A former Native American boarding school reckons with its dark past

By Lisa Cavazuti, Cynthia McFadden, Maite Amorebieta, Yasmine Salam
Photography by Tara Rose Weston for NBC News
Nov. 16, 2022

PINE RIDGE INDIAN RESERVATION, S.D. – Inching forward on her knees, Marsha Small scraped away at the earthen floor in search of a bone, a tooth, any human fragment at all. 

This grim task consumed Small and her team of archeologists for five days in mid-October. They were hunting for the remains of Indigenous children beneath a former Native American boarding school that represents a dark chapter in American history.

“My ancestors put me here,” Small, 63, a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe and a Montana State University doctoral student, said outside of Red Cloud Indian School. “And that’s why I do this.”

Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government set up and supported more than 400 boarding schools designed to extinguish Indigenous culture and assimilate young Native Americans into white society. The goal, in the words of one of the first school’s founders, was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

The schools often required the children to take on English names and give up their style of clothing and hair, as well as their traditional languages, religions and cultural practices. 

Children were forcibly removed from their homes. By 1893, the Bureau of Indian Affairs received congressional authorization to withhold food rations and supplies from American Indian families who refused to enroll or keep their children in boarding schools. 

The boarding school system was used as a “weapon” not only to break the children’s bonds with their families and culture but to take Indigenous peoples’ land, according to a Senate report released in 1969. 

Students were subjected to physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the schools, and substandard health care, malnourishment and overcrowding contributed to rampant disease, according to an Interior Department report published in May.

At least 100,000 Native American children are estimated to have attended the boarding schools, which operated across 37 states with the last ones closing in the late 1960s. 

An untold number of children never returned home, their bodies often buried in unmarked or poorly maintained burial sites hundreds of miles from home. The total number of students who died at the schools could be in the tens of thousands, according to the Interior Department. 

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies, including the intergenerational trauma caused by forced family separation and cultural eradication, were inflicted on generations of children as young as 4 years old and are heartbreaking and undeniable,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American person to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said in June.

The search for unmarked graves at Red Cloud is part of the school’s “Truth and Healing” effort to address its past injustices. Red Cloud is the first former Catholic Indian boarding school in the country to break ground in a search for human remains.

“We know so little about the institutions,” said Preston McBride, a historian who is currently studying disease in federal American Indian boarding schools located off reservations. 

McBride said that while causes of death varied among the students, tuberculosis was the single largest killer. Students also died from a variety of infectious diseases, accidents and wounds. He estimates at least 40,000 students are likely to have died while attending the schools and could be buried in unmarked graves across the country. 

“Boarding school policies caused diseases to flourish on each campus,” McBride said. “The schools were sites of militarized discipline, institutionalized malnutrition, systematic overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, poor medical care, and forced labor unsupported by a balanced or sufficient diet.”

His research also shows that Native American students in off-reservation boarding schools were many times more likely to die than their comparably aged white counterparts. 

“School-aged children, the healthiest demographic of any population, shouldn’t die in the numbers that they did, even in an era before antibiotics,” McBride said. 

For many who endured the boarding school system, the federal government’s move to investigate and acknowledge the atrocities carried out against Native Americans has come too late and is moving too slowly. Canada has paid millions of dollars to former boarding school students and relatives there, and has set up a commission that described the system as “cultural genocide.”

“I want America to face up to its genocide,” said Alex White Plume, 71, a former president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who attended two boarding schools in South Dakota but not Red Cloud. “American genocide is what it is.”

Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com