Indian boarding school investigation faces hurdles in missing records, legal questions

“The hard part is researching the country and understanding what this boarding school did,” said Shannon O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, a nonprofit cultural group and citizen of the Choctaw Nation. Thousands of children “lived, worked and died” in these schools, “far from home,” said O’Loughlin. “And time has passed.”

Canada offers a grim outlook on what the Home Office investigation could reveal: Last month, mass graves of more than 1,500 children were found on the grounds of seven former boarding schools in Canada. The staggering number of stolen children found in just these few facilities suggests the magnitude of what is to come as more grounds are investigated and more tribes seek out their lost.

In the US, the investigation announced last month by Home Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and the first indigenous person to head a cabinet agency, aims to determine the scope and impact of Indian boarding school policies in the country. The research aims to gather information about the decades of institutionalized, federally funded cultural assimilation that has resulted in a variety of negative outcomes for survivors and their families, from mental health problems to the loss of entire communal generations.

Tribes are preparing for a settlement that many consider long overdue.

“The truth must be heard from the point of view of the injured party,” said Christine McCleave, CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation. “There has to be some element of justice or transformation in assessing the effects and damage and damage done and how to restore things that have been taken or broken.”

People gather and shoes are left in Edmonton, Alberta, May 31, in recognition of the discovery of more than 200 children’s remains on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Jason Franson / AP file

The venture recognizes a truth that indigenous peoples across North America have known for generations: that the governments of Canada and the United States have not only adopted the culture of the indigenous children that both countries attempted to assimilate through boarding schools. In innumerable cases, they also took the lives of these children, each representing a stolen generation.

The experiences of survivors of Indian boarding schools – oral records gathered over the past few decades by nonprofits – have documented widespread cases of sexual and physical abuse, psychological trauma, and deaths of children in institutions operated by churches and the federal government. In some cases, according to government documents, children died of disease, but survivors claim there were other deaths from abuse and neglect that schools did not report.

Stories of children who were beaten for speaking their language, had their heads shaved, and were forced to use the Bible to understand how “barbaric” their culture was have been passed down through generations from indigenous families. In many cases, the abuse resulted in the survivors completely severing ties with their native culture and history.

The schools were part of a broader attempt to eradicate indigenous cultures, a step in the colonization of North America. The United Nations definition of genocide includes the “forced transfer” of children from one group to another.

Headstones of Indians, including children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School.Carol M. Highsmith / via Library of Congress

But a national reckoning of the atrocities will not be easy. Researchers and tribal leaders say that not only has the government spent decades trying to cover its tracks, but flaws in federal law give rise to serious concern about how tribal nations will bring back the remains of their lost children.

Little more than a third of state records of Indian boarding schools operating in the United States have been found, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a nonprofit advocating a truth and reconciliation process for survivors of Indian boarding schools Schools. Many documents have been purposely destroyed, while others are in university archives and other historical collections, making it labor-intensive to find, especially for tribes lacking research staff.

The Ministry of Interior investigation will seek to identify the children who have not returned home from boarding schools and their tribal affiliations in order to give tribal nations an opportunity not only to understand the impact on their communities but also to begin the process of repatriation .

While Home Office investigations manage to find records of most of the missing children, federal law makes finding their remains and getting them home another problem.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a federal law, was passed in 1990 to stop the theft of cultural artifacts and human remains from graves and burial and community sites. But the law was designed to regulate theft by universities, museums, and collectors, rather than addressing the government’s role in genocide or the legal path to recovery.

Not only does the law not include provisions to protect unmarked graves such as those uncovered in Canada and the United States, but there are also no mechanisms that protect private landowners (such as the Roman Catholic Church, which still owns many of the former boarding schools owns) require schools) to work with tribes or federal agencies in repatriating the remains.

“There must be laws that apply equally regardless of who owns the property on which these children are buried,” said O’Loughlin of the Association on American Indian Affairs. “I don’t care if it belongs to the Church or Walmart or the federal authorities. Everything should be treated the same. “

In the absence of federal law governing Native American remains on state or private land, state laws will govern the way forward. One of the main concerns, O’Loughlin said, is that many states don’t have laws regulating the discovery of unmarked graves.

The US government’s campaign to destroy the cultural identity of Indigenous children and indoctrinate them with Christian beliefs began with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879 and lasted into the 1990s. Over those decades, the Indian Boarding School Directive has established 367 schools in the United States