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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. 

“The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” wrote Pratt, as he began to round up indigenous children in Dakota Territory.

“It was the same situation in the U.S. in terms of the boarding school experiment, era, harms, and impacts, and the unmarked graves,” claims Christine McCleave, head of NABS. and an enrolled citizen of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation.

McCleave’s grandfather and great-grandfather attended boarding schools. Her great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle. 

In Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the U.S. Army announced it is returning the remains of 10 more indigenous children. This is the fourth time the army is returning the 100-year-old bodies to their home communities. 

McCleave says there are more than 200 children buried there, and 14 of the graves are marked with an “unknown” sign. 

In 2018, Tribal Nations turned to the U.N. in an effort to obtain a full accounting of those who went missing at schools like the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.

A legacy of unmarked graves

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) released a statement in response to the revelations of 215 unmarked graves in Canada.

 “The U.S. Indian boarding school era was an integral part of a centuries-long systematic, genocidal campaign by the United States government to erase Native peoples, cultures, and civilizations.”

“The U.S. has never acknowledged its assimilative boarding school policies and refused to provide an accounting of the children that went missing and deaths that occurred at Indian boarding schools in this country,” a NABS spokesman said. 

No one knows how many children were killed or went missing during the era of the U.S. forced boarding school. In some cases, there were no records kept. And finding the bodies might be the only way to reconstruct what happened.

There are already local calls to investigate sites in North Dakota and Michigan. In the meantime,  NABS and other advocacy groups continue to investigate.