Buried in History: The Native Children who Died in U.S. Boarding Schools and Were Not Reported

 

Buried in History: The Native Children who Died in U.S. Boarding Schools and Were Not Reported

By Brenda Norrell, Censored News, January 27, 2025

The U.S. Interior Department's report on boarding schools did not report thousands of Native children who died. Who were the children, why did they die, and why does the cover-up continue? With the Washington Post's raw data, we look at the schools where the lives and deaths of Native children are buried in history.

The largest number of children's deaths that the Interior did not report were at Chemawa Indian Training School in Oregon. An eleven-year-old boy was shot and killed while running away. The deaths at Chemawa reflect those across the nation: starvation, unsanitary conditions, and abuse leading to epidemics and deaths from infectious diseases.

What is rarely exposed is the fact that epidemics of cholera, scarlet fever and typhoid killed many Native children in boarding schools, and cases of smallpox.

The history of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is well-known, but less known are the lives of the children who never came home.

Geronimo's people were brought here from the prison in Florida and then from the prison barracks in Alabama. Chiricahua Apache teenagers, young men and women, imprisoned with Geronimo, died quickly of tuberculosis at Carlisle. So many died that Captain Richard Henry Pratt began sending them back to the prison barracks to die. Pratt's motto was "Kill the Indian and save the man."

Dine' and Apache children were stolen from their families. Families were rarely told when their children were sick, and received only form letters when their children died. In Fort Defiance boarding school on the Navajo Nation, which bears the stain of Kit Carson and the Longest Walk, the Interior Department failed to report the large number of deaths.

At Haskell Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas, there was a jail where children were punished and suffered. Paiute children in southern Utah as young as six years old were taken to Panguitch boarding school and forced into farm labor. Twelve unmarked graves were discovered in 2023. The Interior Department did not report the large number of Shoshone children who died at Fort Hall.

In Albuquerque, the children were militarized. In Hawaii, children were murdered with brutal force. Lakota children died on the train tracks running away from the Rapid City boarding school in South Dakota and were severely beaten at Genoa boarding school in Nebraska. Native teen girls died from freezing, and amputations from frostbite after running away from boarding school in Greenville, California.

Stewart Indian School in Nevada changed its stance through the years. Today, it states clearly that Indian boarding schools are a violation of the Geneva Convention on Genocide.

China pointed this out during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues when it was criticized for human rights violations. China quickly pointed out the genocide of residential schools in Canada and boarding schools in the United States.

Pointing out the historical inequalities and tragedies that Indigenous children have suffered in these schools, China said Indigenous People have suffered a "dark history of genocide and cultural cleansing."

The year-long investigation by The Washington Post documented that 3,104 students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970 -- three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Department.

The actual number of deaths could be as high as 40,000, since deaths of children in unmarked graves were either never reported or the records were destroyed.

Read Censored News in-depth article:
https://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2025/01/us-interior-report-fails-to-reveal.html

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