More information about the atrocities committed at boarding schools run by the federal government that were designed to eradicate Indigenous people is expected in the new year.

In May 2022, the U.S. Department of Interior released a based on the federal government’s first-ever investigation of the boarding school system in the country. It identified 408 federal Indian boarding schools which dispossessed Indigenous people of their lands and forcibly assimilated their children, including 43 schools in New Mexico.

The report’s second volume is expected to be published in early January 2024, said Heidi Todacheene, a senior advisor to U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna). Todacheene could not give a specific date of publication.

The upcoming report will contain new information on the total number of Indigenous children who attended federally run boarding schools, including their names and tribal affiliations, Todacheene (Diné) said.

It will also identify their marked and unmarked burial sites, the schools’ affiliations with religious organizations, and federal money spent on the boarding school system, Todacheene said.

Todacheene was speaking via Zoom from Washington D.C. on Tuesday to the New Mexico Legislature’s Indian Affairs Committee in Santa Fe.

Since the first volume on the U.S. boarding school initiative came out, Todacheene said, officials from Interior and other federal agencies have continued researching and collecting data, including through Road to Healing listening sessions across the country. The second-to-last session was in Albuquerque on Oct. 29, according to Native News Online.

During the sessions, Todacheene said, Interior “has come to realize that the United States forcibly removed Indian children and relocated them hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their original tribal communities to prevent runaways or those from returning at home.”

“Federal laws have also forced parents to give up their children through punishment, imprisonment, or withholding food rations to families and communities,” Todacheene said. “The deliberate federal disruption of tribal communities through the removal of Indian children to off-reservation boarding schools will never be completely healed, nor that the loss of community or language or culture can adequately be replaced.”

The listening sessions are over but Todacheene said Haaland and Interior assistant secretary Bryan Newland (Ojibwe) still welcome anyone to their story or experience.

About half of the federally run boarding schools “received support or other involvement” from religious organizations, the report found, and the federal government paid those schools using money from Indian Trust Funds to take children away without their parents’ consent and force them into environments designed to destroy generational bonds by eliminating language and culture.

Sen. Benny Shendo (D-Jemez) asked if the Interior Department plans to pay reparations to survivors, but Todacheene’s presentation ended before she could answer.

“I believe that’s illegal, because those are accounts that are held in trust for people,” Shendo said. “For the federal government to dip into that fund to pay for the annihilation and dispossession of tribes of their land, I think it’s pretty egregious.”

Rep. Harry Garcia (D-Grants) asked what the federal government is doing to make up for the damage it did to survivors.

“There’s gotta be long-term effects on these children who are adults now,” Garcia said.

Todacheene said the second volume will contain Newland’s recommendations “on how to move forward and help elevate those issues.”

“All of our leadership at the Department and other federal agencies, and of course in Indian Country, we know that we could have some improvements to our health care and mental health services,” Todacheene said.

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Morris Jenis Jr.’s father knew only his son, a Native American student at the Genoa Indian School in Nebraska 100 years ago, had not been seen in a year. 

Morris ran away from the school in 1921 — “deserted,” according to the militaristic language school officials used — like hundreds of other young Indigenous children who resisted the boarding school policies that forcibly stripped them of language and identity, often hundreds of miles from home. 

“The father…is very anxious to see where his son has gone,” a school clerk wrote the superintendent on the father’s behalf. “He recently heard that a student from Genoa was killed in Montana by a horse and he fears that this may be his son.”

Public archives do not provide any answers about Morris, nor his age and tribal affiliation. The school told his father that they could not find “,” and reportedly returned the $26 — worth about $450 today — his family previously paid to send him home. 

The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to their families and tribes. 

Last summer, the discovery of more than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore through international media and reignited investigations of U.S. boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death. 

Archivists and community members have continued to retrieve haunting letters, student and local newspapers, photographs and other school documents that paint a poignant picture of resistance and survival in day-to-day student life in the boarding schools. 

Still, many records remain out of reach to descendants, and those that are accessible can be traumatizing. Some collections sit dormant, held by churches or universities with no plans to return them to tribal communities; others require extensive time and . 

