[The Native American boarding school system — a decades-long
effort to assimilate Indigenous people before they ever reached
adulthood — robbed children of their culture, family bonds and
sometimes their lives. ]
[[link removed]]

‘WAR AGAINST THE CHILDREN’  
[[link removed]]


 

Zach Levitt, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Simon Romero and Tim Wallace
August 30, 2023
New York Times
[[link removed]]


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[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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_ The Native American boarding school system — a decades-long
effort to assimilate Indigenous people before they ever reached
adulthood — robbed children of their culture, family bonds and
sometimes their lives. _

A very early class of young boys with flags at the Albuquerque Indian
School., National Archives, Denver, Colorado, Identifier 292873

 

The Native American boarding school system was vast and entrenched,
ranging from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished
military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down
both the West and East coasts.

Until recently, incomplete records and scant federal attention kept
even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they
functioned — unknown. The 523 schools represented here comprise the
most comprehensive accounting to date of institutions involved in the
system. This data was compiled over the course of several years by
the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
[[link removed]], a nonprofit advocacy and
research organization. It reflects the efforts of historians,
researchers, activists and survivors who have filled in many of the
blanks in this dark chapter of American history.

The first school opened in 1801, and hundreds were eventually
established or supported by federal agencies such as the Interior
Department and the Defense Department. Congress enacted laws to coerce
Native American parents to send their children to the schools,
including authorizing Interior Department officials to withhold
treaty-guaranteed food rations to families who resisted.

Congress also funded schools through annual appropriations and with
money from the sale of lands held by tribes. In addition, the
government hired Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and
Congregationalist associations to run schools, regardless of whether
they had experience in education, paying them an amount for each
student.

Beyond the vast federal system, this new list also sheds light on
boarding schools that operated without federal support. Religious
organizations ran at least 105 schools; many were Catholic,
Presbyterian or Episcopalian, but smaller congregations such as the
Quakers ran schools of their own.

Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, the schools largely
shared the mission of assimilating Indigenous students by erasing
their culture. Children’s hair was cut off; their clothes were
burned; they were given new, English names and were required to attend
Christian religious services; and they were forced to perform manual
labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Those who
dared to keep speaking their ancestral languages or observing their
religious practices were often beaten.

While the boarding school era might seem like distant history, aging
survivors, many in their 70s and 80s, are striving to ensure the harm
that was done is remembered.

‘OUR LANGUAGE, OUR CULTURE, OUR FAMILY TIES, OUR LAND’

Ben Sherman, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who spent four years
living at the Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, S.D., said he
placed the emergence of some of the worst abuses at Native American
boarding schools with the sunset of the “shooting wars” waged by
the United States government against Indigenous peoples in the last
decades of the 19th century.

“The government was not done with war, so the next phase involved
war against the children,” said Mr. Sherman, 83, a former aerospace
engineer.

“Don’t try to tell me this wasn’t genocide,” added Mr.
Sherman, who said in an interview that he had once run away from the
school and walked nearly 50 miles trying get home. “They went after
our language, our culture, our family ties, our land. They succeeded
on almost every level.”

Some of the most enduring impacts of the schools involved trauma
passed on from one generation to the next, Mr. Sherman said,
explaining how his immediate family attended boarding schools for four
generations. His great-grandmother, Lizzie Glode, was among the first
group sent to a boarding school in Carlisle, Pa.

Lizzie Glode’s portrait and student card from the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School.  Dickinson College Archives and Special
Collections

One of Ms. Glode’s sons, Mark, attended the Rapid City Indian
Boarding School. The environment there was so harsh, Mr. Sherman said,
that in 1910, when Mark was 17, he and three other boys ran away. They
followed the railroad tracks south toward the Pine Ridge reservation.

At one point, Mr. Sherman said, Mark and another boy slept on the
railroad track. A train rolled through, striking and killing the two
boys.

While researchers say the known toll is still far from complete, there
are at least hundreds of Native children who died while attending
boarding schools. In site after site, children’s bodies were stuffed
into graves without regard for the burial traditions of their families
or their cultures.

In recent years, tribal nations around the United States have begun to
use technologies like remote sensing surveys and ground-penetrating
radar to scour locations for evidence of burial sites. In July, the
Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah confirmed that 12 children were buried
[[link removed]] in
unmarked graves at the site of the Panguitch Indian Boarding School in
southern Utah.

