother, Mary Jones, have been searching for their lost aunt. Jones began the search in 1967 by writing to Indian boarding schools across the country in a search propelled by a lone detail from her own mother: that Aunt Mary died at boarding school.

It took another three decades to slowly piece together historic records — including Kininnook’s student ID, death announcement and newspaper clippings about her on-campus funeral — to place her among the more than 200 students buried at the Carlisle Main Post Cemetery in Pennsylvania, Hadden said.

But she was lost once more when Hadden visited Carlisle in 1984 in search of Kininnook’s headstone and instead found another grim reality: When the U.S. Army took over Carlisle in 1918 and moved the cemetery nine years later, the identities of several deceased got lost in the shuffle. The Army reburied those 14 people, who researchers presume to be Native children by matching historic cemetery plot maps to current ones, under headstones marked “UNKNOWN.”

Mary Kininnook is one of them.

“It felt like news when someone dies,” Hadden said, remembering the moment she learned.

Though the Army has pledged to return every Native child’s remains on its property back to their relatives — and has made returns annually since 2017, including several to Alaska Native families — officials haven’t been clear in informing the families who believe their relatives are among the unknowns of a process for return, Hadden said.

Hadden said she and her brother were initially told their great-aunt would come home in the 2020 disinterment cycle with the help of forensic anthropologists. Since her great aunt is one of two non-infant girls missing headstones — the other was 17 years old — forensic anthropologists could deduce identities based on pre-pubescent bone structure, she said. But the return process was delayed due to the pandemic, and Hadden said she hasn’t heard from Office of Army Cemeteries officials since. The Office of Army Cemeteries did not respond to a request for comment.

Across Alaska, there are “thousands, to tens of thousands,” of families like Hadden’s, who still await the return of their relatives, said Alaska Native Heritage Center Indigenous researcher Benjamin Jacuk.

“That, at some point, would include virtually every Alaska Native family and community,” Jacuk said, based on his decade-long research of state, federal, church and private archives.

That is a driving reason behind Alaska Native leaders’ endorsement of federal legislation that would establish a congressional truth and healing commission to further investigate the legacy and loss associated with Indian boarding schools.

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who introduced one of the bills to create a commission, said in a statement that Biden’s acknowledgement of the pain and injustices inflicted upon Indigenous communities strengthens her resolve to have the legislation become law.

U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola, who is Yup’ik, wrote on Facebook that Biden’s acknowledgment of “the pain, both past & present, caused by Indian boarding schools” is “essential to a way forward for Alaska Natives & Tribal communities throughout the U.S.”

“This apology is an important step forward, but it must be accompanied by meaningful actions addressing these historical injustices’ ongoing impacts,” Alaska Federation of Natives President Benjamin Mallott said in a prepared statement. “This includes revitalizing our languages and cultures and bringing home our Native children who have not yet been returned, so they can be laid to rest with their families and in their communities.”

In Kodiak, Cassey Rowland, who brought home her own great-aunt from Carlisle in 2022, said she appreciated President Biden’s apology.

“To hear someone acknowledge that they were wrong, especially when that person is the president of the United States, it helps with the healing,” Rowland said by phone.

Hadden, whose parents met at Sheldon Jackson Boarding School in Sitka in 1944, said that she — like many others — grew up with several truths about Indian boarding schools. Her mother loved her piano lessons, shared “mostly good stories,” and had done the work to address some of the harmful behavior she observed from her own mother — Hadden’s grandmother — by doing things differently with her children, telling them she loved and was proud of them. But Kininnook’s story, and her continued absence, call Hadden to finish the work her mother started long ago.

“Part of me is happy,” Hadden said from her rocking chair. “But I’m also feeling a loneliness. What you need after acknowledgement is a plan. What comes next?”