“Native people have never had easy access to their records. And that in itself has continued to contribute to the genocide,” said Tawa Ducheneaux. a citizen of the Cherokee nation working as an archivist at Oglala Lakota College’s Woksape Tipi library on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she raised her family for 19 years. “You’re not having access to relatives and descendants that can educate you more about who you are and where you come from.”&�Բ�����;

Among the archived collections are receipts for music lessons, requests to use funds to buy shoes, picture contests — a glimpse into students’ interests and how they spent very limited leisure time. Others include letters from parents pleading that their child be allowed to travel home for the summer — a trip families were required to pay for.

Student discipline records and letters show many of such requests denied for lack of funds or because children had to continue building “strength of character,” as a punishment for bad behavior or running away. 

Parents encouraged runaways, hid their children, and, when students were able to return home for summers, would teach children their language, culture, and ways of life as a way to undermine the schools’ assimilationist aim. Families would not legally be able to deny placement in off-reservation schools until 1978, after over a century of resistance, with the passage of the . 

For those working to find and make material more accessible, the retrieval and research is exhausting, but a necessary step toward healing and reckoning with historical trauma.

“It’s painful especially when you recognize relatives’ names or people that you know … I kind of learned to reconcile with that and just understand that, OK, well, maybe my involvement is that these children, they need help to have their stories come to light,” said Genoa Project co-director and historian Susana Geliga, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe and of Taino descent.

“They insisted on their humanity:” Student life as seen in archives

The material that has been made available in digital archives is largely from an official government or school perspective. Yet there are phrases, quotes and clippings from students pointing to how they lived and survived. 

Running away became a common occurrence among students fleeing the conditions of the boarding schools, eager to find a way home, like Susie Romero. Before leaving for Genoa one night in 1933, Romero composed a theme song — “I don’t want to go to school here.” In just one year at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, at least 45 boys did the same. 

“…That tells you a lot about the children’s point of view — that they were running away from this,” said Margaret Jacobs, co-director of the Genoa Project and historian at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. 

The documents suggest Romero was discovered and returned to Genoa, but some did find their way back home. In 1920, one student left Genoa for good after a teacher struck him in the face, breaking his nose.

“He can prove it was done for personal reasons,” an acting superintendent wrote in a letter seeking guidance. 

Student newspapers, common at the boarding schools, though likely heavily scrutinized by school officials, also reveal how students kept themselves informed of local and national news and found ways to make .

When compared to how student deaths were reported briefly in the local Genoa paper, student publications shared more detail on their peer’s life and personality. One student, whose name has been redacted out of respect for descendants who may not yet know the information, was described as an “unusually bright child and the little ones among whom his lot was cast will miss his fair example.”&�Բ�����;

Jacobs said the student newspapers, “insisted on their humanity. They insisted that we matter, and you might not care about us, but we care about each other.”

Some 90 students, in one account published in the Genoa student newspaper, were reportedly in attendance for a funeral at the school — a detail not lost on Geliga.

“They were so policed and monitored with everything that they did … from the time they woke up until the time they went to bed every day …” she said. “Those instances where you can catch their own perspective coming through, they’re really heartwarming because there’s so few and far between — when you find them they kind of pull you into the moment.”&�Բ�����;

Archives also reveal another facet of student life: the “” system, where children were assigned to white families and expected to work in fields, on ranches and in local homes as part of their “civilizing” process. Piloted at Carlisle, the practice was later adopted by other off-reservation schools including Genoa and the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, California. 

Lorenzia Nicholas, a student at , once refused to return to the family she was placed for outing because of ”&�Բ�����;

Though they were paid minimally, students were often forced to go on outings during summer vacations instead of returning home to their respective lands and families. The practice grew popular in communities surrounding the schools: children were a source of cheap labor — girls often cleaned homes and looked after white children, while boys were often placed in undesirable harvest jobs that were , exploitative and dangerous.

On campus, labor did not stop. Children as young as 9 were forced to , likely, Carlisle archivist Jim Gerencser told The 74, to save on infrastructure costs. Half of their school days were devoted to learning vocational trades; photographs show students fixing roofs, washing clothes in “laundry class” and fashioning utensils. 

Expanding access to archival records, family history

In and the United States, churches are holding onto an untold number of records. Many religious institutions received schools until 1928, yet according to the Department of the Interior’s investigation, must independently decide to share documents. 

