The US compelled generations of Native American children to attend boarding schools where they experienced violence and trauma to achieve its broader goal of acquiring tribal land, a federal report concluded Wednesday after a nearly year-long investigation.
The schools intentionally cut ties with children’s tribal nations and purposely worked to assimilate students into mainstream culture, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said in the 105-page report. The review focused on 408 federally run boarding schools, with the largest concentration, 76, in Oklahoma.
Schools in Utah
In Utah there were seven schools discovered in this report that were dispersed across the state. Previously, it was believed only six of these schools operated in the state. The schools were located across Utah with schools in Box Elder County, Uintah County, San Juan County and two in the southwest part of the state.
These two schools operated briefly at the start of the 20th century in St George and Panguitch, with the report suggesting that the schools were connected.
The school in St. George was called the St. George Southern Utah Boarding School and might have started as the Shebit School. The school operated from 1901 to 1904 but during that time the superintendent of the school, Laura B. Work, indicated the school needed to expand and made several references about moving the school to Panguitch, a town about 120 miles to the north. Around the time the Panguitch school opened, Work said “the school has found its home,” according to the report.
The school in Panguitch, called the Panguitch Boarding School, opened shortly after the one in St George closed in 1904. The Panguitch school operated from 1904 to 1909 and it’s estimated 150 Paiute children were forced to attend. Twelve unmarked graves are located on the site. Currently, the land where the school is located is owned by the state and leased to Utah State University which has said they would excavate the site if they get approval from the Paiute Tribe of Utah.
More: On the ground at the Panguitch Indian Boarding School where 12 Paiute children likely died
Most of the schools were located in counties with small populations, two schools each were located in San Juan County and Uintah County. One school in Uintah County was the Uintah Boarding & Day School in White Rocks, it operated from 1880 -1951. The other Uintah School was called the Ouray Indian School in Randlett Utah, it operated from 1885 – 1905 and when it closed its students were moved to the boarding school in White Rocks.
Of the two schools in San Juan County, one is still operating although not as a full-time boarding school. That school was called the Aneth Boarding & Day School when it housed students and opened in 1935 at Montezuma Creek. Now it operates as the Aneth Community School and is controlled by the Bureau of Indian Education. The other San Juan school was called the Navajo Faith Mission; it operated in Aneth from 1899 – 1919 until the buildings were swept away by the San Juan River, according to the report.
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The biggest boarding school that operated in Utah was called the Intermountain Indian School in Brigham City in northern Utah. The report said the school operated from 1950 – 1984, in a remodeled hospital. When this school started it had 500 Navajo children and during its time the school held kids from at least 26 Native American tribes, according to the report.
Scope of the report
It is the federal government’s first attempt to provide an in-depth accounting of the harm done by boarding schools, but the full reckoning remains incomplete. Officials acknowledged they are still trying to count how many children attended the schools and how many died while there. They have so far found 53 burial sites on boarding school grounds.
“The department expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands,” the report said.
The schools were common throughout much of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. Some are still open today.
The report found school leaders regularly changed Native children’s names, cut their hair, forbid them from practicing any part of their culture and required students to complete military drills. The schools focused on manual labor and trade skills training, not education. Living conditions were often “grossly inadequate.” At one boarding school on the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache reservation, children were forced to share small beds pushed closely together in a row.
Federal officials sent children from as far away as Alaska to attend schools in Oklahoma, which was known as Indian Territory until it became a state in 1907.
The traumatic legacy of Native American boarding schools gained broader awareness in 2021, after searches of school sites in Canada revealed mass graves where children were buried.
US officials launched the investigation in June at the direction of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. She is Laguna Pueblo and the first Native American to serve in her post, which oversees federal relations with tribal nations. Newland, who belongs to the Bay Mills Indian Community, answers to her.
In the report, he concluded boarding schools broke up Native families and eroded the health and wealth of tribal citizens and the economies of tribal nations for generations. Investigators found instances when federal officials spent money that was supposed to compensate tribal nations for land to run the boarding schools.
The schools also contributed to the erosion of indigenous languages, because students were often punished for speaking their native languages. One boarding school in Kansas, which operates today as Haskell Indian Nations University, purposely housed children from several 31 different tribes together in the late 1800s “to disrupt tribal relations and discourage or prevent Indian language use.”
More: ‘Just another dead Indian’: Indigenous woman’s murder shows systemic struggles in MMIW cases
The report calls for federal officials to keep investigating both the direct harm and lasting damage of boarding schools. Congress approved $7 million to continue the review.
“It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal,” Haaland said in a statement about the report.
The report’s release comes the day before a Congressional hearing on boarding schools. A House subcommittee plans to hear testimony on a bill that would establish a truth and healing commission to investigate the legacy of boarding schools and hear from survivors. Shawnee Chief Ben Barnes plans to testify.
Barnes and other Shawnee leaders are working to preserve a Kansas boarding school where many Shawnee children were sent and look into what happened at the mission school.
USA TODAY contributed to this report.
Sean Hemmersmeier covers local government, growth and development in Southwestern Utah. Follow on Twitter @seanhemmers34. Our work depends on subscribers so if you want more coverage on these issues you can subscribe here: http://www.thespectrum.com/subscribe.
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