Native Boarding Schools Were Genocidal — Healing Starts With Telling the Truth

When I was in middle school, at a majority-white public school in Montana, I was given an assignment to interview a grandparent about their childhood. The questions were designed to help us better understand what we did and did not have in common with each other.

When I interviewed my maternal grandmother, I asked her whether there was ever a bully at her school. Her answer surprised me; she said she was the bully. “I always had soap in my mouth,” she said, punished for “talking back” to her teachers—and punished for speaking her first language: Blackfeet.

My grandmother was a student at the St. Ignatius Mission and School, a church-run, assimilationist boarding school on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She told me stories about the horrific punishments she endured simply for being Blackfeet and about her classmates who were buried on the school grounds.

Unfortunately, my grandmother’s story is not an anomaly. Instead, her experience is representative of generations of genocidal federal policy. Beginning in 1801, more than 500 assimilative boarding schools operated across the United States, including 408 government-run schools in operation between 1819 and 1969. During this time, multiple generations of my family attended boarding school, including 12 people I’m directly descended from on my maternal side: my grandmother, all four of my great-grandparents, and seven of my eight great-great-grandparents.

Boarding schools were part of an intentional, genocidal policy aimed at “civilizing” Native people and eradicating our nations, communities, cultures, languages, religions, and family ties. Indigenous families were either forced or coerced to send their children to boarding schools. Families who refused were denied the money or goods paid to them in exchange for land, as designated in treaty agreements. This coercion was enshrined in an 1893 code that allowed the secretary of the interior to “withhold rations, clothing and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who refuse or neglect to send and keep their children of proper school age in some school a reasonable portion of the year.”

Indigenous children were often taken to schools far away from their homes because, as John B. Riley, an Indian school superintendent, said in 1886, “only by complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents can he be satisfactorily educated.” My grandmother first attended St. Ignatius Mission, which is about 200 miles south of her home on the Blackfeet Reservation. She later attended the Chemawa Indian Training School in Oregon, 700 miles west of home and two states away.

Once at school, children experienced what the Department of the Interior described as “systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies.” Before kids as young as age 6 stepped foot in a classroom, their long hair — culturally significant for many tribes — was cut to imitate white hairstyles. They were also required to wear military, non-tribal clothing as uniforms, and they were required to speak English — a language many didn’t speak at home.

It is important to reframe what we mean by “school.” These were sites of exploitation and cultural genocide, not places where Native children were educated. The dominant narrative about boarding schools often excludes or de-emphasizes the role of forced labor, or what some scholars conceptualize as human trafficking. Many of my family’s stories about boarding school are about working rather than being educated. In fact, unpaid labor was the goal.

A 2022 report by the Department of the Interior, the first ever to examine the extent of federal boarding schools in the U.S., highlighted the breadth of unpaid labor Native children performed at school: “lumbering, working on the railroad — including on the road and in car shops, carpentering, blacksmithing, fertilizing, irrigation system development, well-digging, making furniture including mattresses, tables, and chairs, cooking, laundry and ironing services, and garment-making, including for themselves and other children in Federal Indian boarding schools.”

My family members performed other unpaid duties: My grandmother’s brother worked as a butcher and a barber, while my great-grandpa worked as a rancher. Some children were also taken out of school to perform unpaid labor in the surrounding community. In California, thousands of Native children were unpaid indentured servants on white ranches, farms, hotels, and households.

A 1928 report by the Institute for Government Research on the social and economic conditions of Native peoples, known as the Meriam Report, notes that Indian boarding schools violated child labor laws in most states. And though it was released 12 years before my grandmother was born, the findings did not lessen the impact of her experience at boarding school.

In addition to robbing children of their cultural and linguistic identities, boarding schools had other devastating impacts. Children were beaten and sexually abused. They experienced overcrowding, food deprivation and nutritional experimentation, and widespread infectious diseases, including tuberculosis.

They were forcibly separated from the love and connection and support and validation of their families and communities. They spent years working as unpaid laborers without receiving an education that could aid them after graduation. Some children died before ever having the opportunity to become parents or eventually elders. These experiences have left generational wounds on survivors, their families, and broader Indigenous communities that continue to hurt to this day.

Agenda of Assimilation

Boarding schools were just one part of the federal government’s efforts to eradicate tribal nations. As boarding schools sought to eliminate tribal languages, religions, and cultures among Native children, the federal government passed policies making these cultural practices illegal in Native communities. In 1883, the Code of Indian Offenses banned tribal religious practice. The Indian Religious Crimes Code was reversed in 1934, but it wasn’t until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 that all legal restrictions on practice were lifted. Still, issues remain today, particularly when it comes to accessing sacred sites and practicing tribal religions in prison. In 1887, the use of tribal languages was banned in schools; this was not reversed until the 1990 passage of the Native American Languages Act, or NALA.

The General Allotment Act of 1887 also had devastating economic, cultural, and political consequences for tribal communities. The act converted communal tribal land into private property and turned individual Native men into private property owners. Tribal landowners were forced to make land agriculturally productive, even in areas where the land was not suitable as such, and the U.S. government assessed their success, or lack thereof. This assimilative tactic drastically shifted, or attempted to shift, Native peoples’ relationship to the land at the same time that their children were being removed from their homes and forced to labor for white people.

