Interior Department Releases Indian Boarding School Report

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) today released its initial findings after a nine-month investigation into the fraught legacy of Indian Boarding Schools that the U.S. government ran or supported for a century and a half.

The 106-page report-penned by Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Bryan Newland-details for the first time that the federal government operated or supported 408 boarding schools across 37 states, including Alaska and Hawai'i, between 1819 and 1969. About half of the boarding schools were staffed or paid for by a religious institution. The investigation identified marked and unmarked burial sites at 53 of those schools, though the DOI expects to find the number of children buried at boarding schools across the nation to be in the "thousands or tens of thousands," as the investigation continues.

The DOI also identified more than 1,000 additional federal and non-federal institutions that didn't fall under its definition of "federal Indian boarding school." Those additional institutions such as Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories worked similarly to assimilate Native youth into white society.

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