White headstones are hidden in a corner of the former site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Five of them are now marked with white thread – a sign of what is about to happen here.
“We are returning five children to five different tribes,” said Renia Yates, director of the Army Cemetery Office, which is in charge of the disembarkation and return of Native American children buried there.
Now the site of a U.S. Army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated between 1879 and 1918, bringing over 10,000 Native American children to forcibly assimilate into white culture.
The school was the first of its kind and became a model for hundreds of other Native American boarding schools that would soon follow across the country.
Not all students survived the experience: at least 200 children died at Carlisle School alone.
After the school closed, the army took over the property and relocated the cemetery.
“It was moved in 1927, and all those graves were moved,” Yates said. “There were 186 graves moved and 14 unidentified.”
Several years ago, a team of forensic archaeologists and anthropologists began work to return some of the buried children to their families and tribes – 28 so far – and the burials of five more children are scheduled for September.
“We work on a request basis,” Yates said. “So, if families and tribes request return, we work with them to administer the return.”
According to the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative – an ongoing federal investigation of the historic boarding school system – from the 1800s to the 1970s, there were more than 400 taxpayer-funded, sometimes church-affiliated, Native American boarding schools.
The exact number of how many students attended those schools is unclear, but it is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Many of them experienced physical, sexual and emotional abuse in schools.
Dr. Samuel Torres, deputy CEO of the nonprofit, said, “This was something that the federal government sanctioned, funded, operated, and so on, as a project of colonization, as a project of western expansion. Also supported the institutions. National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition,
The organization is working with the federal government on an investigation launched in 2021 that is seeking to understand exactly what happened to the students.
alliance just released a new report With an interactive map that shows a far greater number of schools exist than ever before: more than 500.
“We emerged as a grassroots effort of original organizers, tribal leaders, boarding school survivors and descendants who basically wanted to come together to do a similar type of investigation – a commission, really – Which was first seen in Canada with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” said Torres.
Currently in Congress senate bill 1723 The United States would establish a similar commission, but as of yet, a companion bill has not been filed in the House.
“To heal, we have to really know what we are healing from,” Torres said. “The Commission’s process will not be the final answer to how we recover, but it will certainly contribute to how we develop a blueprint for next steps.”
These steps are necessary, he says, because time is of the essence.