Archival records, including an 1899 map, make reference to a cemetery
on the premises of Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska, about
90 miles west of Omaha — but the location of the cemetery has been
lost. At least 86 students are thought to have died at Genoa from
causes including typhoid, tuberculosis and an accidental shooting.

According to this 1899 page from the Plat Book of Nance County, Neb.,
a cemetery was located on the premises of Genoa Indian Industrial
School. Its exact position on the former school grounds is presently
unknown.  Historic Map Works

Present-day investigation efforts to find students’ remains at Genoa
are being led by the Nebraska state archaeologist, in consultation
with 40 Native nations whose children attended the school.

In its preliminary report
[[link removed]] released
last year, the Interior Department indicated it expected the number of
children known to have died in Native American boarding schools to
grow into “the thousands or tens of thousands.”

‘THE NAMES OF WHITE MEN SEWED ON OUR BACKS’

A driving force behind the frenetic expansion of the boarding school
system was Richard Henry Pratt, a military officer who fought in the
Red River War, a campaign in the 1870s to forcibly remove the
Comanche, Kiowa and other tribes from the Southern Plains of the
United States.

In 1879, Mr. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in
what had been army barracks in Carlisle, Pa., and set about
transforming it into a flagship institution spawning dozens of similar
schools around the United States. He was blunt about his mission, as
in an infamous proclamation [[link removed]]:
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Mr. Pratt dreamed of abolishing the reservations and scattering the
entire population of Native children across the country, with some
70,000 white families each taking in one Native American child. He
came up short in this effort, but he did succeed in creating a model
that placed schools in white communities, often far from the
reservations where Native children were born.

Where Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s students came from

For dozens of children from Alaska, and elsewhere, only the state they
came from is known.

Upon arriving at Mr. Pratt’s school, the children were often
photographed in their Native clothing. Then the boys quickly had their
long hair cut short, a particularly cruel and traumatic step for those
coming from cultures like the Lakota, where the severing of long hair
could be associated with mourning the dead.

Boarding schools made the assault on tribal identity a central feature
of their assimilating mission, often starting with renaming children,
as the historian David Wallace Adams explained in his 1995 book
“Education for Extinction.”

[A photo shows a large, square, white building on a campus. It has a
field in front of it and a brown building behind and to the right.]

The original gym built for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School sits
on what is now the U.S. Army War College campus in Carlisle, Pa. 
Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

One former Carlisle student, Luther Standing Bear, of the Rosebud
Sioux Tribe and Oglala Lakota Nation, recalled being asked to point to
one of the names written on a blackboard, then having the name written
on a piece of tape and placed on the back of his shirt.

“When my turn came, I took a pointer and acted as if I were about to
touch an enemy,” he wrote in “My Indian Boyhood,” his 1931
memoir. “Soon we all had the names of white men sewed on our
backs.”

Just as Carlisle had a renaming policy, other schools took note, often
assigning names that could be humiliating, such as Mary Swollen Face
or Roy Bad Teeth. In other cases, children were randomly bestowed
common American surnames like Smith, Brown or Clark, or given the
names of presidents, vice presidents or other prominent figures.

Mr. Pratt’s photographers would take pictures of the children again
— boys in their uniforms, girls in Victorian-style dresses — as
evidence of the school’s mission.

Mr. Pratt imbued Carlisle with a militaristic culture, dressing and
drilling the children as if they were soldiers and even using a
court-martial format, in which older children would sit as judges over
younger children, to enforce rules. (Mr. Pratt reserved the power to
overrule the court.)

News of Mr. Pratt’s experiment spread, and a vast array of similar
schools were established all over the country. Some of the clearest
descriptions of what such schools sought to accomplish are relayed in
the words of the white officials in charge of these institutions.

“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” Thomas J.
Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said
[[link removed]] in a
speech at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School in 1891.

The same year, a newspaper report published an exchange between the
superintendent of Grand Junction Indian School and the secretary of
the Interior that indicated that a student’s toe was cut off because
his foot could not fit into a government-issued shoe.

An excerpt from an article that appeared in Grand Junction News on May
30, 1891.  Newspapers.com

At Carlisle, authorities introduced an “outing” program: an
arrangement by which children worked as manual laborers or maids in
surrounding farms; businesses like wagon-makers; and households. The
objective appeared to be to provide the students with a modest income
while promoting practices of thrift and savings.

