Federal Report Outlines Abuses at Native Boarding Schools, Calls for Remedies

Warning: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the United States. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.

What they took from us…was a way of life, a way of medicines, a way of subsistence, a way of looking at our environment, looking at our universe.

Ione Quigley, Rosebud Sioux Nation, November 23, 2021

Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, Tribal Consultation Summary

In 2021, US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna), who is the first Native American ever to hold a federal cabinet post, called on her assistant secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the history of federal “Indian Boarding Schools.” The final report resulting from that three-year study was published in July 2024.

Outside of Indian Country, the history of these US boarding schools remains largely ignored.

As the Department of the Interior noted at the outset of Haaland’s call, the schools operated for over 150 years, beginning in 1819. These schools formed part of a federally backed “education” system in which Native American children were routinely pulled away from their parents, homes, and communities and sent to boarding schools to “assimilate them in Western culture” and cast aside their own—an explicit strategy of cultural genocide. Children would be separated from their parents for years.

As the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian details, “The children were forced to cut their hair and give up their traditional clothing. They had to give up their meaningful Native names and take English ones. They were not only taught to speak English but were punished for speaking their own languages. Their own traditional religious practices were forcibly replaced with Christianity. They were taught that their cultures were inferior.” Infamously, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, founder of a boarding school in 1879 in Carlisle, PA, said the goal was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”

The multiple harms and intergenerational trauma from boarding schools affect Native communities and Native people to this day. Yet, outside of Indian Country, the history of these US boarding schools remains largely ignored. As Haaland wrote in a Washington Post op-ed at the time the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative was launched (and just three months after she became secretary), “The lasting and profound impacts of the federal government’s boarding school system have never been appropriately addressed.” Haaland added that her own “maternal grandparents were stolen from their families when they were only 8 years old and were forced to live away from their parents, culture, and communities until they were 13.”

By itself, the report is just a starting point. Haaland readily concedes the point, saying that “the road to healing does not end with this report—it is just beginning.” Still, the report—and its findings—offer an important milestone in both documenting the extent of the harm and offering recommendations for remedies.

What the Report Says

In 1925 alone, 60,889 Native children were enrolled in boarding schools—nearly 83 percent of all Native children of school age at the time.

The report includes two volumes—one published in 2022 and the other published at the end of July 2024—both of which are a little over 100 pages long. Among the findings are the following:

• Between 1819 and 1969, the federal Indian boarding school system consisted of 408 schools across 37 states or then-territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 in Hawaiʻi; some schools had multiple sites, so the total number of school sites was 431.
• The federal government spent an estimated $23.3 billion (in 2023 dollars) supporting the boarding school system.
• Based on available records, there were at least 973 documented deaths of Native American children across the system. Debra Krol of the Arizona Republic, however, reports that these figures are “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.”

• The study found 53 marked and 21 unmarked burial sites at 65 different school sites.
• The report identifies by name 18,624 Native Americans who attended boarding schools but acknowledges that this is a small percentage of how many were affected. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition estimates that in 1925 alone, 60,889 Native children were enrolled in boarding schools—nearly 83 percent of all Native children of school age at the time.
• An additional 1,025 other institutions (including day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories) were not formally part of the boarding school system, but the report indicates they were used to advance cultural assimilation goals.

The report also offers eight principal recommendations:

1. Issue a formal apology. Similar apologies were made in 2008 in Canada and Australia, but no such apology has occurred in the United States to date.
2. Invest in Native communities. Notably, as Mary Annette Pember and Stewart Huntington of ICT (formerly Indian Country Today) point out, the word “reparations” is notably absent from the report. It does recommend investments in community and individual healing, family preservation and reunification, violence prevention, Native education, and Indigenous language revitalization, but offers no financial recommendations about how much funding should be involved.
3. Build a national memorial to educate the public.
4. Repatriate the remains of children who died at the boarding schools, including passing laws allowing for the reburial of remains.
5. Return boarding school sites to Native ownership (or at least, if federally owned, with Native land stewardship). This, as Huntington reports for ICT, marks an effort at land back; as Huntington points out, “it was often land—appropriated from Native nations—that provided the resources to operate the boarding schools.”
6. Tell the story of the federal boarding schools and make information available for both academic and nonacademic distribution.
7. Invest in further research regarding present-day health and economic impacts.
8. Advance international relationships with other countries with similar experiences—such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—to exchange best practices regarding healing, repair, and redress.

A Canadian Contrast

As noted above, reparations were not among the recommendations. This contrasts with action taken in Canada, where there were 139 schools—one-third the number in the United States. From 2007 to 2015, Canada conducted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission study, which led to 94 calls to action (some have been implemented, many not). In 2021, a mass grave was found at a boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia, holding the remains of 215 Indigenous children, a development that shocked many Canadians even as it confirmed the suspicions of many Indigenous people. This led to further pressure on the government to follow through on the commitments from the 2015 truth and reconciliation report.

To date, Ian Austen of the New York Times reports that due to legal settlements, about $10 billion ($7.3 billion US dollars) in reparation payments have been made to Indigenous people in Canada for harm resulting from that nation’s boarding school system. An additional $23 billion (about $16.7 billion US dollars) in reparations in Canada has been provided for 300,000 Indigenous people harmed by a system that often placed Indigenous children in foster care rather than helping families stay together.

Next Steps

What’s next in the United States? Clearly, the federal report is an important acknowledgment by the federal government of horrific wrongdoing. Yet, in terms of addressing and remedying the harms, it’s but a small step. Newland, who headed the study team, echoes Haaland and acknowledges this, saying that “our shared work should mark the beginning of a long effort to heal our nation.”

There remain many unanswered questions—including whether, and to what extent, the recommendations of the report will be implemented. Notably, the timing of the report’s release, in the middle of a topsy-turvy national presidential election campaign—did little to help the report get the attention that it merits.

There are some next steps planned. One is a $3.7 million oral history project, launched in 2023 and stewarded by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which, the report notes, will “focus on gathering first-person survivor narratives and establishing an oral history collection.”

Haaland told Krol that there is also an interagency effort being organized involving the federal Department of Health and Human Services and Education Department to develop a 10-year language revitalization strategy in Native communities. Newland also told Krol that the Native communities he met with have called for support for community-based, trauma-informed healing care.

For their part, Pember and Huntington for ICT interviewed about a half-dozen Native leaders for their responses. In Minneapolis, LeMoine LaPointe, a Sicangu Lakota elder, reflected the mixed sentiments of the people interviewed: “This country has never addressed the horrendousness of the boarding school era. It’s hard to swallow the truth,” he said. LaPointe added that he hoped that Native Americans could lead the way forward to “a more positive and beneficial place.”