The Indian Boarding School Legacy

Between the 1870s and the 1970s, the United States government operated or funded a system of Indian boarding schools that removed hundreds of thousands of Native American children from their families and communities. The children were taken, sometimes voluntarily, often under coercion, and sent to institutions where they were forbidden to speak their languages, practise their religions, wear traditional clothing, or maintain contact with their families. The system spanned more than a century, operated across dozens of states, and affected virtually every tribal nation in the country. Its consequences are still present in the communities it targeted.

The Design and Operation of the Schools

The boarding school system did not arise from educational philosophy. It arose from a particular solution to what 19th-century federal policymakers called "the Indian problem." The military campaigns of the 1860s and 1870s had been costly and politically difficult. The assimilationist alternative, dismantling tribal identity through the removal of children, seemed to offer a cheaper and more permanent result.

Pratt's Carlisle school became the model. Children arrived and were immediately subjected to a transformation process: their hair was cut, their traditional clothes were confiscated and replaced with uniforms, they were given English names, and they were assigned to dormitories separated from any siblings who had arrived with them. Speaking their native languages was punishable by physical discipline. The school's curriculum was built around manual labour for boys and domestic service for girls, preparing them for the lowest rungs of the American economic system rather than for any form of professional advancement.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs expanded the programme rapidly. By the early 20th century, there were more than 150 federally operated or funded boarding schools across the country, with an additional number of schools run by religious organisations, primarily Catholic and Protestant missions, under federal contract. Attendance was often enforced: federal agents withheld food rations from families that refused to send their children, and in some cases children were simply taken by force.

The physical conditions in many schools were poor. Overcrowding, inadequate nutrition, and insufficient medical care produced high rates of infectious disease, particularly tuberculosis. Children died in these schools in significant numbers. The federal government did not systematically track these deaths, which is one reason why the full scale of child mortality in the boarding school system took so long to be publicly acknowledged.

The May 2022 report issued by the US Department of the Interior, the result of a year-long investigation ordered by Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a cabinet position, identified more than 50 burial sites associated with federal boarding schools and documented the deaths of at least 53 children at identified schools. The report was explicit that this figure was almost certainly an undercount, noting that records were incomplete and that many deaths had not been formally documented. Subsequent research has placed the number far higher. The locations of many burial sites remain unknown, and tribal nations have been working with federal agencies to locate and identify the children buried in them.

What the Schools Did to Language and Culture

The boarding schools were not merely physically dangerous. They were designed to permanently sever children from the cultural knowledge that their communities had transmitted across generations. Language was the primary target because language carries everything: ceremonial knowledge, oral history, kinship systems, relationships to land, and ways of understanding the world that have no direct translation into English.

Children who were beaten for speaking their languages stopped speaking them. Children who returned home after years at school found themselves unable to communicate fully with grandparents who had no English. The transmission of oral traditions, of ceremonial knowledge, of specific skills and ecological knowledge required that knowledge to pass from elders to youth in a language they shared. The boarding school system interrupted that transmission across multiple generations, and the interruption was not reversed when the schools eventually closed.

The 2022 federal report estimated that at the height of the boarding school era, more than 50,000 children were enrolled at any given time. Over the full duration of the programme, the number of children affected runs to the hundreds of thousands. Each child represented a point at which intergenerational cultural transmission was interrupted, and in many cases that interruption was permanent. Languages that were being actively spoken in 1879 were extinct by 1970 because the generation that should have learned them was in boarding schools instead.

The psychological and social effects were not confined to the children who attended. Research on trauma transmission has documented that the effects of the boarding school experience were passed to subsequent generations through parenting practices, through the absence of cultural frameworks for child-rearing, and through the specific psychological patterns that result from early separation, cultural dislocation, and institutional abuse. The term "intergenerational trauma" is sometimes dismissed as jargon, but it refers to a real and measurable phenomenon: the children of boarding school survivors showed elevated rates of certain mental health conditions, substance use disorders, and family instability that research has linked to the conditions their parents experienced.

The Long Work of Reckoning

The Indian boarding school era formally ended when the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and related legislation restored tribal control over education. But the end of the programme did not produce an immediate accounting. For decades, the boarding school system was absent from mainstream American history education, unknown to most non-Indigenous Americans, and known to Indigenous communities primarily through the painful private knowledge of families who had lived through it.

The discovery in 2021 of the remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada, and the subsequent discoveries at other Canadian residential school sites, brought the parallel system to international attention and reinvigorated calls in the United States for a formal investigation of the American boarding school programme. Secretary Haaland's investigation and the resulting report represented the first formal federal acknowledgement of the full scale of what had occurred.

The survivors and descendants of survivors who have come forward to document their experiences have done so at personal cost, revisiting memories that were deliberately suppressed. Their testimony has been essential to the investigative process and to the broader public understanding of what the system was. Many are elderly. The window during which first-person accounts can be gathered is closing.

What has not yet happened is a formal federal apology, meaningful compensation for survivors and their families, or a full accounting of the burial sites that have not yet been located. The federal government's formal position has shifted from the assimilationist policies that created the system to an acknowledgement that those policies caused harm, but the gap between acknowledgement and redress remains wide. For the communities that absorbed the consequences of a century of deliberate cultural destruction, the question of what adequate redress would look like remains open and urgent.