More than 900 Native American children died in federally-operated boarding schools over a period of nearly a century, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs said in a report issued Tuesday.
The report is the culmination of an investigation ordered in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold that role in government.
After conducting years of interviews with survivors and their families and examining the records of more than 400 schools, the department concluded that at least 973 children died attending the schools. The report cautions this should not be taken as a definitive count, as there are likely other deaths that were not accounted for.
Interior staff also identified 74 marked and unmarked grave sites across 65 schools.
Between 1871 and 1969, the federal government appropriated the equivalent of $23.3 billion for the boarding school programs. Students at the schools were forced to cut their hair and punished for speaking tribal languages, part of a broader effort by the government to forcibly assimilate them.
Lieut. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa., coined the motto “kill the Indian, save the man” to summarize the schools’ mission.
“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. These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” Haaland said in a statement.
“I am immensely proud of the hundreds of Interior employees – many of them Indigenous – who gave of their time and themselves to ensure that this investigation was thoroughly completed to provide an accurate and honest picture. The Road to Healing does not end with this report – it is just beginning.”