Other institutions made the access to a reservoir of cheap child
laborers a selling point when persuading community leaders to
establish a Native boarding school.

Such “outing” systems eventually became widespread around the
United States. Practices differed considerably from school to school,
and abuses emerged — such as paying the children unfair wages,
making them cover their own room and board, removing them from their
studies for months at a time, and placing them in lodgings that were
substandard or segregated from white laborers.

‘90 MILLION ACRES OF LAND’

In November 1894, U.S. soldiers arrived in the remote northern Arizona
mesas where the Hopi people had lived since time immemorial. Their
orders: Take the children.

But some Hopi parents had already made it clear they would not send
their children to the Keams Canyon Boarding School. Facing resistance,
authorities had tried bribing Hopi parents with yards of cloth, or
tools like axes. They used their bare fists, striking Hopi who
didn’t want to send their children away. They withheld food supplies
guaranteed by treaties in a bid to starve the Hopi into submission.

When even those tactics failed, and resistance to having their
children hauled away was compounded by tensions over farmland, two
cavalry companies arrived to arrest 19 Hopi men. The captives were
imprisoned on California’s Alcatraz Island for nearly a year, and
the removal of Hopi children proceeded as planned.

[A black and white photograph of a group of Hopi men sitting on the
rocky ground while men with guns stand guarding them.]

Men from the Hopi Tribe being transported to Alcatraz.  Mennonite
Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas; Voth photo
#57; used by permission of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office

The treatment of the Hopi, which briefly captured public attention in
the 1890s when the writer Charles Lummis made it the focus of
a crusade
[[link removed]] against
federal Native American education policies, soon faded from view.

Brenda Child, a historian whose Ojibwe grandparents were sent to
Native boarding schools, emphasized in an interview that the period of
the greatest expansion of the boarding school system — from the last
decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th —
coincided with colossal theft of Indigenous land.

When Native American boarding schools were opening at a steady clip
around the country, the General Allotment Act of 1887 allowed federal
authorities to divide up and distribute Native lands. The law
effectively turbocharged land dispossession, allowing white people to
take control of “surplus” land belonging to Indigenous peoples.

“Indian people lost 90 million acres of land during the half century
that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United
States,” said Dr. Child, a professor of American studies at the
University of Minnesota.

Some of the earliest schools, like the Asbury Manual Labor School,
near Fort Mitchell, Ala., took root in the 1820s, when the U.S.
government was on the cusp of forcibly relocating peoples, including
the Cherokee and Creek, from their homelands in the Southeast United
States to lands west of the Mississippi River.

The Interior Department report
[[link removed]] released
last year by Bryan Newland, the department’s assistant secretary for
Indian affairs, showed that land dispossession and funding for Native
American boarding schools went hand in hand. To help pay for the
federal boarding school system, the inquiry noted, the federal
government had used money from trust accounts set aside for the
benefit of tribal nations as part of treaties in which they ceded
lands to the United States. In other words, the United States
government effectively made Indigenous peoples use their own funds to
pay for boarding schools that severed their children’s ties to their
families and cultures.

By the 1920s, so many Native American boarding schools had been
created that nearly 83 percent of school-age Indigenous children were
enrolled in such institutions.

[A photograph shows a large brick building with white windows and four
tall palm trees evenly spaced in front of it.]

Memorial Hall at the Phoenix Indian School in Arizona, which operated
for 99 years after its establishment in 1891.  Tailyr Irvine for The
New York Times

Questions about the costs and effectiveness of assimilation policies,
along with revelations of some of the horrors in the system, slowly
led to changes. An inquiry in 1928, commonly known as the Meriam
Report, detailed
[[link removed]] how
children were malnourished, overworked and harshly disciplined.

In the 1930s, when the process of dispossessing Native lands had
largely been completed, the federal government began shutting down
many of the schools. That took decades, as Native peoples sought to
gain control of the education of their own children, against a
backdrop of activism aiming to bolster Native sovereignty.

From the 1960s to 1980s, federal authorities began handing over
administration of some remaining schools to the Bureau of Indian
Education or the tribes. Institutions such as the Santa Fe Indian
School and the Sherman Indian High School, in Riverside, Calif., still
operate under this model, emphasizing Native sovereignty and
preserving traditional languages and cultures. At least nine boarding
schools in the accounting of 523 schools opened after 1969.