Ducheneaux added tribal governments only recently have had the infrastructure or resources required to retrieve and disseminate records held in various public and government archives – tribal colleges and universities have been working at returning access since at least the ’60s. 

Some records have been passed on to private universities like Augustana and Marquette instead of tribal communities and descendants, presenting another barrier to access: fees. Marquette has held a including at least 10,000 images from the Red Cloud Indian School for nearly 14 years, only having digitized about 10%.

“[It] is maybe the only collection that might have images of certain individuals’ relatives … There’s no known images of that person except possibly within that collection,” she said. “And I couldn’t ever get anywhere with them. We have to do justice to all these people that are contacting us asking if we have anything about their relatives.”&�Բ�����;

An intergenerational legacy: “It’s part of the blood that’s in us”&�Բ�����;

Justin Shedee, a member of the Apache nation also known as Corn Cobb Smoker, entered the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania at 16. Though a letter in his own handwriting expresses his desire to leave, school documents say he “consented” to stay enrolled.

“The reason is I have been so long enough here, about six years now. So I am very anxious to [go] home. That is all I want to ask you,” he wrote in the spring of 1890, requesting to leave the school. 

He would not leave for three more years, “discharged” on July 5, 1893 for “ill health.”&�Բ�����;

Shedee’s desire to return home lives on in descendants. Community members, scholars and activists describe the weight of their ancestors’ experiences as intergenerational trauma that impacts their current health and ways of life. 

Native American communities and over 80 U.S. representatives are advocating for l on Indian Boarding School Policies to create a commission to investigate nearly two centuries of boarding school policies. 

Among the policy recommendations that have been floated are reparations, a hotline for those experiencing intergenerational trauma, and reformed child welfare adoption practices to prevent “.”

“We’ve been subjected and our ancestors have been subjected to such atrocities and such attempts to wipe us out that we’ve sort of normalized suffering, in a way,” said Stacy Bohlen, CEO of the National Indian Health board and member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, during a webinar hosted by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. 

“It’s part of the blood that’s in us and the blood of our ancestors that we know was shed for our survival.”

This story was made possible by the archives and archivists at the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, and National Archives. 

Born and raised on Navajo and Ojibwe reservations, three of endawnis Spears’s four grandparents were among the estimated hundreds of thousands of Native children separated from their families, their tribes and their traditions and forced to attend government-run Indian boarding schools.

A federal Bureau of Indian Affairs officer took Spears’s maternal grandmother at just 6 years old from Arizona to the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico. The agency threatened the young girl’s parents with possible jail time if they did not surrender her. 

Her paternal grandmother was sent across state lines from Minnesota to Kansas, where she was forced to attend Lawrence’s infamous Haskell Indian Training School, unable to return home for nearly a decade.

After hiding from federal officers for years, agents took her maternal grandfather at 14 to Fort Wingate, Arizona and forced him to cut his hair, pray to a Christian god and speak English, though Navajo was the only language he knew at the time. The teen repeatedly tried to run away, and staff punished him by forcing him to spend days on end in the school’s basement without food. Spears’s parents shared these stories with her over the years. 

“These legacies and these histories are so intimate to us as Native people,” said Spears, who now lives in Hopkinton, Rhode Island and serves as Brown University’s . “We carry them in our DNA.”

At least 500 Indigenous children died while attending federally operated Indian boarding schools, according to a May 11 . Just 19 facilities, a small fraction of the 408 government-supported schools identified, account for that tally — meaning the death total is likely a severe undercount.

For 150 years, up until the late 1960s, the U.S. government stole Indigenous youth from their communities, often without parents’ consent, and sent them to Indian boarding schools where they were forced to use English names, wear Americanized haircuts and perform military drills. Many children suffered and , and an unknown number died, often . 

The long-awaited report represents the first time the federal government has attempted a systematic accounting of the facts and consequences of the Indian boarding school system it perpetuated.

“I’m glad to see it on the news. I’m glad that there are people asking these questions because our Native families, our Indigenous families in this country carry these stories with them every day,” Spears told The 74. But the process is only beginning, she added. 

“We’re just learning the full scope of the truth. … People always want to jump to reconciliation and they want to skip over the truth-telling part. We need to sit in the truth for a while.”

