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Native American Indian activists are calling for a reckoning in the U.S. Reporter Anya Zoledziowski of the Vice News claims there were once over 360 “schools” for indigenous kids in the states. They fear that the schools are filled with unmarked graves of the children sent there. 

Churches and the government operated the boarding schools, which were as brutal as those in Canada. Activists are asking for an investigation and want to find the unmarked graves.

Last week five Canadian churches were burned or vandalized as a response to finding more unmarked graves at a former residential school site. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission continues to investigate.

 It is estimated that as many as 15,000 Indian children may have died in the schools in Canada between 1860 and 1980. So far 215 child victims have been located in unmarked graves in Kamloops, Canada.

Shortly after a First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, confirmed it found the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried under a former residential school, news of similar sites started to spread across Canada and in the United States.

Ricky White attended a residential day school in Canada in the 1980s. Now he lives in Fargo, North Dakota.“It’s only a matter of time…We’re days, hours, or weeks away from something like that happening here in the U.S.,” White, an Anishinaabe man from Naotkamegwanning First Nation in northern Ontario claims. 

“Every community says that only half of the kids that went away to boarding schools came back…Of those kids who were killed, tortured, slaved, there’s a good guess there were many killed—and how do you hide that?” White said. “Well, we’re finding that out in Kamloops right now.”

The Carlisle School 

The “schools” began operation in the 1860s and some were open until the early 1980s. Similar to Canada, the point of the boarding schools was not to care for the children.

It was to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people. And by all accounts, these children were subjected to terrible sexual and physical abuses. They also had harsh punishments for speaking their native languages or expressing their identities. 

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, open 1879 to 1918, is an example of a U.S. boarding school.

Carlisle’s founder was Richard Henry Pratt.  Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt ordered him to concentrate on Lakota children. Who allegedly had a “hostile attitude toward the government.” 

Hayt wanted to use the boarding school to pressure the Lakotas, and other western Indigenous nations, to give back millions of acres of treaty-protected territory. So it could be used for white people's settlement.