A U.S. Senate report
[[link removed]] in 1969 noted the
tragedy and failure of the system, helping to spur approval of the
Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975, giving
tribal nations greater control over the schools.

[A photograph shows a curving set of railroad tracks, seen through a
gap in trees and brush in the foreground.]

Railroad tracks line the former campus of the Carlisle Indian
School.  Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

A Supreme Court case this year reflected how the abuses of the
boarding school era are still echoing across institutions. The case
involved a challenge to a 1978 law, known as the Indian Child Welfare
Act, aimed at keeping Native American adoptees within tribes. The
court upheld the law, bolstering the notion that tribal nations are
distinct sovereign communities in the United States and alleviating
fears of resurrecting policies giving authorities greater power to
separate Native children from their families and cultures.

Last year’s Interior Department investigation came at the direction
of Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo whose own
grandparents were boarding school survivors. In an effort to lift the
veil on abuses within the system, Secretary Haaland has been traveling
around the country for more than a year, conducting listening sessions
with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the
boarding school system. In the Senate, a bill
[[link removed]] has
been introduced to establish a truth and healing commission to address
the legacy of Native boarding schools, similar to one undertaken by
the Canadian government in 2007.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every
Indigenous person I know,” Ms. Haaland 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.”

‘MILITARY ORGANIZATION, DRILL AND ROUTINE’

Among the most far-reaching effects of the boarding school era was the
way it molded Native children to feed into the American military and
economy. Schools around the country trained Indigenous students to
become manual laborers or prepared them to go to war — not against
the United States, as some of their parents had done, but for it.

At the Phoenix Indian School, administrators developed an
exceptionally militaristic atmosphere. In addition to requiring
students to wear uniforms and conduct regular drills, all pupils had
to stand for inspection at 7:30 a.m. on Sundays.

“Too much praise cannot be given to the merits of military
organization, drill and routine in connection with the discipline of
the school,” the school’s superintendent, Harwood Hall, wrote in
an 1897 report.

A company of boys, trained by the Arizona National Guard, formed an
elite campus group that was eventually attached to the 158th Infantry.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the federal
government had yet to recognize Native Americans as citizens, much
less allow them to vote. But the Phoenix Indian School sent dozens of
students to enlist during World War I. Two were killed.

In addition to training soldiers, the boarding schools sought to
supply laborers. The Albuquerque Indian School, for instance, was
known for sending boys out to work for local farmers, in addition to
teaching “harness making, shoe making, cooking and baking, sewing,
and laundry work,” according to a superintendent’s report in the
1890s.

[A black and white photograph of school-age girls in a classroom, some
using sewing machines and some hand stitching.]

Young school girls attending a sewing class at the Albuquerque Indian
School around 1910.  National Archives
[[link removed]]
, Denver, Colorado, Identifier 292877

But sometimes administrators looked much farther afield to place the
children in their care into jobs. In 1905 and 1906, the Albuquerque
Indian School sent 100 boys and 14 girls to work in Colorado, on the
railroad and in the beet fields.

At Carlisle, which had pioneered the “outing” system, it soon
became a brisk business. In one 18-month period beginning in March
1899, school records show more than 1,280 outings by about 900
students. Many students were sent out more than once, and at least 23
did not return to the school because they ran away from their outings.
The map below shows more than 200 of their destinations, spanning five
states and Washington, D.C.

Where Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s students were sent to work

Some students were sent to places as far as Western New York.  Most
students were sent to towns outside of Philadelphia and Trenton.

Anita Yellowhair, 84, a Navajo survivor who was taken from her family
in Steamboat, Ariz., to live at the Intermountain Indian School in
Brigham City, Utah, said children were simply not allowed to question
being made to work as part of their school experience.

“It was just what you did, no questions asked,” said Ms.
Yellowhair, a former dental assistant who now lives in the Phoenix
area. “They hired me out on weekends to clean the homes of white
families.”

[A photograph shows an older woman, seen from the shoulders up,
looking off to her right. Flowering trees are in the background.]

Anita Yellowhair, 84, sitting outside her home in Arizona. Tailyr
Irvine for The New York Times

The Sherman Institute in Southern California made use of child labor
from its very beginning in 1902 — starting with the construction of
the school itself. Male students at the school built much of the
institution intended to assimilate them into white culture: its
dormitories, hospital, vocational workshops, farm buildings and
auditorium.

The outing system at Sherman, which Kevin Whalen, a historian, called
“a means to prepare students for second-class existence,” became
known for sending so many girls to work as servants in white
households that the school employed an “outing matron” to
supervise them.

[A black and white photograph shows a school-age girl in a maid’s
uniform wiping the dust off a piano.]

A Sherman Institute student working as a housekeeper.  Sherman
Institute

[A black and white photograph shows four school-aged boys working in a
tomato field. Three boys hold boxes of tomatoes, while the fourth
picks them off the vine.]

Sherman Institute students picking tomatoes.  Sherman Institute

Sherman also sent boys to labor in fields around Southern California,
picking citrus fruit, digging ditches, managing livestock and cutting
and baling hay. One company, Fontana Farms, employed hundreds of male
students, mostly Navajo and Hopi, from 1908 to 1929, making them work
six days a week for 10 hours a day and live in racially segregated
shacks apart from white workers.

‘I WAS JUST A CHILD’

James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955, when he was taken with his
6-year-old brother to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He said his
mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had been given a choice: send
her sons to boarding school or put them up for adoption.

When his mother chose boarding school, Mr. LaBelle said, he found
himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope
inserted in the belt loops of their pants. He said his destination,
where he spent the next several years, was the Wrangell Institute, a
boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast
Alaska.

[A photo shows an older man wearing a dark blue shirt and brown pants,
standing between two trees in a yard. There are more trees and a fence
in the background.]

James LaBelle, 76, in his yard in Anchorage.  Ash Adams for The New
York Times

Mr. LaBelle, who is Inupiaq and an enrolled member of the Native
Village of Port Graham, still finds it hard to describe the treatment
he endured at Wrangell. Now 76, his voice grows shaky when he recounts
the punishments children received — and how children were turned
into punishers.

During weekdays, it was common for supervisors to tell children to
undress so they could be paddled or whipped with a
cat-o’-nine-tails, Mr. LaBelle said. And when weekends came, he
said, it was time for the “gauntlet,” when some children were
ordered to get completely naked and others were ordered to hit them
with belts for perceived violations of school rules.

“It could have been a prison or a mental hospital,” said Mr.
LaBelle, who is now a lecturer on historical trauma and a board member
of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
“They made the children the enforcers.”

[A black and white photograph shows a cluster of buildings at the base
of a tree-covered mountain, with a body of water and a dock in the
foreground.]

An undated photograph of the Wrangell Institute, which operated in
southeast Alaska from 1932 to 1975.  P44-01-053, Alaska State
Library, Skinner Foundation Photo Collection

When he was 10, Mr. LaBelle said, he and another boy were punished for
wrestling by being doused with nearly freezing water from a fire hose.
Sexual violence was also rampant, he said, citing the example of a
girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator for the entire
eight years she was at Wrangell.

And in addition to witnessing other male students being raped by a
supervisor, Mr. LaBelle said, he was sodomized by another boy. When
the lights went out at night, Mr. LaBelle said, he could hear other
children, especially some of the youngest, sobbing and calling for
their mothers.

“It was the only time we could show emotion,” Mr. LaBelle said.
“It didn’t take very long until it grew and grew and grew. The
entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in
the dark.”

[A black and white photograph sits on a table, slightly obscured by a
green plant in the foreground. The photograph shows a smiling young
man from the shoulders up. He has styled hair and is wearing a suit
jacket and tie.]

A photograph of Mr. LaBelle from his time as a student at Mt.
Edgecumbe, one of two Native American boarding schools he
attended.  Ash Adams for The New York Times

The range of experiences at these schools was immensely varied.
Despite the overwhelming emphasis on assimilating children into the
dominant white culture of the United States, some former students were
exposed to Indigenous cultures different from their own, met their
future spouses or learned a trade that enabled them to put food on
their family’s table. But many survivors say the horrors of the
system saturated their own experiences to the point where they linger
with them to this day.

