Taken Away

During the fall of 1894, U.S. Army troops arrived on horseback in the remote northern Arizona mesas. It was an area where the Hopi people had lived since time ancient times. The soldiers had specific orders: Take the children.

Some Hopi parents had refused to send their children to a special school in Keams Canyon, Arizona. Keams Canyon Boarding School was established by the federal government to force Native children to adopt the American way of life. Agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs tried several methods to get parents to comply, including bribing Hopi parents. They offered yards of cloth or tools like axes. When that didn’t work, they tried violence. Agents used their fists against those who didn’t want to send their children away. Government food rations were withheld. The agents tried to starve the Hopi into submission.

When those methods failed, two cavalry companies arrived to arrest 19 Hopi men. The soldiers took the captives to California’s Alcatraz Island where they were imprisoned for nearly a year. The Hopi children were taken as planned.

The forced removal was part of a massive and coordinated effort. For more than 150 years—beginning in the early 19th century—hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to boarding schools across the country. Nearly 1,000 of them died and untold others were deprived of their language and culture in an attempt to “Americanize” them.

Until recently, the details of this dark chapter in American history were largely unknown. But new research from the nonprofit National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition shows that at least 523 institutions were part of a sprawling network of boarding schools for Native American children. At least 408 received federal funding. Congress enacted laws to coerce Native American parents to send their children to the schools. The laws included allowing federal officials to withhold food aid from families who resisted.

The schools had a mission to assimilate Indigenous children. The schools cut off children’s hair, burned their tribal clothing, and gave them English names.  Students were required to attend Christian religious services. They also forced the children to perform manual labor, both on school premises and on surrounding farms. Students who kept speaking their ancestral languages or observing their religious practices faced beatings.

“They went after our language, our culture, our family ties, our land,” says Ben Sherman, 84, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe who as a child spent four years living at the Oglala Community School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. “They succeeded on almost every level.”

The Native American boarding school system was part of a long, troubled history between Native Americans and the U.S. government. The first of these schools opened in 1801. They really took off in the late 19th century because of Richard Henry Pratt, a former military officer. He founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879 (see “Key Dates,” below).

Pratt was blunt about his mission: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

Upon arriving at Pratt’s school, the children were often photographed in their Native clothing. Then school officials quickly had the boys’ long hair cut short. It was a cruel and traumatic step for some cultures like the Lakota, where cutting long hair was associated with mourning the dead.

They dressed the children in new clothes. The boys wore uniforms and the girls Victorian-style dresses. Then they photographed the children again. The before-and-after shots wound up in promotional materials as evidence of the school’s assimilation mission.

Next, they renamed the children. Sometimes they were given random American surnames such as Smith or Brown, or names inspired by presidents or other prominent figures.

News of Pratt’s experiment spread. Similar schools opened up all over the nation. Some of the clearest descriptions of what such schools meant to accomplish are captured in the words of the White officials in charge of these institutions.

“It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them,” Thomas J. Morgan, the commissioner of Indian Affairs, said in a speech at the establishment of the Phoenix Indian School in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1891.

By the 1920s, nearly 83 percent of school-age Indigenous children lived in such boarding schools. The development and funding for the schools went hand in hand with the federal government’s taking land from Native Americans, according to a 2022 Interior Department report.

To help pay for the boarding school system, the report notes, federal officials used money from tribal trust accounts. These accounts were established as part of the treaties in which tribes ceded lands to the United States. In other words, the U.S. government effectively used Indigenous peoples’ funds to pay for boarding schools that cut their children’s ties to their families and cultures.

Congress also funded schools with money from the sale of tribal lands. During the time when the boarding school system expanded the most—the 1880s through the 1920s—a large-scale theft of Indigenous land was also occurring, according to Brenda Child, a professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

“Indian people lost 90 million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States,” says Child, whose Ojibwe grandparents were sent to boarding schools.

James LaBelle was 8 years old in 1955.  His mother drove him and his 6-year-old brother to the airport in Fairbanks, Alaska. He says his mother, who struggled with alcoholism, had been given a choice. She could send her sons to boarding school or put them up for adoption.

When she chose boarding school, LaBelle says, he found himself literally tied to other Native Alaskan children by a rope threaded through the belt loops of their pants. He spent the next several years at the Wrangell Institute, a boarding school operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in southeast Alaska.

