Kathy Hochul is very sorry. The governor of New York recently went to visit the Seneca Nation’s territory in upstate New York to apologize for the fact that the state ran a boarding school for Native American children for about a century starting in 1855. “But instead of being a haven for orphaned children, it became a place of nightmares, a place some would call a torture chamber,” Hochul said. “A site of sanctioned ethnic cleansing.”
Hochul is picking up where former President Joe Biden left off, when shortly before exiting office, he apologized for Indian boarding schools nationwide. “I know no apology can or will make up for what was lost during the darkness of the federal boarding school policy,” Biden said. “But today, we’re finally moving forward into the light.”
All of this apologizing has now opened the door for a class-action lawsuit by the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma on behalf of Native nations whose children attended boarding schools. The suit names as defendants the Department of Interior, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Indian Education and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The tribes say they want a full accounting of how the inflation-adjusted $23 billion that it cost to run these schools was spent.
For one thing, it was spent on educating kids. Many of the kids who went to these schools did so voluntarily. “There was an application to the Carlisle School, just like there was an application to Harvard,” Ben Chavis, a member of the Lumbee tribe and a longtime educator, tells me.
Their families wanted them to get an education and there weren’t many other options in these locations. The opening of these schools coincided with the end of hunting as an economically feasible way of life. Both government officials and Native families thought that children needed new skills in order to get by. Of course, the schools were assimilationist in their aims, but, to borrow a phrase, the cruelty was not the point.
It is, of course, worth discussing the abuse that many of these children endured, which was widespread and severe. But it’s also worth understanding the context. I know this sounds insensitive, but none of us today would ever send our kids to any kind of school, let alone boarding school, under the conditions deemed acceptable in the 19th century. Corporal punishment was the rule, not the exception. Sexual abuse was far too common. And especially in rural areas, the conditions were generally terrible. There is no evidence that these horrors were perpetrated on Native Americans in particular.
A New York Times article about the lawsuit notes that “in many cases, the children did not survive.”
“A total of 973 children are confirmed to have died while attending the boarding schools, and tribal members believe hundreds more deaths have not been included in the government’s official tally.”
The results are horrible, but hardly surprising and hardly much different than one might have expected at any other school or even had a child remained at home. Recent claims to the contrary, there is no evidence of “mass graves” or anything of the sort. Children died, often of natural causes, and they were buried. Sometimes the gravestones have been lost to the elements.
As Ian Gentles, an emeritus history professor at York University, documents in a piece for Quillette about the Canadian boarding school system for indigenous people, “the early buildings were generally constructed on the cheap, badly heated, and poorly ventilated.
“In many schools, the students shivered during cold winter nights, and transmitted infections to one another in overcrowded classrooms. These included influenza, pneumonia, smallpox, whooping cough, diphtheria, and especially … tuberculosis.”
Child mortality rates were approximately 316 per 1,000 in 1870 compared to 7 in 1,000 today.
Every death of a child at an Indian boarding school was tragic. But that doesn’t make it part of a concerted campaign of destruction by the federal government.
This lawsuit is being brought almost entirely on behalf of the “heirs” of people who went to the schools, not the individuals themselves, most of whom are deceased. Many states have already extended the statute of limitations on sex abuse suits, but the idea that we are now going to open them up to people suffering intergenerational trauma is a recipe for disaster. Reparations are not a way to make up for slavery and they’re not going to fix what ails Indian communities now.
If American Indians want to assign responsibility for the horrible conditions in many of their communities today, there are several better targets. Like the modern public school system.
In 2022, 43% of Native fourth graders were proficient in reading and 45% of Native 8th graders were proficient in math. They have lower rates of high school graduation than any other racial group in the country. American Indian children also experience abuse and neglect at higher rates than any other racial group.
None of this is because of Indian boarding schools, most of which have been closed for half a century. These statistics are the results of bad policies today — public schools that promote both teachers and students without any real standards, a broken system of child welfare and law enforcement, community leaders who seek to blame history for modern problems and national leaders who prefer to promote cultural sensitivity and grievance politics over real solutions and accountability.
