APRIL BAUMGARTEN
The Forum
FARGO — Nearly three dozen Native American children died while attending federal boarding schools in Minnesota and North Dakota, according to a study that found hundreds of children died at the U.S. schools.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s investigation report revealed Tuesday, July 30, that 973 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died in federally operated or supported schools. The report also identified 74 burial sites, some unmarked, at 65 schools.
The report is part of an Interior Department effort to investigate the “troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies,” according to a news release. Leaders also hoped to shed light on the schools’ intergenerational impacts on Native Americans, the release said.
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No burial sites were found in North Dakota, according to the report. Minnesota had two: the St. Rose/St. Francis Xavier School, also known as the Holy Child Academy, in Avoca and the St. Paul’s Industrial School in Clontarf, the report said.
The report claimed 21 children died while attending North Dakota schools. That included five at the Fort Totten Indian Industrial School and eight each at the Standing Rock Agency Boarding School in Fort Yates and Wahpeton Indian School.
Wahpeton’s school remains open but is chartered under the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate, according to its website.
In Minnesota, five children died while attending the Red Lake Boarding and Day School, three died at the Pipestone Indian School, and one died at both the Morris Industrial School for Indians and Vermillion Lake Indian School in Tower.
The Morris school remains open and is a state government school.
“The federal government — facilitated by the Department I lead — took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair.”
The report didn’t say how many bodies were found in the burial sites or how the children died. Research has found the children who attended the schools were subject to illness and abuse.
It does include a list of tribes that lost children who attended the boarding schools.
The Interior Department called on the U.S. government to acknowledge the harm that boarding schools caused and to issue a formal apology for its role in forming the institutions. The agency also called for investments into remedies to “present-day impacts” of boarding schools and efforts to identify and repatriate children’s remains.
In addition, the Interior Department recommended establishing a national memorial to commemorate Native Americans who were affected by the schools, return the school sites to tribes, tell the story of boarding schools to the American people and global community, and advance international relationships with countries who share similar histories regarding boarding schools.
“For the first time in the history of the United States, the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children,” Assistant Interior Secretary Bryan Newland said in a statement. “This report further proves what Indigenous peoples across the country have known for generations — that federal policies were set out to break us, obtain our territories, and destroy our cultures and our lifeways. It is undeniable that those policies failed, and now, we must bring every resource to bear to strengthen what they could not destroy.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-02 04:45:00
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