LaBelle, 77, who is Inupiaq and an enrolled member of the Native Village of Port Graham, still finds it hard to describe the treatment he endured at Wrangell.

“It could have been a prison or a mental hospital,” he says.

When he was 10, LaBelle recalls, the school punished him and another boy for wrestling by dousing them with nearly freezing water from a fire hose. Sexual violence was also widespread, he says, citing the example of a girl who was repeatedly abused by an administrator all eight years she was at Wrangell.

At night, LaBelle could hear other children, especially some of the youngest, crying and calling for their mothers.

“It was the only time we could show emotion,” he says. “The entire section of the dorm for the youngest kids were all wailing in the dark.”

Many survivors say the horrors they experienced still haunt them.

“I was just a child, so I couldn’t stand up for myself,” says Anita Yellowhair, who was taken from her Navajo family in Steamboat, Arizona. She was sent to live at the Intermountain Indian School, in Brigham City, Utah.

Now 85, she still remembers how students were punished for speaking languages other than English.

“They made us get on our knees to clean the toilets,” she says. “It was very embarrassing and humiliating. That’s why some of us never talk about our time at school.”

The children at these schools didn’t only suffer harsh punishments; according to an Interior Department report released this year, 973 children died. At some schools, dozens died; 189 students are known to be buried at Carlisle alone.

Many of the children’s burial sites remain unmarked. But clues continue to emerge. In a city park just north of downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, workers digging irrigation trenches in the 1970s found children’s bones. The site, it turned out, was the cemetery of the Albuquerque Indian School.

Now 85, she still remembers how students were punished for speaking languages other than English.

“They made us get on our knees to clean the toilets,” she says. “It was very embarrassing and humiliating. That’s why some of us never talk about our time at school.”

The children at these schools didn’t only suffer harsh punishments. According to an Interior Department report released this year, 973 children died. At some schools, dozens died. There are 189 students that are known to be buried at Carlisle alone.

Many of the children’s burial sites remain unmarked. But clues continue to emerge. In a city park just north of downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, workers digging irrigation trenches in the 1970s found children’s bones. The site was determined to be the cemetery of the Albuquerque Indian School.

The decline of Native American boarding schools began in the 1930s. By then, the federal government had largely finished taking Native lands, and it slowly began to close some of the schools. From the 1960s to the 1980s, federal authorities began handing over administration of some remaining schools to the Bureau of Indian Education or to the tribes.

In 1969, a U.S. Senate report noted the tragedy and failure of the system. That report helped spur approval of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975, which gave tribal nations greater control over the schools.

In 2021, Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe whose own grandparents survived the boarding schools, became U.S. Secretary of the Interior. The Interior Department has long overseen the federal government’s policies toward Native Americans, so her appointment—the first Native American to serve in any cabinet position—was especially significant.

For more than a year, Secretary Haaland traveled the country, conducting listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the boarding school system.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland says. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”

The end of Native American boarding schools began in the 1930s. By then, the federal government had largely finished taking Native lands. The schools began to slowly close. From the 1960s to the 1980s, federal authorities began handing over administration of some remaining schools to the Bureau of Indian Education or to the tribes.

In 1969, a U.S. Senate report noted the tragedy and failure of the system. That report helped get approval for the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975, which gave tribal nations greater control over the schools.

In 2021, Deb Haaland became U.S. Secretary of the Interior. She is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and her own grandparents survived the boarding schools. The Interior Department has long overseen the federal government’s policies toward Native Americans. Her appointment was significant because she is the first Native American to serve in any cabinet position.

For more than a year, Secretary Haaland traveled the country, conducting listening sessions with Indigenous communities still dealing with the fallout from the boarding school system.

“Federal Indian boarding school policies have impacted every Indigenous person I know,” Haaland says. “Some are survivors, some are descendants, but we all carry this painful legacy in our hearts and the trauma that these policies and these places have inflicted.”

Simon Romero is a reporter for The New York Times; Zach Levitt and Tim Wallace are Times editors; Yuliya Parshina-Kottas is a freelance journalist.

Simon Romero is a reporter for The New York Times; Zach Levitt and Tim Wallace are Times editors; Yuliya Parshina-Kottas is a freelance journalist.