FOLLOW US

“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.