“I was just a child, so I couldn’t stand up for myself,” said
Ms. Yellowhair, who described the punishment meted out at Utah’s
Intermountain school to students caught speaking languages other than
English. “For doing that, they made us get on our knees to clean the
toilets,” Ms. Yellowhair added. “It was very embarrassing and
humiliating. That’s why some of us never talk about our time at
school.”

Ms. Yellowhair and Mr. LaBelle are among the survivors attempting to
grapple with the trauma of the boarding school experience as it
endures in their own bones and is passed on, metamorphosing and
evolving into different forms of grief, from one generation to the
next. They have chosen to make their own painful experiences public;
others do not.

Public health researchers have begun to attempt to account for the
lasting toll of boarding school attendance, as well. A study
[[link removed]] by Ursula
Running Bear of the University of North Dakota found that Native
Americans who had attended boarding school were more likely to have a
host of serious chronic health conditions than Native people who did
not attend boarding school, even after controlling for demographic
factors. Her work builds on similar findings
[[link removed]] concerning the Indigenous
residential school system in Canada.

While it may be impossible to fully recount the horrors of the time,
some of the most devastating and harrowing episodes were laid out in
routine bureaucratic reports, which listed the toll of dead children
as if they were discussing livestock losses.

For instance, several paragraphs into a subsection of the “Report
Concerning Indians in Utah” submitted in July 1901 to the Interior
Department, E.O. Hughes, the superintendent of the Uintah Boarding
School in Whiterocks, Utah, noted that something unusual had happened.

“In December came the catastrophe,” Mr. Hughes said in his report.
A measles outbreak that started at the boarding school, he explained,
quickly spread to more than half the school because of substandard
care in the infirmary. Learning of the crisis, many parents from
surrounding reservations quickly went to the Uintah school and took
their children home.

“It was found necessary to call for a troop of cavalry to protect
the buildings from being burned,” Mr. Hughes wrote, noting that
“four of our pupils died in camp,” while another 17 children in
the vicinity died as a result of the measles outbreak.

[A newspaper clipping showing a multi-part headline that reads:
“TROOPS TO GUARD INDIAN SCHOOL. Threats made to burn the buildings
at the Uintah Agency. Children Are Quarantined Because of Epidemic of
Measles and Parents Demand Their Release.”]

An excerpt from an article in The San Francisco Call on December 13,
1900.  Library of Congress, Chronicling America

A precise accounting of how many children died at Native American
boarding schools remains elusive. At some schools, dozens of children
died; 189 students are known to be buried at Carlisle alone. Clues
continue to emerge.

For instance, in a city park just north of downtown Albuquerque,
workers digging irrigation trenches in the 1970s found the bones of
children. The site, it turned out, was the cemetery of the Albuquerque
Indian School.

A decades-old plaque describing the location as “used primarily for
burial of Albuquerque Indian School students from the Zuñi, Navajo
and Apache tribes” itself went largely unnoticed until the
discoveries of student graves at Canadian boarding schools recently
focused greater attention on such sites in the United States.

[A stack of two photographs. The first shows a line of simple white
cloth figures tied together with twine and hung from one branch of a
tree to another. The second is a zoomed-out photograph of the same
tree, decorated with ribbons and cloth on the trunk and in the
branches. It has toys and a sign at its base, and is surrounded by an
orange mesh fence.]

A memorial at the site of what was the cemetery of the Albuquerque
Indian School, just north of downtown Albuquerque.  Tailyr Irvine
for The New York Times

Now the plaque is gone, replaced by a memorial under the shade of a
tree with stuffed animals, toys and an old basketball. A sticker on a
weathered sign at the memorial proclaims “Land Back” — a slogan
of a movement seeking to re-establish Indigenous sovereignty over
purloined lands.

Plastic mesh fencing around the site seeks to place it off limits to
any further despoiling. And another sign, this one put up by the City
of Albuquerque, warns passersby that disturbing marked burial grounds
can result in a felony charge. On a recent day in late July, the
entire park, including the area where Native children were once laid
to rest, was empty.

Reflecting how the reckoning of the boarding school era is still in an
incipient phase, in Albuquerque and around the United States, the sign
explains that the city is “listening to Pueblo & Tribal Leaders, as
well as the broader community, to plan the future of this site.”

* Native Americans
[[link removed]]
* children
[[link removed]]
* schools
[[link removed]]
* Institutionalized Racism
[[link removed]]
* exploitation
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
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