More schools that forced Native American children to assimilate revealed

A nonprofit group has identified 115 more Indian boarding schools than has been previously reported, offering new insight into the role of religious institutions in the long-standing federal policy to eradicate Native Americans’ culture through their children.

For more than a century, generations of American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children were forced or coerced from their homes and communities and sent to live at schools where they were beaten, starved and made to abandon their Native languages and culture. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced last year that the federal government ran or supported 408 such schools in 37 states, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven in Hawaii, from 1819 to 1969.

The new list released Wednesday by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition uses a different criteria, bringing the number of known Indian boarding schools in the country to 523 in 38 states. In addition to the federally supported schools tallied by the Interior Department, the coalition identified 115 more institutions that operated beginning in 1801, most of them run by religious groups and churches.

The coalition scoured thousands of records scattered across the National Archives, universities, tribal offices and local historical societies to identify and map the schools as part of an effort to raise awareness about an often forgotten part of U.S. history.

“Regardless of who was complicit in running these schools, whether it was done by the federal government or a church or religious group, they both thought it was acceptable to create these schools to remove Native children from their land, strip them of their language and reprogram them under a Manifest Destiny model,” said Samuel Torres, deputy chief executive of the coalition.

Tens of thousands of American Indian children attended these schools, although no one knows the exact number. Thousands are believed to have died, the coalition said.

There are increasingly few Native elders alive to give firsthand accounts of their time at the schools. Many are now in their 70s and 80s and attended the schools in the late 1940s and ‘50s. Some were physically, mentally and sexually abused. Their experiences left them deeply scarred.

The coalition’s work comes amid a growing effort to expose the harmful legacy of the boarding school era on American Indian families and tribes as part of the federal government’s broader, centuries-long policies to try to eradicate Native Americans and seize their land. The reckoning has been spurred in large part, many Native leaders said, by the discovery in 2021 of roughly 200 unmarked graves of children who died at a residential school in Canada.

Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians - a D.C.-based lobbying group - said the findings in Canada “ignited a reawakening” of the United States’ painful history of Indian boarding schools, especially among elders who went to the institutions and never spoke about their experiences.

“We’re getting to a place where they’re starting to pass away, and we want to make sure the truth is known and the truth is told, so there’s some measure of justice because we’re all impacted as Native people,” said Sharp, who is also the vice president of the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington state.

The healing coalition partnered with the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada to build a map similar to one the Canadian center did that looked into how Indigenous children in Canada were forced into residential schools.

Of the additional schools on the coalition’s list, 105 were run by missionary groups and churches. Officials at the coalition said it is difficult to tell exactly how those schools were funded because the records are held in private collections of religious missions or church groups and more research needs to be done.

Nine were opened after 1969 - beyond the time frame investigated by the Interior Department. Another operated as both a boarding school and a day school at one point, the coalition said.

The coalition’s small staff has spent the past three years locating and analyzing records on boarding schools, which are often hard to find and incomplete. Its latest work found more schools in Oklahoma - which had the most, with 95 - and Hawaii, where researchers revealed another 22, bringing that state’s total to 29.

Over the past year, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland - a member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe whose grandparents were stolen from their homes and sent to boarding schools - has traveled the country in what her agency calls a “Road to Healing Tour.” She has visited nine tribal communities and listened to survivors and their descendants tell of experiences at boarding schools and the often traumatic impact on their lives, culture, language and customs.

Haaland’s agency published the first of two reports investigating the schools in May 2022 and found that roughly 50 percent of the federal Indian boarding schools likely received “support or involvement from a religious institution or organization, including funding, infrastructure, and personnel.” The federal government at times paid religious institutions on a “per capita basis for Indian children” to attend boarding schools run by religious groups, according to Interior’s report.

Many children never made it home. The Interior report’s initial analysis found that more than 500 Indigenous children died at 19 of the federal boarding schools but said that investigators expect the eventual number of deaths to “be in the thousands or tens of thousands.” American Indian historians said many of the children were likely to have died of malnutrition, abuse, tuberculosis or typhoid.

Their parents often received letters long after their deaths. In some instances, families were unable to travel the long distances from their homes to claim the bodies. Many children were buried at cemeteries on or near the boarding schools’ grounds - sometimes in unmarked graves.

A second report from the Interior Department will focus on children who died at the schools and how the institutions were funded. Congress is also considering legislation that would create a commission to investigate the schools’ operations, examine church and government records and locate children’s graves.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland, the nation’s first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”

The coalition also plans to release a digital archive of boarding school records later this year, allowing easier access to historians and families still searching for information about their loved ones.

“It’s going to be a paradigm shift so individuals, communities and Native nations will be able to see in a comprehensive, profound way who was responsible for running these schools,” Torres said.

Many tribes have started to investigate what happened to children lost to these schools. Some are finding answers. Tribes and communities in Nebraska, South Dakota and Utah have used ground-penetrating radar to search land surrounding boarding schools for unmarked graves.

At the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of the first federal boarding schools in the United States, the remains of five Native American students found at a cemetery near the school will be disinterred and returned to their families for burial this fall, according to officials from the U.S. Army, which now has a war college on the site. The students died between 1880 and 1910.

In Utah, experts and local tribes using ground-penetrating radar found 12 graves of Indian children in July on the property of the former Panguitch Indian Boarding School, which operated in the early 1900s. They are believed to be from the Paiute and other tribes.

“These children were taken from their families at very young ages, were not permitted to communicate in the only language they had ever known and were forced into manual labor to maintain the facility,” leaders of the Paiute tribes said in a joint statement when the graves were found.

The tribal leaders said, “Our hearts go out to the families of these children as we are left to consider how best to honor and memorialize their suffering.”