War against the children

Zach Levitt, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Simon Romero and Tim Wallace

The Native American boarding school system was vast and entrenched, ranging from small shacks in remote Alaskan outposts to refurbished military barracks in the Deep South to large institutions up and down both the West and East coasts. Until recently, incomplete records and scant federal attention kept even the number of schools — let alone more details about how they functioned — unknown. The 523 schools represented here comprise the most comprehensive accounting to date of institutions involved in the system

The first school opened in 1801, and hundreds were eventually established or supported by federal agencies such as the Interior Department and the Defense Department. Congress enacted laws to coerce Native American parents to send their children to the schools, including authorizing Interior Department officials to withhold treaty-guaranteed food rations to families who resisted.

Congress also funded schools through annual appropriations and with money from the sale of lands held by tribes. In addition, the government hired Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Congregationalist associations to run schools, regardless of whether they had experience in education, paying them an amount for each student.

Wherever they were located or whoever ran them, the schools largely shared the mission of assimilating Indigenous students by erasing their culture. Children’s hair was cut off; their clothes were burned; they were given new, English names and were required to attend Christian religious services; and they were forced to perform manual labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Those who dared to keep speaking their ancestral languages or observing their religious practices were often beaten.

“The government was not done with war, so the next phase involved war against the children,” said Mr. Sherman, 83, a former aerospace engineer.

“Don’t try to tell me this wasn’t genocide,” added Mr. Sherman, who said in an interview that he had once run away from the school and walked nearly 50 miles trying get home. “They went after our language, our culture, our family ties, our land. They succeeded on almost every level.”

In its preliminary report released last year, the Interior Department indicated it expected the number of children known to have died in Native American boarding schools to grow into “the thousands or tens of thousands.”

Boarding schools made the assault on tribal identity a central feature of their assimilating mission, often starting with renaming children, as the historian David Wallace Adams explained in his 1995 book “Education for Extinction.”

One former Carlisle student, Luther Standing Bear, of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and Oglala Lakota Nation, recalled being asked to point to one of the names written on a blackboard, then having the name written on a piece of tape and placed on the back of his shirt.

“When my turn came, I took a pointer and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy,” he wrote in “My Indian Boyhood,” his 1931 memoir. “Soon we all had the names of white men sewed on our backs.”

Just as Carlisle had a renaming policy, other schools took note, often assigning names that could be humiliating, such as Mary Swollen Face or Roy Bad Teeth. In other cases, children were randomly bestowed common American surnames like Smith, Brown or Clark, or given the names of presidents, vice presidents or other prominent figures.

“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” Thomas J. Morgan, the commissioner of Indian affairs, said in a speech at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School in 1891.

Other institutions made the access to a reservoir of cheap child laborers a selling point when persuading community leaders to establish a Native boarding school.

Brenda Child, a historian whose Ojibwe grandparents were sent to Native boarding schools, emphasized in an interview that the period of the greatest expansion of the boarding school system — from the last decades of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th — coincided with colossal theft of Indigenous land.

“Indian people lost 90 million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States,” said Dr. Child, a professor of American studies at the University of Minnesota.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Ms. Haaland said in a statement. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”

“It was just what you did, no questions asked,” said Ms. Yellowhair, a former dental assistant who now lives in the Phoenix area. “They hired me out on weekends to clean the homes of white families.”

When his mother chose boarding school, Mr. LaBelle said, he found himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope inserted in the belt loops of their pants. He said his destination, where he spent the next several years, was the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast Alaska.

Sexual violence was also rampant, he said, citing the example of a girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator for the entire eight years she was at Wrangell.

And in addition to witnessing other male students being raped by a supervisor, Mr. LaBelle said, he was sodomized by another boy. When the lights went out at night, Mr. LaBelle said, he could hear other children, especially some of the youngest, sobbing and calling for their mothers.

“It was the only time we could show emotion,” Mr. LaBelle said. “It didn’t take very long until it grew and grew and grew. The entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in the dark.”

A decades-old plaque describing the location as “used primarily for burial of Albuquerque Indian School students from the Zuñi, Navajo and Apache tribes” itself went largely unnoticed until the discoveries of student graves at Canadian boarding schools recently focused greater attention on such sites in the United States.

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