Forced assimilation and abuse: How US boarding schools devastated Native American tribes

The White House says President Joe Biden will apologize on behalf of the U.S. government Friday for its 150-year campaign to break up Native American culture, language and identity by forcing children into abusive Indian boarding schools.

More than 900 children died at the government-funded schools, the last of which closed or transitioned into different institutions decades ago. Their dark legacy continues to be felt in Native communities where survivors struggle with generational trauma from the torture, sexual abuse and hatred they endured.

Biden is expected to formally acknowledge the federal government's role and apologize for it during an appearance at the Gila River Indian Community outside Phoenix.

A closer look at the federal boarding school system:

150 years of forced assimilation

Congress laid the framework for a nationwide boarding school system for Native Americans in 1819 under the 5th U.S. President, James Monroe, with legislation known as the Indian Civilization Act. It was purportedly aimed at stopping the “final extinction of the Indian tribes” and “introducing among them the habits and arts of civilization.”

Central to that effort was dissolving Native families and severing generational ties that had kept their cultures alive despite being forced onto reservations.

Over the next 150 years, government and religious institutions backed by taxpayer money operated at least 417 schools in 37 states. Staff at the schools worked to strip Native children of their traditions and heritage. Teachers and administrators cut their hair, forbade them from speaking their own languages and forced them into manual labor.

By the 1920s, most Indigenous school-age children — some 60,000 at one point — were attending boarding schools that were run either by the federal government or religious organizations, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

The heaviest concentrations of the schools were in states with some of the largest Native populations: Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota and the Dakotas. But the schools were in every region of the U.S. and students — some as young as 4 — were often sent to schools far from their homes.

The last of the schools opened in 1969, the same year that a Senate report declared the boarding school system a national tragedy. It found they were grossly underfinanced, academically deficient and had a “major emphasis” on discipline and punishment.

The forced assimilation policy was finally and officially rejected with the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978. Despite this policy shift, however, the government never fully investigated the boarding school system, until the Biden administration.

Survivors recount abuse

A nationwide re-examination of the system was launched in 2021 by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary.

She and other Interior officials held listening sessions over two years on and off reservations across the U.S. to allow survivors of the schools and their relatives to tell their stories.

Former students recounted harmful and often degrading treatment they endured at the hands of teachers and administrators while separated from their families. Their descendants spoke about traumas that have passed down through generations and are manifest in broken relationships, substance abuse and other social problems that plague reservations today.

Haaland’s grandparents were among them — taken from their community when they were 8 years old and forced to live in a Catholic boarding school until they were 13.

“Make no mistake: This was a concerted attempt to eradicate the quote, ‘Indian problem’ — to either assimilate or destroy Native peoples altogether,” Haaland said in July when findings of the agency's investigation were released. The top recommendation from the agency was for the government to formally apologize.

Unmarked graves and repatriations

At least 973 Native American children died in the boarding system. They included an estimated 187 Native American and Alaska Native children who perished at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s now the site of the U.S. Army War College. Its officials continue repatriations — just last month, the remains of three children who died at the school were disinterred and returned to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana.

The Interior Department's investigation found marked and unmarked graves at 65 boarding schools. The causes of death included disease and abuse. More children may have died away from the campuses, after they became sick at school and were sent home, officials said.

The schools, similar institutions and related assimilation programs were funded by a total of $23.3 billion in inflation-adjusted federal spending, officials determined. Religious and private institutions that ran many of the schools received federal money as partners in the campaign to “civilize” Indigenous students.

More than 200 of the schools supported by the government had a religious affiliation. The boarding school coalition has identified more than 100 additional schools not on the government list that were run by churches, with no evidence of federal support.

U.S. Catholic bishops in June apologized for the church’s role in trauma the children experienced.