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 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. 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. Source: Department of the Interior

Federal Indian boarding schools examined

Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative 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, 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.

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.

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.

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

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

An oral history project launched in 2023 will continue to collect and make public boarding school students’ experiences. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, 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, 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, which among other 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. (Source: Department of the Interior)