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At least 3,100 Native Americans killed in US boarding schools: report

Elders from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in southeastern Montana listen to speakers during a session for survivors of government-sponsored Native American boarding schools, in Bozeman, Montana, Nov 5, 2023. (PHOTO: AP/Matthew Brown)

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WASHINGTON: The number of Native Americans who were killed in US boarding schools is at least triple the official government figure, the Washington Post reported Sunday (Dec 22).

From 1819 until the 1970s, the United States ran hundreds of Indian boarding schools across the country to involuntarily assimilate Native children into European settler culture, including forced conversion to Christianity.

An investigation by the Post documented 3,104 Indigenous students who died at the schools between 1828 and 1970, three times the number found in a recent government assessment of the institutions’ toll.

President Joe Biden made headlines in October when he offered a historic apology for one of the United States’ “most horrific chapters”: Native American children being ripped from their families and placed in often abusive boarding schools.

In this photo taken in 1906, provided by the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College, teachers and students gather for a portrait at Tunesassa School in Tunesassa, New York. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it will digitize 20,000 archival pages related to Quaker-operated Indian boarding schools. The records will provide a better understanding of the conditions that children received at these schools. (PHOTO: AP/Haverford College, Quaker and Special Collections)

The Post found that in many cases, children who died were buried “in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes”.

Poor record-keeping and the passage of time have made it difficult to determine exactly how many children died at the schools, where conditions were akin to “prison camps,” one expert told the newspaper.

Some cemeteries are marked, while others “are hidden, neglected or have been paved over,” said the Post, adding that its conclusions were based on “hundreds of thousands” of government documents.

Children died of disease, malnutrition and accident, sometimes under suspicious circumstances, according to the Post.

Biden’s speech came after a government report documented the deaths of nearly 1,000 children at such schools, though the real number was always thought to be higher.

Omaha Tribe members Mark Parker, left, and Jarell Grant, both of Macy, Neb., watch as workers dig for the suspected remains of children who once attended the Genoa Indian Industrial School, Tuesday, Jul 11, 2023, in Genoa, Neb. The mystery of where the bodies of more than 80 children are buried could be solved this week as archeologists dig in a Nebraska field that a century ago was part of a sprawling Native American boarding school. (PHOTO: AP/Charlie Neibergall)

The Biden administration has invested significantly in Native American communities, with executive actions expanding tribal autonomy, designating monuments to protect sacred ancestral sites, directing agencies to prioritize the problem of gender-based violence, and more.

Native Americans remain, on average, poorer than the rest of the country at large, a fact that advocates attribute to centuries of marginalization.

In Canada, where more than 4,000 students at residential schools are believed to have died or gone missing, a government commission blasted the schools as a form of “cultural genocide”.