The impacts of boarding school and these policies can be understood through the lens of historical trauma, a term conceptualized by Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, Ph.D., a Hunkpapa/Oglala Lakota social worker, in 1995. Historical trauma is the idea that intergenerational, compounded trauma has measurable impacts on the mental health of the descendants of traumatic events, including the forced separation of Native children from their families.

A 2004 study that asked Native participants how often they thought about historical losses, such as the seizure of land and boarding schools, found that “perceptions of historical loss are not confined to the more proximate elder generation, but are salient in the minds of many adults of the current generation.” This generational trauma has impacted how families interact with each other: My grandmother didn’t teach my mother Blackfeet because she didn’t want her to be discriminated against for speaking English with a Blackfeet accent.

Boarding schools have also impacted the physical health of Native Americans: Research suggests that boarding school survivors are more likely to have chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, and arthritis, than Native people who didn’t attend boarding school.

Boarding schools have also had other material impacts on Native communities. The jobs students were training for often did not match jobs available back home, making it difficult to find meaningful employment after leaving school. Today, Native people continue to face higher rates of poverty and unemployment, and lower rates of homeownership compared to white people. Native children also continue to be removed from their homes, and are disproportionately impacted by child welfare reports, investigations, and out-of-home placements.

Native people know that the legacy of boarding schools continues to impact our communities’ physical health, mental health, housing and economic stability, educational attainment, parenting and family functioning, cultural knowledge, and more. And yet, there has been limited storytelling — in media, academic research, and government reports — that measures these impacts.

Contemporary Truth Telling

For many people in Indian Country, it is quotidian to share stories about boarding schools. Boarding schools are openly discussed in my family: My grandma, and great-grandma when she was alive, spoke about their time as students, about their friends who died of poisoning from the lye in the soap placed in their mouths, and about the labor they performed. I grew up having family picnics on the grounds of the boarding school my great-grandmother attended; her grandmother is buried in the school’s cemetery.

Over the past 50-plus years, there have been a handful of federal government programs attempting to reckon with the tragedy of boarding schools. In 1969, a decade after my grandmother left boarding school, a scalding report titled “Indian Education: A National Tragedy — a National Challenge” illuminated the disastrous impacts of boarding schools, noting that they were “a failure when measured by any reasonable set of criteria.” In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA, was passed, which prioritized placing Native children with family members and tribal members before placing them with non-Native families.

ICWA notes that “there is no resource that is more vital to the continued existence and integrity of Indian tribes than their children.” Advocates for the bill recognized that removing Native children from their families—through both boarding schools and the child welfare system—had devastating impacts on both the children and their broader communities. In 1990, NALA passed, allowing the use of tribal languages in schools for the first time since the late 19th century. These legal efforts focused on ensuring Native children stayed connected to their families and cultures but stopped short of collecting testimony from boarding school survivors.

In recent years, there has been increased media attention paid to boarding schools, notably after mass graves were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada in 2021. There’s also been in-depth reporting in national newspapers about the extent of sexual abuse in boarding schools in the U.S., and an episode of Reservation Dogs, a hit FX show that aired for three seasons from 2021 to 2023, about the traumatic impacts of residential schools.

Since Deb Haaland, a descendant of boarding school survivors, became secretary of the interior in 2021, there has been a surge of federal interest in truth telling from boarding school survivors and their descendants. In 2021, after decades of advocacy from tribes and Native organizations, the Department of the Interior launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, which included an extensive federal report on the impacts of boarding schools, the first-ever inventory of federal boarding schools, and the collection of testimony from boarding school survivors.

Part of the initiative is the Road to Healing project, launched in 2022, in which Haaland and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland toured the U.S. to collect testimony from hundreds of boarding school survivors. Boarding school survivors and their descendants were also invited to publicly speak about their experiences. For some survivors, this was their first time speaking about their boarding school experiences. Each event had trauma counselors and break rooms to support survivors.

The Department of the Interior is also funding the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit, to continue to gather testimony from boarding school survivors over the next few years and create a public oral history repository. These efforts will ensure that the stories and experiences of survivors are preserved for future generations and, survivors hope, help hold the U.S. accountable for the atrocities perpetrated.

Survival and Resistance

On the legislative front, advocates are pushing for the passage of the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, which was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 2023 and the U.S. House in 2024. Truth and reconciliation efforts are not an uncommon response to violence like cultural genocide. Dozens of states across the globe have attempted truth and reconciliation efforts. Some consider Argentina’s 1983 National Commission on the Disappeared to be the first major effort, though the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission: South Africa, led by Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, is perhaps the most well-known. There have been a handful of commissions focused on the impacts of colonialism, including one in Australia and one in Maine examining the placement of Wabanaki tribal children into foster care since the 1970s.

