Congress contemplates sweeping investigation of Native boarding schools

For years, advocates and leaders in Indian Country have pushed for the creation of a federal commission that would document the testimonies of Indigenous people who survived the boarding schools funded and managed by the federal government and religious institutions. Such a commission would be the first of its kind in the United States, coming after similar efforts toward truth-telling in Canada and elsewhere. 

Last month, legislation to create such a commission in the U.S. moved closer to reality when Reps. Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Sharice Davis, D-Kan., introduced a bill in the House. An identical one has already passed out of the Senate. The proposed Truth and Healing Commission would be made up of five people chosen by Congress based on recommendations by tribes and Indigenous-led organizations. In addition to creating an avenue for survivors to share their stories, it would investigate the federal government’s role in boarding schools and the impacts they had on Indigenous people and then create a report with recommendations for a path to healing.    

The legislation has been championed by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) and has gone through several iterations since it was first introduced in 2021. A commission would build on the coalition’s work over the past decade — including documenting survivors’ oral histories — as well as investigations by the Department of the Interior under the Biden administration. Those investigations found that the federal government operated 417 institutions across 37 states, forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families and subjecting them to assimilation, abuse and sometimes death. It’s estimated that the federal government made more than $23 billion in today’s dollars available to fund the system for almost 100 years.

At the end of January, High Country News spoke with the coalition’s deputy chief executive officer, Samuel Torres (Mexica/Nahua), about the Truth and Healing Commission legislation, what it could accomplish if it became law, and the political moment it arrives in. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

HCN: What, in your view, makes this bill so important?

Samuel Torres: The Truth and Healing Commission Bill legislation is a new opportunity before us to demonstrate the true bipartisan nature of this work that is so needed in the United States at this moment. We expect there to be minimal opposition. 

This is quite simply, an opportunity for the United States to inquire about questions that have been asked by Indian Country for generations. It is legislation that has received overwhelming support from both parties, from tribal leaders everywhere. The National Congress of American Indians over the past couple of years has passed overwhelming and unanimous resolutions to see the passage of this bill. Various faith communities from different denominations have passed resolutions and continue to support this bill. And people everywhere, whether they be Native or non-Native, want to see this commission bill passed. 

It’s more than time that a commission like this be formed and implemented. There are boarding school survivors and relatives that went to boarding schools that deserve the right to be able to offer their testimony in a commission. Our elders are not getting any younger, and we need to pass this now for them, for their ancestors and for their descendants.

HCN: And what, specifically, would the legislation do?

ST: We would expect that, as a part of this multi-year commission, a series of recommendations would be made to support both the healing of Indian Country and accountability of actors that may have witnessed or committed wrongdoing. Fundamentally, this would be the first time that the federal government of the United States of America took a close look and a personal approach toward hearing from boarding school survivors firsthand and having that inform how the United States takes next steps toward healing with the Indigenous peoples of these lands. 

Certainly, a robust amount of research and narratives would come out of this commission to help support the collective understanding and social awareness education of the United States population, and we have seen that to be really important work that the coalition has been doing for over a decade. When we widen that circle, folks want to lean in, they want to step in, and they want to be advocates: How can we help support Indian Country in this way? What can we do to change our society, to change how our schools, our churches, our places of gathering, so that we can be more aware and cognizant and honoring of the impacts of this history? We believe it starts with the gathering of that testimony and uplifting the voices of boarding school survivors directly.

HCN: It sounds like it would be much more expansive than Interior’s previous investigations into the federal role of boarding schools under the Biden administration.

ST: It absolutely goes beyond the Interior Department’s Volume One and Volume Two Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. That was very much archival research, a limited survey. Very important work that needed to be done, but it’s something that requires a great deal of follow-up to include the direct voices of boarding school survivors, in addition to the policy recommendations and ways in which we address meaningfully the impacts of boarding schools for relatives.

HCN: The coalition’s efforts to document oral histories of boarding school survivors were affected last year when the federal government rescinded $250,000 in grant funding. The Trump administration said the grant no longer reflected its priorities. What has it been like to go from federal support on boarding school investigations to being told it’s not a priority?

ST: Up until recently, the desire to investigate or to learn more about boarding schools from the federal level has been entirely minuscule. The history of the United States demonstrates a very paltry intent to want to answer some of those questions. We’ve submitted (Freedom of Information Act) requests regarding how many boarding schools there have been, regarding how many children went missing, or how many died. And while the Biden administration and then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland were able to put together two volumes outlining some of the research that we also supported, it scratches the surface of what needs to be done. 

Considering that this is a history that impacts all Americans — Native, non-Native — it is incumbent on all of us to demand that these questions still need to be answered. There are still open questions around how many children went to boarding schools and how many children never came home. It is not necessarily the responsibility of one party over another. American taxpayers deserve to know how tax funding was utilized to wage violence against Native people over generations.

HCN: The Trump administration is removing signs from national parks that document histories of people who were enslaved, and of Native people. That, along with these funding cuts to boarding school oral histories, seems to fall under a larger conversation that you’ve already touched on about a lack of truth-telling about American history in this administration. 

ST: Removing signage regarding a history that historians agree (on), that (help us) all understand the impacts of moments of our history — generations of our history, where entire groups of people were violently subjugated and dehumanized — I think, is entirely shameful. Removing signs doesn’t change any of that history. Changing narratives because of political power does not change the impact of wielding that violence.

What we aim to do when we tell the truth about historical occurrences is we have the possibility of standing up shoulder-to-shoulder with all of our relatives, with all of our neighbors, and bearing witness to these types of historical injustices and proclaiming that we will work towards preventing these types of atrocities in the future. 

When we move away from truth-telling, we move away from kinship. When we move away from telling the truth about these injustices, we allow an opening for campaigns of injustice to happen again. So this is incumbent on everyone, across party lines, to be able to support honest and courageous truth-telling, so that we can allow those generational wounds to heal. But removing signs does not move us closer to that goal.

HCN: A lot of what’s happening right now in the U.S. today in regard to immigration enforcement really echoes the history of the U.S. separating Native families, in which boarding schools were instrumental. NABS is headquartered in Minneapolis. How has the coalition been engaged in what’s happening in Minneapolis with the increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents?