53 burial sites at US boarding schools found

An investigation launched by the US Interior Department has identified marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 different American Indian boarding schools, a number that is expected to grow as the probe continues.

The first part of an investigative report focusing on the federally operated American Indian boarding schools, first set up in the early 19th century to wean the native Indian children of their language and cultural traditions, was released Wednesday by the Interior Department.

Deb Haaland, the department secretary, launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which produced the report after mass graves for native students who had attended similar schools in Canada were discovered.

According to the report, from 1819 to 1969, the US federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 federal schools across 37 states or then territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and seven schools in Hawaii.

The investigation also identified the sites at approximately 53 different boarding schools.

"The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old — are heartbreaking and undeniable," said Haaland.

In fact, "to kill the Indian and save the man" was the mandate given to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, America's first government-run off-reservation boarding school for Native American children, by its founder, US Army general Richard Henry Pratt. He believed that to accomplish the goal of assimilation, the children must be removed from their tribal context.

In 1891, 12 years after Carlisle opened, the federal government made attending boarding school compulsory for all indigenous children. Those at such schools could be as old as 17 or 18 — in some cases young married women with children were forcibly enrolled — or as young as 4 or 5 because they were considered the most malleable.

"Prior to this education-for-assimilation period, the federal policy toward Native Americans was extermination," says Samuel Torres of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

According to the newly released report, the federal Indian boarding school system deployed "systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies". Those included renaming Indian children with English names, cutting their hair and barring them from using their native tongues.

Those who violated the rules were routinely subjected to physical punishment, including having their mouths washed out with soap, being held in dark solitary confinement for days or forced to run a gantlet whereby the victim went down in between two lines of fellow students, who swung their belts at the victim, egged on by the teacher.

Between the 1880s and 1930s, through its non-Indian agents, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs trawled the reservations for students to fill the schools. The bureau, which was also responsible for distributing food, land and executing other provisions in treaties with Native American tribes, routinely withheld provisions from those who refused to send their children to the schools.

In some cases its agents — who had a quota to fill — simply kidnapped children. It has been estimated that by 1926 nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children were in the system.

The Meriam Report of 1928, commissioned by the Institute for Government Research and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, painted a damning picture of life at the boarding schools — students sometimes had no access to soap and had to share towels, cups and beds. That's led to major outbreaks of trachoma, measles and tuberculosis. The influenza pandemic of 1918-19 also hit the boarding schools hard.

In most cases school officials failed to notify parents of the sickness until their children died, often in agonizing solitude. Many were buried in school cemeteries, in wooden coffins made by their classmates.

"Indian children … in the residential schools … die at a much higher rate than in their villages," Duncan Campbell Scott, the Canadian government's deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, said in the 1920s. "But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian Problem." It's worth noting the Canadian Indian boarding (residential) school system was developed based on the US model.

Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary, said upon the launch of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative last June, that the discoveries of unmarked graves in Canada had left her "sick to my stomach". Her grandparents were both 8 years old when they were forced to attend boarding schools.

Despite assertions to the contrary, the investigation found that the boarding school system largely focused on manual labor and vocational skills that left its students with employment options often irrelevant to the industrial US economy. That led to dire poverty and further disruption of the tribal economies.

"We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face," said Haaland, who announced the launch of "The Road to Healing", a yearlong tour that will allow boarding school survivors to share their stories with the public.

"It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal."