By Brad Brooks
(Reuters) – U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said on Friday she is racing to uncover as much history as possible about abuses committed within the old Native American boarding school system, which separated many generations of children from their families in order to wipe out Native American culture.
These federally funded schools, which operated across the United States from the early 1800s through the 1970s, forcibly assimilated Native American children by forbidding them from speaking their languages or engaging in cultural practices. The scope of abuse that occurred is unknown, including the number of children who died or never returned home.
Haaland, the first Native American woman to serve as cabinet secretary, is investigating the history of these schools, and released an initial report https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_2022_508.pdf from the Interior Department in May. The report included recommendations for funding programs to preserve Native American languages.
Haaland told Reuters in a phone interview that no single investigation can recover all that was lost from the boarding schools.
“We’ve had a very brutal and vicious history in this country. This is one piece of it,” Haaland said.
She said repairing the harms of the system means recovering what was lost: language, education, housing, healthcare and security through better law enforcement.
“All of those things we’re working toward. And for me, if we can live up to those obligations, that will be justice,” she said.
Haaland last weekend began a year-long listening tour to hear from survivors of boarding schools about the abuses they endured.
“For native folks who felt invisible for so many centuries, decades and years, having the opportunity to tell of their experiences with a cabinet member sitting right there, it helps them to get it out of their hearts and onto healing,” Haaland said.
Conditions at former Native American boarding schools gained global attention last year when indigenous leaders in Canada announced the discovery of thousands of unmarked graves of children at the sites of residential schools, as such institutions are known in Canada.
Unlike the United States, Canada carried out an investigation into its schools via its Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The U.S. government has never published data on how many children attended such schools, how many children died or went missing from them or even how many schools existed.
Haaland, a former Democratic Party congresswoman from New Mexico, co-authored a Congressional bill to establish a Truth and Healing Commision, similar to one that was established in Canada in 2007.
A version of Haaland’s bill is still going through Congress. She said its passage was critical to an all-of-government approach to addressing a system Native Americans widely blame for creating generations of essentially parentless children raised by abusive institutions, decimating family structures and healthy tribal culture.
The Congressional bill, which has Republican co-sponsors, would also give a Truth and Healing Commission subpoena powers, which the Interior Department does not have for its own investigation. This would force the churches and other institutions that often ran the boarding schools to turn over internal documents.
“That would be a game changer,” Haaland said.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Lubbock, Texas; Editing by Josie Kao)
