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‘NO CHILDREN IN THE VILLAGE’: TRIBES’ LOSSES TO INDIAN BOARDING
SCHOOLS  
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Debra Utacia Krol
July 30, 2024
Arizona Republic
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_ "My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all
left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children.
No children in the village," another student from Alaska told a panel
convened to hear from boarding students... _

Photos of the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center, which is
dedicated to sharing the history of the Phoenix Indian School.,

 

More than 18,000 children were shipped off to faraway schools in the
late 19th and 20th centuries. Nearly 900 known deaths occurred in the
417 federal-run institutions, along with uncounted cases of trauma,
abuse, neglect, poor nutrition and despair. Entire generations paid
the price for a failed federal policy.

These and other facts punctuated the second report on the troubled
legacy of Indian boarding school policies and the federal government's
attempt to assimilate tribes by removing children as young as age 4 to
military-style schools.

But it was the personal accounts that stood out Tuesday in the second
and final volume of a groundbreaking report
[[link removed]]
on the toll the federal Indian boarding schools exacted on tribal
communities, families and children.

"I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other
children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents, and
just wanting to go home," one former student said.

"My aunt said after we all left, after the planes came and we all
left, she said the village was so quiet because there was no children.
No children in the village," another student from Alaska told a panel
convened to hear from boarding students and their families.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released the report Tuesday, following
up on the first from 2022
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This one contained more accurate information about how federal
assimilation policies, including boarding schools and the wholesale
removal of children handed off for adoption by non-Native families,
caused havoc and disruption in Indigenous communities throughout the
U.S.

This map shows some of the federal Indian boarding school sites that
were examined in an Interior Department report.  
Department of the Interior
 
Federal Indian boarding schools examined
Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative
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in 2021 to investigate and document the "troubled legacy" of how the
417 federal schools and another 1,025 religious and privately operated
schools worked to assimilate Indian children by removing them from
their homes to sometimes remote military-style schools where they were
systemically deprived of language, culture and family life.

"We're here because our ancestors persisted," Haaland said during a
call with reporters Tuesday. "It's our duty to share those stories
with the world."

The Interior Department's team identified 417 Federal schools
operating on 451 sites across 37 states or then-territories
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including 22 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii, between 1819
and 1969. The report found that religious organizations operated
nearly half of the 417 federal schools, while another 59 schools run
by religious groups received federal dollars.

Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs, said
investigators also identified 1,025 other institutions that were not
run by the federal government but by religious organizations.

The report also provided detailed profiles on the federal
institutions, Newland said.

Investigators pored through 103 million pages of records to locate at
least 18,624 Indian, Alaska Native and Hawaiian children who were
taken into the federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and
1969, but they admitted the numbers are not complete.

For one thing, the report noted, children in the system outside of the
study period would not be counted. Also, records from non-federal
religious or private schools were not available. Other schools like
day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, stand-alone dormitories
and schools operated without government support also were not counted.

The report also estimated that more than $23.3 billion in fiscal year
2023 inflation-adjusted dollars were appropriated from 1871 to 1969 to
run the schools and similar institutions and associated policies
[[link removed]].

Deaths at boarding schools are likely underreported

The report identified 973 children who died while attending one of the
federal boarding schools. That number included 249 students from
Arizona tribes. The three largest tribes in Arizona suffered the
greatest losses. The Navajo Nation lost 135 children plus one from the
Ramah Navajo Reservation in New Mexico; the four Apache tribes in
Arizona suffered 49 deaths; and the O'odham tribes lost 41 students.

Those figures are also likely far less than the number of children who
perished. Some burial sites contain human remains of multiple people
or burials of people relocated from other sites. This prevents tribes
from the ability to identify those individuals.

The report also identified schools with onsite and offsite burial
sites. The Phoenix Indian School, which operated from 1891 to 1990,
did not have an onsite cemetery to inter the estimated 23 children who
perished there.

Students, their families and entire communities have endured
disruption from the boarding school system for nearly 200 years, the
report said. Tribes are dealing with domestic violence, substance
abuse and adverse childhood experiences often resulting in reduced
cognitive abilities through adulthood, along with other social ills.

Those effects include the government's next failed tribal assimilation
policy: the wholesale removal of Indian children to be adopted into
non-Native families. That policy persisted until 1978 with the
enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, although Native kids are
still removed from homes at greater rates than other groups.

A PRICE PAID: Native families welcome children home, but 'long road'
not over for others
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What's next in 'The Road to Healing'

The boarding school initiative included hearing the experiences of
boarding school survivors and their families about the school
experience and how it affected their lives and those of their
descendants during "The Road to Healing," a series of listening
sessions across the U.S.

