Review of Native boarding schools in Oklahoma, US expected to reveal thousands of deaths

The U.S. government compelled generations of Native American children to attend boarding schools where they experienced violence and trauma to achieve its broader goal of acquiring tribal land, a federal report concluded Wednesday after a nearly yearlong investigation.

The schools intentionally cut ties with children’s tribal nations and purposely worked to assimilate students into mainstream culture, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said in the 105-page report. The review focused on 408 federally run boarding schools, with the largest concentration, 76, in Oklahoma.

It is the federal government’s first attempt to provide an in-depth accounting of the harm done by boarding schools, but the full reckoning remains incomplete. Officials acknowledged they are still trying to count how many children attended the schools and how many died while there. They have so far found 53 burial sites on boarding school grounds. They ultimately expect to document thousands or tens of thousands of child deaths linked to the schools.

The boarding schools broke up Native families and eroded the health of tribal citizens and nations for generations, Newland said at a news conference in Washington, D.C.

“The United States initiated this policy of forced assimilation through targeting children,” said Newland, who belongs to the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan. “What I believe that our role here is, in this investigation, is to account for that.”

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What happened at Native American boarding schools?

Newland and his boss, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, described the report as the first step in a sweeping effort to document what happened at boarding schools and to address the intergenerational harm caused by them. The review found school leaders regularly changed Native children’s names, cut their hair, forbid them from practicing any part of their culture and required students to complete military drills.

“This has left lasting scars for all Indigenous people,” Newland said. “There is not a single American Indian, Alaska Native or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn’t been affected by these schools. We haven’t begun to explain the scope of this policy era until now.”

Investigating the legacy of boarding schools: Read the full Department of Interior report

The traumatic legacy of Native American boarding schools started to gain more attention last year, when searches of school sites in Canada revealed mass graves where children were buried. U.S. officials launched their investigation in June at the direction of Haaland, who is Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to serve in her post overseeing U.S. relations with tribes. During Wednesday’s news conference, she described her department’s work on boarding schools as her legacy. 

“I come from ancestors who endured the horrors of the Indian boarding school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead,” she said, before listing several facts about how many boarding schools the federal government operated in the past. “Now we are uniquely positioned to assist in the effort to recover the dark history of these institutions that have haunted our families for too long.”

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Government campaigns to acquire tribal land and to eradicate Native cultures have direct ties to the high rates of violence, poverty, mental health disorders and substance abuse that tribal communities face today, Haaland said.

Do Native American boarding schools still exist?

Federally backed schools for Native children still exist, including Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, one of four off-reservation boarding schools. But Newland said there is a clear divide between past and present. “The difference is at the core of the schools’ mission, which is to empower Indian kids in their communities, to attempt to revitalize languages and cultural practices and not to forcibly assimilate kids and not to take them from their families without their consent,” he said.

Federal schools aimed to assimilate Native children throughout much of the 1800s and 1900s, until as recently as 1969. Many of the schools had ties to religious groups, which also ran some of their own schools that weren’t paid for by the federal government. The review looked only at federally backed schools and identified them all.

Investigating boarding schools: Full list of schools included in Interior Department report

The report found the schools focused on manual labor and trade skills training, not education. Classroom studies focused on learning English. Students often were punished for speaking their Native languages. A Kansas boarding school purposely housed children from 31 different tribes together in the late 1800s “to disrupt tribal relations and discourage or prevent Indian language use.”

Living conditions were often “grossly inadequate.” At one boarding school on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation, children were forced to share small beds pushed closely together in a row. Federal officials sent children from as far away as Alaska to attend schools in present-day Oklahoma, which was known as Indian Territory until it became a state in 1907. 

The review found some of the schools in Oklahoma were segregated and enrolled only Freedmen — African Americans who had been enslaved by one of the Five Tribes before gaining freedom in 1866 — and their children. 

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During their investigation, federal staffers uncovered reports of corporal punishment and malnourishment at boarding schools. Investigators also found instances when federal officials spent money on boarding schools that was supposed to compensate tribal nations for land. 

The report called for the Department of the Interior to keep investigating both the direct harm and lasting damage of boarding schools. Congress approved $7 million to continue the review. Officials plan to tally all of the federal money spent on boarding schools, in addition to compiling a full list of burial sites and children interred. 

Deb Haaland to meet with Native American boarding school survivors

Haaland also plans to launch a listening tour to meet with boarding school survivors throughout the U.S., as part of a goal to create a federal repository of oral histories detailing what people experienced at boarding schools.

“Recognizing the impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system cannot just be a historical reckoning,” she said. “We must also chart a path forward to deal with these legacy issues, to address the intergenerational impact of federal Indian boarding schools, and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities.” 

Deborah Parker, who leads the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, said the review should extend beyond the Department of the Interior. Parker, who belongs to the Tulalip Tribes in Washington, advocated for Congress to create a boarding school truth and healing commission, which would have the power to subpoena church records and collect more testimony from boarding school survivors. 

“Our children had names,” she said. “Our children had families. Our children had their own languages. Our children had their own regalia, prayers and religion before Indian boarding schools violently took them away.”

A House subcommittee plans to hear testimony on a bill Thursday that would set up the boarding school commission. Shawnee Chief Ben Barnes plans to testify. Barnes and other Shawnee leaders are working to preserve a Kansas boarding school where many Shawnee children were sent and look into what happened there.

Barnes said in a statement that he is grateful for the broader federal investigation into boarding schools and described the report published Wednesday as a major step forward.

“The stories of these children have been hidden for too long,” he said. “It’s time they were heard.”

This is a developing news story and has been updated. Molly Young covers Indigenous affairs for the USA Today Network's Sunbelt Region. Reach her at mollyyoung@gannett.com or 405-347-3534.