Statement from NEH Chair Lowe on Federal Indian Boarding School Investigation Findings

NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) issued the following statement on the findings of the Department of the Interior’s second investigative report issued under the ongoing Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

“The first step toward addressing the intergenerational consequences of the United States government-supported Indian boarding schools is to squarely acknowledge and examine the history of a federal system intended to separate families, erase Native languages and cultures, and dispossess Native peoples of their land.

“This groundbreaking investigation has shown us this history is more damaging than we understood and brings to light the large number of Native students who died or were physically and sexually abused at Indian boarding schools and the scale of federal investment in severing Native children’s connections to their families, heritage, and communities.

“I am grateful to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland for leading this important, urgent work and establishing a pathway to redress these wrongs and help Native communities heal from this traumatic past. We at the National Endowment for the Humanities are extremely proud to be a partner on the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to document and bring greater awareness to the experiences of students who passed through these schools and the lasting legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies on Native peoples.”

Volume II of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report significantly expands the breadth of detail and information publicly available on the boarding school system and other institutions with similar assimilation policies that operated between 1871 and 1969. Based on a review of approximately 103 million pages of records, Interior created profiles of 417 Indian boarding schools across 37 states (or then-territories) and documented $23.3 billion in FY23 inflation-adjusted dollars provided by the U.S. government to these schools and similar institutions over a nearly 100-year span.

Their investigations confirmed that at least 973 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children died while attending federal Indian boarding schools and identified 74 marked and unmarked burial sites at 65 different school sites. Drawing upon the review of historical records and personal testimony from students who attended federal Indian boarding schools and their families, the report also details numerous abusive practices that occurred at these schools. Survivors and their descendants described physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the boarding schools and the trauma of being separated from their families and removed from their homes. Students routinely endured forcible assimilation practices such as haircuts to remove traces of their Native identities and punishments for speaking in their Native languages.

“The federal government – facilitated by the Department I lead – took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people. These policies caused enduring trauma for Indigenous communities that the Biden-Harris administration is working tirelessly to repair,” said Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, in a release accompanying Interior’s report.

The report also provides a series of recommendations from Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland to help correct and heal the wrongs wrought upon Native communities by the federal Indian boarding school system. These include a formal acknowledgment and apology from the U.S. government; investing in remedies to the present-day impacts of the federal Indian boarding school system; and investing in further research, language revitalization, and teaching the history of federal Indian boarding schools to the American people and global community.

Archival and oral history research for the investigative report was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has committed $4 million to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to support the research and analysis of records and creation of a permanent oral history collection documenting the experiences of the generations of Indigenous students who passed through the federal Indian boarding school system.

In addition to the agency’s partnership with the Department of the Interior, NEH has awarded approximately $2.2 million in grants to extend the reach and impact of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. This includes $411,000 in funding to 14 Tribal Nations and organizations for projects that shed light on the history of boarding schools and their impact on local communities. These grants are supporting projects such as a ground-penetrating radar survey of a former boarding school site in Washington by the Cowlitz Indian Tribe to detect unmarked burial grounds, a community-based oral history and story-mapping of the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys and the Kawailoa Industrial School for Girls in Hawai’i, and the creation of a traveling exhibition on Michigan’s Indian boarding schools created by the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians to share this history with Tribal communities and the Michigan public.

NEH also provided funding for the launch of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition’s National Indian Boarding School Digital Archive, a digital repository of archival materials from and about U.S. Indian boarding schools.

Other NEH grants are supporting the creation of a Native language revitalization institute at Fort Lewis College in Colorado; summer workshops for K-12 teachers about the history of Indian boarding schools in Arizona; and the digitization and development of intellectual property protocols around an archive of photos and records documenting the Native American boarding school experience at the White Earth Mission school in Minnesota from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.

NEH’s partnership with the Department of the Interior and support for the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative fall under American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future, a wide-ranging special initiative that leverages the humanities to strengthen our democracy, advance equity for all, and address our changing climate. Since January 2021, NEH has invested more than $40 million into humanities projects that promote Native and Indigenous history and culture.