At least 3,100 Native Americans died in US boarding schools: report

 

A candle is lit on a menorah during a Hanukkah holiday reception in the East Room of the White House on December 16, 2024 in Washington, DC.  [AFP]

The number of Native Americans who died in US boarding schools is at least triple the official government figure, the Washington Post reported Sunday.

From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.

An investigation by the Post documented 3,104 Indigenous students who died at the schools between 1828 and 1970, three times the number found in a recent government assessment of the institutions' toll.

President Joe Biden made headlines in October when he offered a historic apology for one of the United States "most horrific chapters": Native American children being ripped from their families and placed in often abusive boarding schools.

The Post found that in many cases, children who died were buried "in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children's bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes."

Poor record-keeping and the passage of time have made it difficult to determine exactly how many children died at the schools, where conditions were akin to "prison camps," one expert told the newspaper.

Some cemeteries are marked, while others "are hidden, neglected or have been paved over," said the Post, adding that its conclusions were based on "hundreds of thousands" of government documents.

Children died of disease, malnutrition and accident, sometimes under suspicious circumstances, according to the Post.

Biden's speech came after a government report documented the deaths of nearly 1,000 children at such schools, though the real number was always thought to be higher.

The Biden administration has invested significantly in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding tribal autonomy, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, directing agencies to prioritize the problem of gender-based violence, and more.

Native Americans remain, on average, poorer than the rest of the country at large, a fact that advocates attribute to centuries of marginalization.

In Canada, where more than 4,000 students at residential schools are believed to have died or gone missing, a government commission blasted the schools as a form of "cultural genocide."