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At least 973 Indigenous children died while attending boarding schools run or supported by the U.S. government, a federal report has found, prompting apologies for the pain suffered at the abuse-ridden institutions.
The report, released Tuesday and commissioned by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, found dozens of marked and unmarked graves in 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools that have been established across the country.
The findings do not specify how each child died, but the causes of death included illness, accidents and abuse over a 150-year period ending in 1969, authorities said.
The schools were created to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into white society, and survivors described the intergenerational trauma that their families and communities continue to experience as a result of the institutions.
Children were often prevented from speaking their own language and separated from siblings, and many were subjected to physical, sexual and psychological abuse.
On Tuesday, Haaland — the first Indigenous person to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior — said the investigation aimed to “provide an accurate and honest picture” of what happened.
“The federal government – facilitated by the Department I lead – has taken deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indigenous boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities and rob them of the languages, cultures and connections that are fundamental for the native. people,” she said in a statement.
“The Path to Healing does not end with this report – it is just beginning.”
Leaders of indigenous communities in the US and its northern neighbor Canada – which also operated similar institutions of forced assimilation for indigenous children – called on authorities to fund investigations into unmarked graves at the former schools.
The discovery of hundreds of suspicious graves in Canada’s westernmost province, British Columbia, in 2021 led to a national reckoning, with several communities launching searches for the remains of children who never returned home.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children in Canada were forced to attend the institutions – known as residential schools – between the late 1800s and the 1990s.
In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of children were forcibly placed in boarding schools between 1869 and the 1960s, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.
The coalition states on its website that in 1926, almost 83% of indigenous school-age children attended institutions.
‘A forgotten story’
The findings of Tuesday’s report follow a series of listening sessions across the US over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they suffered while separated from their families. .
In an initial report released in 2022, authorities estimated that more than 500 children died in schools, which the federal government supported through laws and policies.
The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by more than $23 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, U.S. officials determined.
The religious and private institutions that ran many of the institutions received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students, according to Tuesday’s report.
Interior Department officials offered eight recommendations to the U.S. government, including “issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology… regarding its role in adopting and implementing federal national policies for Indian boarding schools.”
They also urged Washington to invest in solutions to the system’s ongoing effects; establish a national memorial to recognize and honor all those affected, and to identify and repatriate the remains of children who died in schools.
Donovan Archambault, 85, from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana, said he was sent to boarding schools starting at age 11 and was mistreated, forced to cut his hair and prevented from speaking his native language.
He said he drank heavily before turning his life around more than two decades later and never discussed his school days with his children until he wrote a book about the experience several years ago.
“An apology is necessary. They should apologize,” Archambault told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “But there also needs to be broader education about what happened to us. For me, it’s part of a forgotten history.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
