For Indigenous People’s Day in 2021, I wrote a blog piece for a university press about Indigenous truthtelling and healing from my insights as a Diné (Navajo) boarding school survivor descendant and scholar who has researched and written several publications about Native American boarding school experiences. That same year, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who is the first Native American woman to be appointed to that position as a Laguna Pueblo woman, initiated the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to examine and trace the impacts of the policies and school system that affected countless Native Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States over generations.
The public still does not know exactly how many people attended, and even more shockingly, how many (mostly children) never returned home from the federal Indian boarding schools. These questions are more than just statistics to me, because my father and most of my relatives — many of my aunts, uncles, cousins, my grandmother and my great-grandfather — went to Indian boarding schools.
It is abhorrent how people continue to block reconciling and understanding such histories of violence and injustice in the U.S. I was hurt to read, for example, the article “Apologies won’t help Native American communities, and neither will reparations” in the Deseret News, which questioned whether Indian boarding schools were a “part of a concerted campaign of destruction by the federal government.”
From the origins of the U.S., there was always “a concerted campaign of destruction” against Indigenous peoples for their lands and waters. Indian boarding schools were a part of many waves of violence, specifically targeting Indigenous peoples, because they stood in the way of American settler colonialism and the so-called “Manifest Destiny.”
Brenda Child, an Ojibwe scholar and citizen of the Red Lake Nation, stressed in her Washington Post perspective piece, “U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land,” that Indian boarding school policies aimed to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands. Such strategies of destruction against Indigenous peoples included but were not limited to theft, murders, massacres, starvation, scorched-earth military campaigns, forced removals, sterilization, family separation, child removal and suppression of Indigenous languages, cultures and lifeways. Recognizing and seeking to rectify the wrongs of such violence, including Indian boarding schools, is not just “blaming history” but a commitment to creating a better future where government policies protect and promote healing and harmony.
My father was 5 years old when he was dropped off at an Indian boarding school without warning. The school personnel immediately reprimanded and shamed him for speaking Diné bizaad (Navajo language), the only language that he knew. He cried all night with a chorus of sobbing children who all longed for their families and those who loved them. I will never forget hearing Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, an esteemed Diné author and educator who specialized in Diné bizaad, talk about the trauma and pain of not hearing someone tell her “I love you” for the months and years that she attended an Indian boarding school.
Diné have perpetuated teachings of Si’ąh Naagháí Bik’eh Hózhǫ́ since time immemorial, which underscores restoring peace and harmony even through disorder and struggles. Apologies recognize wrong was done, and then real change to heal can happen for everyone so that people no longer carry and pass on festering soul wounds from the past. But whatever people believe about apologies, the pending legislation for the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act of 2025 (S. 761) is the least that the U.S. can do to understand and learn what really happened at these Indian boarding schools and their long-lasting effects on Americans today.