"We listened, we wept and we began to heal," Haaland said.

The Interior Department held one of those sessions in the Gila River
Indian Community in 2023
[[link removed]].

The report includes eight recommendations for the federal government
from Assistant Secretary Newland that aim to support a path to healing
the nation, including:

* Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S.
government regarding its role in adopting and implementing national
federal Indian boarding school policies.
* Investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal
Indian boarding school system.
* Establishing a national memorial to acknowledge and commemorate
the experiences of Indian tribes, individuals, and families affected
by the federal Indian boarding school system.
* Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary
objects who never returned from federal Indian boarding schools.
* Returning former federal Indian boarding school sites to tribes.
* Telling the story of federal Indian boarding schools to the
American people and the global community.
* Investing in further research regarding the present-day health and
economic impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system.
* Advancing international relationships in other countries with
similar but their own unique histories of boarding schools or other
assimilationist policies.

An oral history project
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launched in 2023 will continue to collect and make public boarding
school students' experiences. The National Native American Boarding
School Healing Coalition [[link removed]], which
has been recording boarding school survivors' accounts and advocating
for support services, will receive $3.7 million in grant funding to
help facilitate this project.

Newland and Haaland also said that language revitalization was one of
the most-asked-for points during the 12-stop "Road to Healing" tour.
Haaland said the departments of Education, Health and Human Services
and Interior were developing a 10-year strategy to promote language
revivals in tribal communities.

President Joe Biden has supported the generation of the report,
Haaland said, and she expects him to read it. She believes Biden and
First Lady Jill Biden support language revitalization efforts.

"President Biden has made many promises and kept many promises to
Indian County," Haaland said.

Newland said families and students have also been calling for
community-based, trauma-informed healing care, family-strengthening
programs and reductions in Native kids being pulled into foster care,
and programs to address domestic violence to deal with the
intergenerational effects of the schools and other federal policies.

"There's a lot of work to be done to turn these broad recommendations
into specific strategies," Newland said.

Historians, scholars say it's too little, too late

Dakota historian and Indian education history expert Jeanne Eder
Rhodes believes the effort could be too little, too late. Rhodes, a
retired history professor and co-author of one of the first definitive
books on the history of Indian education
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said the damage boarding schools inflicted on tribes is "so
complicated that they really can't fix it."

For one thing, Rhodes said, the schools did such a good job of
suppressing Indigenous languages that many tribes no longer have any
living speakers, making revitalization difficult if not impossible.
And, she said, larger tribes would most likely receive the lion's
share of any funding, leaving smaller tribes out.

Rhodes also said she believes the report is "reinventing the wheel,"
pointing to earlier such reports like the Meriam Report
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findings showcased the poor conditions in the schools, inadequate
diet, including foods like milk to which Indigenous kids were
allergic, and the difficulties Native students returning from boarding
school faced as they were not prepared to reassume their lives in
tribal communities.

Because her stepfather worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she
got a waiver to attend public schools. Still, she and other Native
students suffered similar abuses to what boarding school students
endured.

"There was a perception that Indian kids weren't capable of learning,"
Rhodes said.

She went on to earn a Ph.D in history from Washington State
University.

David Martinez, an Indian studies professor at Arizona State
University, said the federal government "should be held accountable
for all people who suffered from the egregious boarding school
policies whether or not they are in recognized tribes."

Martinez is enrolled in the Gila River Indian Community but is also a
member of the Hia-Ced O'odham Tribe, the only unrecognized tribe in
Arizona.

He said there were no recognized tribes until 1934 when the Indian
Reorganization Act was enacted, and that many students from currently
non-recognized tribes were pulled into the schools.

"The worst abuses in Indian boarding schools occurred before 1934,"
Martinez said. "Justice for non-federally recognized tribes is not
based on when the abuses happened but on the fact that they happened
at all."

Newland said abuses occurred in the schools well into the 1960s and
1970s but the department is aware that many Native people living with
the harmful effects of the schools don't live in their communities or
are not members of recognized tribes. He also said the boarding
schools may have had effects on federal recognition, particularly in
Northern California.

"We've got to repair our relationship with all Indian people," Newland
said.

Federal Indian boarding school sites are shown on this map from an
Interior Department report.  
Department of the Interior
 

_Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of
climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West.
Reach Krol at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter
at @debkrol [[link removed]]. _

_Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture
and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation._

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* U.S. Department of the Interior Federal Indian Boarding School
Initiative; Arizona; Navaho Nation; Apache; O'odham tribes; ;
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