U.S. lawmakers are considering whether to create a truth commission to investigate the history of American Indian boarding schools, which the federal government directed for more than a century with the goals of forced assimilation of Indigenous children, the destruction of tribal cultures, and the stealing of Indigenous lands.
“It is necessary for us all to better understand this dark history, so that we can grow and heal from it.”
At a Congressional hearing on May 12, several House members spoke in favor of a proposed bill that would create a truth commission, an investigative body with the power of subpoena. Supporters said the commission would be essential for uncovering the facts about what happened at the schools and starting a process of healing for all those who were affected.
“This bill is imperative to recognize the atrocities of the federal government’s Indian boarding school policies,” said Representative Teresa Leger Fernandez, Democrat of New Mexico. “It is necessary for us all to better understand this dark history, so that we can grow and heal from it.”
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Students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1890s.
Starting in the 1800s, the federal government began creating a nationwide network of boarding schools for Indigenous children. These schools, which were operated by the federal government and Christian churches, worked to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into U.S. culture. The basic goal, as defined by Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was to “kill the Indian” and “save the man.”
As Indigenous people were being violently dispossessed of their lands, they lost control over their children. Tens of thousands of children were taken from their families. The Department of the Interior maintained an Indian police force that took children from their homes and brought them to the schools, which sometimes were located hundreds of miles away.
School leaders subjected children to multiple forms of cultural reconditioning including cutting children’s hair, making them wear uniforms, giving them English names, and requiring them to speak only English. The children also had to follow strict schedules that included manual labor and military-style drills.
“At the end of ten years, I did not know who I was as a Native person,” James LaBelle Sr., a boarding school survivor, testified at the hearing. “I passed down to my children their own inability to speak their language or know their traditions as well.”
Boarding schools enforced their assimilationist policies through punishment. School leaders employed corporal punishment, such as beatings, whippings, solitary confinement, and the withholding of food. At times, school officials made older children punish younger children. Many children were also sexually abused.
“At lights out, matrons would start molesting the youngest children in the lower bunks and bathrooms,” LaBelle said in his Congressional testimony.
The U.S. Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Secretary Deb Haaland, has been investigating the boarding schools. Last year, Haaland introduced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which launched a major review of the schools and their legacy.
“Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States . . . has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” Haaland wrote last year in an op-ed in The Washington Post.
On May 11, the Interior Department released a highly anticipated investigative report detailing the boarding schools’ many abuses. The report found that 408 federal schools operated across thirty-seven states and territories from 1819 to 1969.
“We cannot go back and change the past, but we can and must hold ourselves accountable for doing the right thing today.”
“As the federal government moved the country west, they also moved to exterminate, eradicate, and assimilate Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians,” Haaland said in a press briefing. “The languages, cultures, religions, traditional practices, and even the history of Native communities, all of it was targeted for destruction. Nowhere is that clearer than in the legacy of federal Indian boarding schools.”
According to the Interior Department’s report, many Native children never returned home. The department located burial sites at fifty-three different schools, with nineteen schools accounting for more than 500 child deaths. It expects future research to reveal more burial sites and the total number of child deaths to be in the “thousands or tens of thousands.”
Accompanying the report, the Interior Department included profiles of schools and maps of their locations, but it did not reveal the locations of the burial grounds, despite the fact that several burial sites are a matter of public record.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania buried nearly 200 children. Approximately 175 students are buried at Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. There are graves of more than 100 children at the Haskell school in Kansas.
“While I was fortunate to attend what is now Haskell Indian Nations University, there still resides a history that must not be forgotten,” said Representative Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas.
The growing push for the creation of a truth commission follows recent discoveries of mass graves at former boarding schools in Canada, where the remains of more than 1,000 children were found last year. In 2015, a Canadian truth commission concluded that the country’s forced schooling of Indigenous children was “cultural genocide.”
Advocates of a U.S. truth commission say it would complement the Interior Department’s investigative work. Proposed bills in the House and Senate would give the commission subpoena power, enabling it to compel organizations to hand over evidence and other documents.
“We’ve heard a lot of reasons why we cannot receive the records,” said Deborah Parker, the head of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. “With the subpoena power, that will allow us to make sure the records do come forward in a timely fashion.”
While Congress has been slow to act, many tribal nations, Indigenous organizations, and human rights organizations have urged U.S. lawmakers to create the commission. More than fifty leaders and organizations have endorsed the Senate bill.
“We cannot go back and change the past, but we can and must hold ourselves accountable for doing the right thing today,” said Ben Barnes, Chief of the Shawnee Tribe. “The stories of human suffering at these institutions can no longer be hidden from view or ignored. It is time that they take their place in the public conscience.”