Seth Tupper, South Dakota Searchlight
A new report on federally supported boarding schools for Native American children says at least 33 of the students who died while attending them — and likely more — were from tribes in South Dakota.
The report also says six known burial sites have been linked to boarding schools in the state.
Each of the 33 deaths was traced to one of the nine tribes in South Dakota: the Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Flandreau, Lower Brule, Oglala, Rosebud, Sisseton Wahpeton, Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux.
An additional 28 deaths are listed only as “Sioux,” meaning they could also have been from tribes in the state.
The report lists 32 boarding school locations in South Dakota, including three with known burial sites, either marked or unmarked: the former Crow Creek Agency Boarding School in Fort Thompson (one marked burial site); the former Rapid City Indian School in Rapid City (one marked site and one unmarked); and the Red Cloud Indian School, which is still operating in Pine Ridge as a nonprofit Lakota and Jesuit Catholic school under the name Mahpiya Luta (two marked sites and one unmarked).
The numbers are in the second and final volume of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative’s investigative report, released Tuesday. Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo and Laguna tribes in New Mexico, launched the initiative in 2021. The department published the first volume in 2022.
“I am immensely proud of the hundreds of Interior employees — many of them Indigenous — who gave of their time and themselves to ensure that this investigation was thoroughly completed to provide an accurate and honest picture,” Haaland said Tuesday in a news release.
From the 1800s through the 1960s, federal assimilation policies resulted in the removal of thousands of Native American children from their homes to be educated in boarding schools. Those policies resulted in numerous instances of abuse and generational damage to Native families, culture and languages.
The second volume of the report updates a national list, profiles and maps of boarding schools to include 417 institutions in 37 states or former territories.
At least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federally operated or supported schools, the report says. Some of those children’s remains are in 74 known burial sites at 65 boarding school locations.
The report estimates the U.S. government spent the inflation-adjusted equivalent of at least $23.3 billion between 1871 and 1969 in support of the boarding school system.
Eight recommendations are listed in the report to “support a path to healing the nation”:
- Issuing a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government.
- Investing — “on a scale that is, at a minimum, commensurate with the investments made in the federal Indian boarding school system” — in programs for individual and community healing, family preservation and reunification, violence prevention, Indian education, and revitalizing Native languages.
- Establishing a national memorial for tribes, individuals and families affected by the boarding school system.
- Identifying and repatriating remains of children and funerary objects that were never returned from boarding schools.
- Returning former federal Indian boarding school sites to tribes.
- Telling the story of federal Indian boarding schools to the American people and global community.
- Researching the present-day health and economic impacts of the boarding school system.
- Advancing international relationships with other countries that have histories of boarding schools or other assimilationist policies.