Federal report confirms that over 900 Native children died at federal boarding schools

At least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending boarding schools operated or supported by the federal government. That is just one of the sobering details found in the second and final volume of a federal investigative report into Indian boarding schools that was released Tuesday.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in 2021, an effort to recognize and address the impact of federal Indian boarding school policies. In 2022, the first volume of the Initiative’s investigative report was released. Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland announced the second volume’s release Tuesday and outlined next steps for the federal government, including promoting Native languages and a recommendation that the U.S. government formally apologize.

The initiative is the first time the federal government has made a comprehensive effort to recognize the legacy of the federal Indian boarding school policies and attempt to address the impact of those policies on Indigenous communities. The team working on the investigative report reviewed over 103 million pages of federal records.

“It has shed light on this horrific era of our nation’s history, a federal agenda to assimilate and eradicate Native peoples that was in part carried out by the department I lead,” Haaland said. “This trauma is not new to Indigenous people, but it is to many Americans.”

Haaland is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and, like many Indigenous people, she has a personal connection to the history of Indian boarding schools.

“When my maternal grandparents were only 8 years old, they were stolen from their parents, culture and communities and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until the age of 13,” said Haaland.

“My great grandfather was also taken, sent by train thousands of miles away from his small village of Mesita in New Mexico. Many children like them never made it back home.”

For more than a century, tens of thousands of Native American children were placed in boarding schools to force assimilation and eradicate Native cultures. The new report updates the list of federal Indian boarding schools. There are 46 schools identified in New Mexico. It also provides school profiles and identifies at least 74 burial sites at 65 schools.

Often records only showed that a child had died, not the specific cause of death, Newland said, and the report was not able to identify all 973 children who died by name, though it was able to identify their tribal affiliation.

“We do know that there was, historically, a lot of disease outbreaks at these schools. We do know that in many instances, Indian agents would send kids back home if they were sick,” Newland said. “They may have died there, rather than at the school itself, and it’s very likely that many of those kids died as a result of abuse or the aftereffects of abuse that was done to them at those schools.”

The report identified that at least 136 Navajo children and 34 Pueblo children died at boarding schools.

The new report also comes with a set of eight recommendations for Congress from Newland. They include a formal acknowledgement and apology from the U.S. government for its role in implementing national federal Indian boarding school policies; identifying and repatriating the remains of children to tribes; and investing in remedies for the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.

“Through our interagency effort, alongside the Department of Education and Health and Human Services, we are empowering the protection and promotion of Native languages nationwide with our 10-year strategy forthcoming later this year,” Haaland said. “Protecting Native languages was one of the most common requests we heard on the road to healing.”

As part of the initiative, Haaland and Newland made 12 stops across Indian country over more than a year to listen to boarding school survivors and their descendants — “The Road to Healing” tour. The tour included stops in the Pueblo of Isleta and the Navajo Nation. The department is also creating a permanent oral history collection of first-person stories from boarding school survivors.

“Their stories are key to keeping the horrors of this era alive within our national conscience,” Haaland said.