- Details
- By Levi Rickert
The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California have filed a groundbreaking 68- page lawsuit against the United States government, seeking justice for a long-overlooked tragedy: the creation and operation of the Federal Indian Boarding School Program.
The Tribes are represented by the law firms DiCello Levitt, Selendy Gay, Fields Han Cunniff, and Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky.
According to the lawsuit, the federal government used funds belonging to Native Nations to finance a widespread network of boarding schools designed to forcibly assimilate Native children. These institutions—operating across the United States—were modeled more like prisons than schools. Their aim was to remove children from their families and communities, strip them of their languages and traditions, and erase their cultural identities.
The complaint asks that a full accounting is made for the funds allocated to Indian boarding schools, which equate to some $23 billion in today's dollars, is made.
The complaint outlines decades of systemic abuse and trauma, including physical and sexual violence, forced labor, and the widespread loss of Native life, language, and cultural heritage. While these harms have long been known within Native communities, they were not officially documented by the U.S. government until recently.
In 2022 and 2024, under the leadership of then–Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newlan (Bay Mills Indian Community) released two major reports following an extensive investigation into the Federal Indian Boarding School Program. These reports confirmed the U.S. government's direct involvement in the funding and operation of these institutions. Crucially, they revealed that much of the evidence surrounding this financing remains exclusively in the hands of the federal government.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, a jurisdiction that includes the site of one of the most infamous schools in the program: the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The case seeks a full accounting of the funds used to support the boarding school system—money that was taken from tribal resources under the pretense of educating Native children.
This legal action marks a significant step toward truth, accountability, and healing. It challenges the federal government to confront its role in a program that caused generational trauma and calls for transparency regarding the misuse of Native resources.
As the complaint alleges:
The United States Government, the trustee over Native children’s education…has never accounted for the funds that it took, or detailed how, or even whether, those funds were ultimately expended. It has failed to identify any funds that remain.
The harm inflicted by the Boarding School Program endures in the broken families and poor mental and physical health of survivors of the Boarding Schools and their descendants. It endures in the cycles of poverty, desperation, domestic violence, and addiction that were born of the Boarding School Program. It endures in the silence of lost language and culture, and the quiet desperation of so many survivors and their descendants, families that carry scars down through generations. It endures in the missing remains and unmarked graves of the children who died.
The United States systematically sought to destroy Native children’s connections to their families, homes, languages, and cultural and religious practices, which, in Native Nations’ communities, indoctrinated the children into servile positions, and condemned Native Nations to cycles of poverty, violence, and drug addiction.
Beyond being a national disgrace, the Boarding School Program was an undeniable violation of the United States’s longstanding, explicit, and ongoing obligations (including, but not limited to, obligations guaranteed by treaty and statute) as trustee tasked with providing Native children’s education.
This trust duty was never disavowed and never ended, and the United States continues to recognize its “responsibility for . . . education of Indian children,”1 based on a “unique and continuing trust relationship with and responsibility to the Indian people for the education of Indian children.”2 The United States has a moral, political, and legal responsibility to fully account for the Boarding School Program.
"The Boarding School Program represents one of the most shameful chapters in American history," Serrell Smokey, Chairman of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said. "Our children were taken from us, subjected to unimaginable horrors, and forced to fund their own suffering. This lawsuit seeks to hold the U.S. Government accountable for its actions and to ensure that the truth is finally brought to light."
"The Boarding School Program inflicted profound and lasting harm on our communities," Amber Silverhorn-Wolfe, President of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, said. "We are seeking justice not only for the survivors but also for the generations that continue to suffer from the intergenerational trauma caused by these schools."
The case is Wichita and Affiliated Tribes v. Burgum and was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. A copy of the complaint is available online here.
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