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Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in US government boarding schools
A federal investigation has found that at least 973 Native American children perished in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system over a 150-year period.
apnews.com
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At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.
The investigation commissioned by Interior Sec. Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness, accidents and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said.
The findings follow a series of listening sessions across the U.S. over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.
... “The federal government — facilitated by the Department I lead — took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a news release Tuesday.
... The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, according to the new report.
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By 1926, more than 80% of Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 children — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The Minnesota-based group has tallied more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that were run by churches and with no evidence of federal support.
U.S. Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church’s role in trauma the children experienced. And in 2022, Pope Francis apologized for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with boarding schools in Canada. He said the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.
... Legislation pending before Congress would establish a “Truth and Healing Commission” to document and acknowledge past injustices related to boarding schools. The measure is sponsored in the Senate by Democrat Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and backed by Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. ..."
