More than 900 Native American children died in federally operated boarding schools over a nearly 100-year period, the federal government said Tuesday.
A new report from the Bureau of Indian Affairs found that at least 973 children died attending the U.S.-operated schools.
The finding is based on years of interviews with survivors and their families and examinations of the records of more than 400 schools.
Between 1871 and 1969, the federal government appropriated the equivalent of $23.3 billion for the boarding school programs. Students at the schools were forced to cut their hair and punished for speaking tribal languages, part of a broader effort by the government to forcibly assimilate them.
Lieut. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pa., coined the m otto “kill the Indian, save the man” to summarize the schools’ mission.
“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, the U.S.’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in a written statement.
