Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (D-New Mexico) said her department launched a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative last month at a National Congress of American Indians Midyear 2021 Conference in Washington, D.C.
The initiative will be a comprehensive investigative study that will look at the dark history of the nation’s forced separation of Indian children from their parents and educating them in boarding schools hundreds of miles from their homes – with the objective of erasing their native culture in place of white culture.
The effort will seek to determine the damage caused by boarding schools designed to strip native culture from American Indian children during the last century, Haaland said.
The project gained impetus after the recent discovery of 215 unmarked graves of native children made by the Tk’emlups to Secwepemc First Nation, an advocacy nonprofit for native people based in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. The graves are located at the Kamloops Residential Indian School, which operated from 1893 to 1978. The site was once the largest residential school for Indian children in the region with 500 students by the 1950s.
The U.S. established boarding schools for Native American Indian children beginning with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, and for 150 years, hundreds of thousands of children were taken from their homes to be indoctrinated in white culture.
“The Interior Department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”
Department officials said the initiative will serve as an investigation into the loss of human life and the consequences of residential Indian boarding schools, identify student burial sites, the children and their tribal affiliations.
“We must shed light on what happened at federal boarding schools,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said. “As we move forward in this work, we will engage in tribal consultation on how best to use this information, protect burial sites and respect families and communities.”
The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), run by the Interior Department, is tasked with ensuring a quality education for Native Indian children and ensuring the economic and cultural well-being of tribes.
