U.S. should apologize for Native boarding schools where hundreds died, officials say

At least 973 Native American children died at U.S.-funded boarding schools they were forced to attend, according to a federal report released Tuesday after a years-long investigation .

The report also identified 74 sites where children were buried on school grounds, including 16 in Oklahoma.

Officials acknowledged the true death toll is likely higher than what can be traced through historical records, which date back as far back as 1819.

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies, including the intergenerational trauma caused by forced family separation and cultural eradication, were inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said during a news conference. “It is heartbreaking, but yet it is also undeniable.”

New report calls for formal apology from US government, Pope Francis on behalf of the Catholic Church

The 105-page report lands three years after Haaland launched an investigation into federally run boarding schools for Native children. Her department concluded in 2022 that the schools operated for more than a century with the express purpose of eradicating Native cultures and communities.

The new report expands on the department’s previous findings and calls for a slate of actions, including a formal apology from the U.S. government.

Haaland said it also would be a “wonderful gesture” for Pope Francis to apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church, which ran many of the schools. The pope apologized in 2022 for the church’s role in running similar residential schools for Indigenous students in Canada.

More: An Oklahoma tribal nation conducted a census for the first time. Here's what it found

To compile their latest report, federal researchers worked through an estimated 103 million pages of records and identified more than 417 schools funded by the U.S. to assimilate Native children.

More schools — 87 — were located in Oklahoma than in any other state. The tallies do not include any church-run schools that operated without federal support.

US should help tribal nations identify children who died, official says

Bryan Newland, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs, said school administrators noted when children died, but sometimes did not record students’ names and often left out why they had died.

“It’s very likely that many of those kids died as a result of abuse or the after-effects of abuse that was done to them at the schools,” said Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community in Michigan.

He said people in charge of running the schools were also known to send deathly ill students home, and those children's deaths would not be included in official records.

However, federal officials were able to find each child’s year of death, as well as their tribal nation. Newland said the U.S. should help tribal nations identify students who died and reclaim their remains.

The records show at least 18 of the students who died were Cherokee. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, described the report as long overdue but appreciated.

“We hope that the next steps beyond this federal investigation help account for the injustices that have occurred and that we can begin to heal some of the generational traumas Native people still struggle with as a result of past anti-Indian policies and practices,” Hoskin said in a written statement.

Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico, said she was “sorry beyond words” for the damages inflicted by boarding schools. Their operations were largely overseen by Interior Department, which she now leads.

She described the investigation as deeply personal, noting that her maternal grandparents were forced to attend boarding schools when they were young children.

As part of their inquiry, Haaland and Newland traveled throughout the U.S. to hear from survivors of boarding schools and their families. They stopped in July 2022 at Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, which is still run by the federal government as a boarding school for tribal citizens. Officials have said the present-day schools no longer seek to erase tribal cultures, languages and identities, as a result of a shift in federal policy.

The schools operated with the goal of assimilating Native children from 1819 until as recently as 1969.

Officials have said the schools helped the U.S. obtain tribal lands and break apart tribal nations, and also led to generations of poor health, economic and educational outcomes that still linger today.

Newland recommended that federal officials begin addressing those harms by funding efforts aimed at keeping Native families together, preventing violence, improving educational opportunities and revitalizing Indigenous languages.

He also called for the boarding school sites to be returned to tribal nations and said the U.S. should build a national memorial to acknowledge what generations of Native children were forced to endure.

He stopped short of calling for repatriations in the form of direct payments to survivors and their families. He said the most frequent ask he had heard from survivors was for the federal government to back forms of community healing.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: U.S. should apologize for Native boarding schools where hundreds died, officials say