U.S. report urges formal apology in final volume on Indian Boarding Schools
The U.S. Department of the Interior recently released the final volume of its report into the U.S. Indian Boarding School system urging a formal apology on behalf of the government as one of its eight recommendations.
“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,” Department Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement on July 30.
“The Road to Healing does not end with this report – it is just beginning.”
The Federal Indian boarding school system in the U.S. operated from 1819 to 1969. Similar to Canada’s residential schools, the system aimed to assimilate Indigenous children and suppress their languages, with reports of widespread abuse.
In 2021, Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to address the lasting legacy of the institutions. The initiative included an investigative report detailing historical records and school locations.
Today, we released the final volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative’s investigative report on our nation’s troubled yet largely ignored boarding school era. It’s an era that has impacted every Native person I know, including my own family.https://t.co/G7D8x8VM4n
— Secretary Deb Haaland (@SecDebHaaland) July 30, 2024
Memorial, funding for education and health among recommendations
Volume 2 of the report released July 30 updated the official list of residential schools as well as maps. It documented 417 institutions across 37 states or then-territories and that 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, or Native Hawaiian children died while enrolled in the schools. The report doesn’t provide details on the causes of death saying researchers faced challenges gathering that information given the age of many documents, the fact that many were handwritten, and given the inconsistent U.S. Government reporting of child deaths at the time.
In addition to the recommendation of a formal apology, the other seven recommendations are:
- Fund initiatives that address the problems still affecting people today because of the federal Indian boarding school system
- Create a national memorial
- Return childrens’ remains and funerary objects buried at the schools or their former sites
- Give former boarding school sites to Indigenous Tribes.
- Making sure history of the boarding schools is known both in the U.S. and internationally
- Funding more research into health and economic effects of the boarding school system.
- Strengthening connections with other countries that have faced similar boarding school issues
To create these reports, the Department’s team went through about 103 million pages of federal records.
Meetings with Canadian and other Indigenous leaders
Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland also talked with officials and Indigenous leaders from Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to learn about their processes for addressing the legacy of their Indigenous boarding schools and assimilation policies.
Newland says the report is an important step towards the U.S. federal government accounting for its role in operating the schools.
“This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations – that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways,” Newland said.
“It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy. It is critical that this work endures, and that federal, state and Tribal governments build on the important work accomplished as part of the Initiative.”
Write to Eilís Quinn at eilis.quinn@cbc.ca
Related stories from around the North:
Canada: Pope Francis finishes Canadian visit in Nunavut, CBC News
Finland: Truth and Reconciliation Commission should continue says Sami Parliament in Finland, Eye on the Arctic
Greenland: Greenland, Denmark initiate investigation into past relations, Eye on the Arctic
Norway: Can cross-border cooperation help decolonize Sami-language education, Eye on the Arctic
Sweden: Sami in Sweden start work on structure of Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Eye on the Arctic
United States: U.S. launches effort to document history of Indigenous residential schools, The Associated Press
