This is the first in a three-part seriesfollowing the intergenerational effects that the United States government’s century and a half practice of placing Indian children in boarding schools has had on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. This story was produced as a project for theUSC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism's 2021 Data Fellowship.

A watered-down bill was introduced in the Michigan senate on March 15 that “strongly encourages” local school districts to teach Native boarding school history, instead of directing the Department of Education to make changes to the state-wide curriculum.  

“I feel like traveling home,” the Oneida singers sang, their voices filling the Church of the Holy Apostles in Hobart, Wisconsin. “My heavenly home is right ahead, I feel like traveling home.”

Opinion.Thirty some years ago, I attended a family function. As more of the family assembled for dinner I casually asked two of my mother’s cousins why we didn’t know a whole lot about our family history. It seemed to me that our elders should have passed it down so that I would be able to pass it on to my children and grandchildren. 

ANADARKO, Okla. — In the packed Riverside Indian School gymnasium on Saturday, July 9, 2022, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) began the Road to Healing Tour.

Native News Online reporters are traveling across Indian Country this week, reporting on Indian boarding schools. Here's what to watch out for next week at Native News Online:

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. —  U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) will visit the Riverside Indian School in Anadarko, Okla. on Saturday, July 9, 2022 at 10 a.m.

A service on Sunday will honor the memories and lives of Frank Green and Paul Wheelock of the Oneida Nation, who were buried at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania over 120 years ago. 

Next week, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland will visit Caddo County, Oklahoma to conduct their first listening session in the Road To Healing Tour, the Department of the Interior’s initiative to hear from survivors of Indian Boarding Schools. 

To all of our readers and friends,

This week, witnesses appeared before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs to speak about the genocidal history of federal Indian boarding school policies as well as the generational harm of those policies on Native families and communities. 

A few days before the Senate hearing, news broke that the U.S. Army had exhumed the remains of a Native American student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School — only to discover that the body was that of a different person. Tribal leaders told Native News that losing the remains of the Native American teen was not an isolated incident, and that it foretells a grim reality for future Indian boarding-school repatriations across the country.

If you’re a regular reader of Native News Online, you’re likely familiar with the 150-year history of Indian Boarding Schools and their impact on Indian Country. We have written extensively on this issue, reporting more than 100 stories as part of our effort to shine a bright light on this dark era of forced assimilation of Native American children.

During the Senate hearings, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and herself a product of the boarding school policies — advocated for a Truth and Healing Commission and talked about her planned “road to healing” tour to speak with boarding school survivors and assess tribal needs.  She told the Senate committee that her first stop will be in Oklahoma.

We plan to be there and at other stops on the road to healing. And we will continue to cover this important story throughout 2022 and 2023. That’s why today, I’m asking you to support our newsroom with a one-time or recurring donation to fund our reporting, including the escalating cost of travel. I ask that you please join us in this effort with a one-time donation or a recurring donation of $5 or $10 per month. 

Yes, I’ll Support Native News Coverage of Indian Boarding Schools

Megwetch, 

Levi Rickert
Editor & Publisher

Two issues were on the table during the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs’ hearing June 22: the Department of the Interior’s landmark investigative report on Indian Boarding Schools, and legislation intended to work in tandem with the department’s initiative to address trauma and bring healing to boarding-school survivors and their communities.

On June 18, the remains of 13-year-old Wade Ayers were set to go home to  the Catawba Nation in South Carolina for the first time since he was sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1901. But at the disinterment ceremony, U.S. Army archaeologists excavating under Wade’s headstone found remains inconsistent with those of a 13-year-old boy, which were “instead found to be that of a girl of the approximate age of 15-20.”

The Senate Commitee on Indian Affairs will host a hearing titled “Oversight Hearing on Volume 1 of the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report & Legislative Hearing on S. 2907, Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act" on Wednesday, June 22, 2022 at 2:30 p.m. - EDT.

Opinion. Last year, about a week after news broke about the buried remains of 215 innocent school children at the Kamloops Industrial Residential School in Canada’s British Columbia province, I reported on a rally in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Twenty years after they first spotted the name of a relative on a tombstone at one of the nation’s most infamous Indian Boarding Schools, two Catawba Nation tribal members are preparing to finally bring him home.

On June 15, nine students at the Native Storytelling Workshop took part in a visit to Haskell Indian Nations University. The shuttle transported the group from University of Kansas’s Stauffer-Flint Hall to the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum. Students took in the environment of the wild flowers in front of the building and the atmosphere of welcoming faculty. 

Haskell Institute, founded as United States Indian Industrial Training, was an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas that was established in 1884.  During the boarding school era, children were brought there by force — sometimes in child-sized handcuffs — and put into a re-education program. The legacy of the boarding school era still resonates today.

Sophie High Dog was the age of a kindergartener when she was taken by a missionary from the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota and placed in a notorious boarding school in Pennsylvania: Five years old. 

This month, we’re compiling questions that our readers are asking us about Indian Boarding Schools and offering answers as reported by our team.