The truth and reconciliation effort that may most closely mirror what is being proposed in the U.S. is Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacy of Indian residential schools, which is a result of the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. Like the U.S., the Canadian government and Christian churches operated assimilationist boarding schools for Indigenous youths in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This commission was not the Canadian government’s first attempt to support boarding school survivors. In 1998, it established the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which distributed $515 million to Indigenous community initiatives that addressed impacts of residential schools until federal funding was cut in 2010. After the truth and reconciliation lawsuit, the commission interviewed more than 6,500 witnesses between 2007 and 2013. In December 2015, they released a document with 94 calls to action, ranging from adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a model for reconciliation to providing stable funding for community-based alternatives to incarceration for Indigenous peoples.

However, progress to fulfill these calls to action has been slow. The Yellowhead Institute, which tracked progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission over five years, noted that at the rate the Canadian government was moving, it wouldn’t finish implementing the calls to action until 2081.

An unintended consequence of the commission has been the growth of boarding school “denialism” among non-Indigenous people in Canada. In a 2023 interim report from the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, the increase in denialism was identified as a top 12 concern held by boarding school survivors, descendants, and families. For example, after mass graves of 215 children were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, some people, including political commentators, priests, and Danielle Pierce, the premier of the province of Alberta, downplayed the news as a media hoax. Some denialists went so far as to bring shovels to the Kamloops site to “see for themselves” if children were indeed buried there.

Denialism is the final “stage of genocide” in Genocide Watch’s 10 stages of genocide, a widely used policy tool developed by Gregory Stanton, Ph.D. This increase in denialism necessitates the importance of storytelling. Truth and reconciliation — or in the case of the U.S. bill, truth and healing — is not a panacea for the material and psychological impacts on individuals, communities, and families. But allowing people to tell their stories is an important step. If passed, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act would establish a commission tasked with investigating the genocidal practices of boarding schools and would require the federal government to hold public hearings with survivors, their families, and communities to help create this document.

The commission would also attempt to make a record of the number of children who attended federal boarding schools; document the number of children who were abused, went missing, or died in federal boarding schools; and outline the ongoing impacts of boarding schools on survivors and their families. As Native communities throughout the country continue to record their stories — and the Truth and Healing bill advances through Congress — many questions remain.

What does it mean for the same government that created these violent policies to lead a so-called “healing” process mere decades later? Does the focus on reconciliation rather than healing focus too much on perpetrators and those who benefit from colonialism “coming together” with those they harmed, versus focusing on support of victims and survivors? Is truth telling inherently beneficial to the truth teller? Or might it be traumatic for people to share their stories without tangible action coming from it?

Boarding school survivors and tribal communities have made one thing clear: A nuanced reckoning of the expansive, intergenerational impacts of boarding schools is absolutely necessary, and tribally driven solutions based on Indigenous healing — not government or church abdication — must be centered.

When my grandmother’s older sister passed away in 2020, my family got access to 30 pages of scanned files from Chemawa Indian School in Salem, Oregon, which they both attended. In these files are report cards, notes on her medical needs, comments from teachers, and other correspondence. One report card includes a “citizenship” section, which lists her “good” behavior (one item, “dragging mattress down hall in dust”) and “poor” behaviors (12 items, including “did not go to church”). Throughout the scanned documents are references to the sisters’ supposedly “unstable life” at home on the reservation.

Further down in the files is a scanned letter from my great-grandparents written on Nov. 10, 1954. On one side is a letter asking that their daughters, my grandmother and her sister, be sent home on the train. They were 14 and 15. “You send them home this week” is the last sentence, written in pencil with each word underlined in blue ink. On the back, they wrote the train schedule from Salem, Oregon, where the boarding school was, to Browning, the main town on the Blackfeet Reservation. They also sent train fare. The next page is the response from the principal of the school. “We are at a loss to understand just what your intention is in the matter,” she wrote. But by Nov. 15, 1954, they were both withdrawn from the school.

Native people have always resisted colonialism and fought to protect our families, communities, cultures, and nations. When my grandmother and her sister were at boarding school, their parents tried to be actively engaged in their children’s lives — and worked proactively to get them back. When tribal religions were illegal, my family continued to practice, pray, and hold ceremonies.

As I am writing this, wild mint, yarrow, bee balm, white sage, and sweet grass that I collected last night with my mother are drying in my room. I’ll use them for medicinal teas and smudging throughout the year, and we’ll gather more next summer. My family continues to gather, prepare, and use Blackfeet plant medicine. Despite policies intentionally trying to obliterate our culture, my relatives still passed down this ancestral knowledge and love.

We are running out of time to capture the vital stories of boarding school survivors. My grandma is the last living boarding school survivor in my family; her parents and her siblings who attended boarding school have passed away. Advocates say the impacts on parenting, family relationships, and tribal communities and economies — both psychological and very material — need to be part of the conversation to truly understand the impacts of boarding schools and the contemporary disparities and injustices still facing Indigenous communities today.

Boarding schools took a lot away from my family. Truth telling is one step toward government and church accountability, public education, and perhaps most importantly, helping families like mine rebuild what was taken from us for future generations. Truth telling can help us rebuild our relationships to each other, strengthen and revitalize our cultural practices, and begin to heal, on our own terms, from the ongoing violence of colonization.

This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine.