Indian kids' death, abuse at schools is documented
Ramona Klein's voice quivered as she sat before a U.S. House subcommittee in Washington,D.C., recounting horrific childhood memories of Fort Totten Indian boarding school in North Dakota, where she was a student.
There, she said, she was starved, beaten, humiliated and sexually assaulted. Oftentimes, she found herself staring out the frosty window of her dormitory, longing for home and to see her mother and father.
Klein was 7 years old when she and five other siblings were ripped from her parents and sent to the school under a federal program to assimilate Indigenous peoples into White society — a program that withstood challenge for more than 150 years.
“I remember seeing my mom as she stood and watched six of her eight children being placed
on a big green bus and taken to Fort Totten,” Klein, now 74, testified Thursday. “That image is forever imprinted in my mind and in my heart.”
Klein, an educator and member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, was one of several American Indians who spoke at Thursday’s hearing before the Subcommittee for Indigenous Peoples of the United States, in support of Rep. Sharice Davids’ House Resolution 5444, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act.
Historic report
The hearing came a day after the Department of Interior released a firstof-its-kind investigative report revealing that more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died at 19 Indian boarding schools from the early 19th century through the late 1960s.
As the federal investigation continues, the Interior Department expects the death toll to increase by the thousands, possibly the tens of thousands, according to the report.
The study has identified 408 boarding schools that operated in 37 states, or then territories, as well as 53 burial sites across the federal boarding school system, a number that also is expected to increase over the course of the investigation.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the first American Indian to head the federal agency, launched the investigation in June 2021 amid the grim discoveries of skeletal remains of hundreds of Indigenous children at former Indian boarding schools in Canada.
Accounting for the number of child deaths has been difficult because records weren’t always kept. The COVID-19 pandemic also limited the Interior Department’s research and its ability to access documents and the facilities that house them, according to the report.
Sherman Indian High School, formerly Sherman Institute, in Riverside and the former St. Boniface Indian Industrial School in Banning, which now lay in ruins, are among the hundreds of boarding schools being tapped in the multiphase investigation expected to take years.
Sherman is one of only four remaining Indian boarding schools in the country still operated by the federal government. The other three are in Oregon, Oklahoma and South Dakota.
A second volume of the report will cover burial sites as well as the federal government’s financial investment in the schools and the impacts of the boarding schools on Indigenous communities, the Interior Department said.
Tribal leaders have pressed the agency to ensure that any children’s remains that are found are properly cared for and delivered back to their tribes, if desired.
HR 5444
Davids’ legislation would complement the Interior Department’s investigation by establishing a formal commission to investigate and document assimilation practices at Indian boarding schools and their policies to strip Indigenous peoples of their culture and language, said Davids, DKansas,
during Thursday’s hearing.
“This bill does not duplicate the efforts of the Department of Interior, but rather expands and continues to acknowledge that legacy with the help of survivors, tribal leaders, policy experts and communities that can help guide this process,” said Davids, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the first LGBT American Indian elected to Congress.
Bryan Newland, the Department of Interior’s assistant secretary of Indian affairs, said the report presents an opportunity for the federal government to reorient its policies to support the revitalization of tribal languages and cultural practices.
“This reorientation of federal policy is necessary to counteract nearly two centuries of federal policies aimed at the destruction of tribal languages and cultures,” Newland said in the report.
Newland has recommended, among other things, prioritizing research of the more than 98 million documents gathered or discovered during the investigation, identifying survivors of Indian boarding schools, such as those who spoke during Thursday’s hearing in Washington, and documenting their experiences.