The May report represents Volume I of an investigation that Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and the agency’s first Indigenous head, unveiled in June 2021. The effort is intended to provide a basis through which the U.S. may reckon with past brutality by locating gravesites — many of them unmarked or — repatriating children’s remains and offering resources to affected families.

“It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal,” said the secretary, who’s own grandparents were also subjected to the boarding school system.

Indigenous scholars underscore that this first report only conveys a small fraction of the violence wrought by these schools, scores of which were operated by the Catholic Church and various Protestant groups at the government’s behest. 

“Basically every school had a cemetery,” Preston McBride, an Indian boarding school historian and a Comanche descendent. “There are deaths at or deaths because of virtually every single boarding school.”

“The United States doesn’t even know how many Indian students went through these institutions, let alone how many actually died in them,” he added.

In his own research, he has documented over 1,000 child deaths at just four boarding schools. He estimates the toll over the entire system’s century and a half of operation may be .

The Department of Interior declined to comment on whether it believes that to be a plausible estimate, though the report’s authors note they expect “continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”&�Բ�����;

“Each one of those individuals is a story, had a story, has a story. And each one of those individuals did not have the opportunity to continue their traditions, to continue their culture, their language, to have a family — to be able to pass down the knowledge, the practices, the language that they inherited from generations past,” Samuel Torres, deputy CEO of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told the 74 after the investigation was first launched.

Spears said her grandparents did not talk about witnessing deaths at the boarding schools, perhaps to protect their family from that horror. 

Amazingly, her grandfather, George Kirk, who suffered deprivation and torture at the hands of the U.S. government, later went on to help the country win World War II. Kirk became a famed , one of 29 U.S. Marines whose skill at transmitting over 800 messages without error in a coded version of their native tongue proved a critical advantage to Allied forces.

“The very language he was starved for speaking, later helped save this country,” Spears said.

To bring the boarding school history to light, the Interior Department’s research team is working through the review and electronic screening of roughly 500 million pages of documents held in the American Indian Records Repository in Lenexa, Kansas. 

Most of the staff who have worked on the report are themselves Indigenous, . 

“It’s been an exhausting and emotional effort for them to confront this horror on a daily basis to bring this information to you,” said Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland, who led the investigation and is a member of the Ojibwe nation. “This has left lasting scars for all Indigenous people. There’s not a single American Indian, Alaskan Native or Native Hawaiian in this country whose life hasn’t been affected by these schools.”

As the team continues its investigation, they hope to further clarify the U.S. government’s role in supporting the Indian boarding system, determine the location of more burial grounds associated with these schools and identify the names, ages and tribal affiliations of those buried there. They have already identified over 50 marked and unmarked gravesites.

The Interior’s investigation, the beginnings of what may become a public, centralized archive, will continue with

The report follows a similarly disturbing and builds on years of Native-led activism to unearth the truth behind U.S. boarding school policies. Since its founding in 2012, the Boarding School Healing Coalition has filed for the, conducted their own, supported survivors, and led in Eastern Pennsylvania. 

“I don’t think the impact [of the Investigation] can be underestimated. This is such a big part of American history that has not been talked about,” Jim Gerencser, a Dickinson College archivist who co-founded a, told The 74 last year. Many people have reached out to him looking for in-depth archives of boarding schools, family information or sources to incorporate in their . 

Carlisle has become one of the most studied U.S. boarding school sites, in part due to its size and founder’s infamous propaganda to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The site forcibly enrolled over 10,000 children from 142 Native nations over the course of 40 years.

Spears and her husband Cassius Spears Jr. — first councilman for the Narragansett tribe and nephew of former councilwoman, Tomaquag Museum leader and educator — have worked to reclaim many of their Native ways of life for their children. Her boys grow their hair out long and have pierced ears. They teach their kids about humans’ relationships with plants and non-human animals. They learn words and prayers in Native languages.

“I make decisions everyday to give my children what my grandparents couldn’t have,” said Spears.

Lede Image: Dan Romero or Walking Bird of the Ute Tribe encircles the graves of children with sage at Sherman Indian School Cemetery in Southern California. (Cindy Yamanaka/The Riverside Press-Enterprise via Getty Images)