More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures
"The Washington Post has found more than three times as many deaths as the U.S. government documented in its investigation of Indian boarding schools.
Each figure on this page represents a child who died while they attended a school.
Almeda Heavy Hair is one of them.
Bone by bone, two archaeologists lifted the 130-year-old skeletal remains of a Native American girl from the shallow grave in a roadside cemetery. A hand bone, a rib, a chunk of vertebrae and, finally, her skull.
Almeda Heavy Hair had been forcibly removed from her family and the Gros Ventre tribe when she was 12 and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, one of hundreds of institutions operated by the U.S. government to eradicate Native Americans’ culture and assimilate them into White society.
She died in 1894, four years after arriving, without ever seeing her family again. Now, 19 of Almeda’s relatives and others from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana — some crying, some praying as they watched her bones being exhumed — had come to take Almeda home.
Almeda was one of thousands of children who died in the custody of the U.S. government during a dark chapter in American history that has been long ignored and largely hidden.
A year-long investigation by The Washington Post has documented that 3,104 students died at boarding schools between 1828 and 1970, three times as many deaths as reported by the U.S. Interior Department earlier this year. The Post found that more than 800 of those students are buried in cemeteries at or near the schools they attended, underscoring how, in many cases, children’s bodies were never sent home to their families or tribes.
The Post’s investigation found the deaths by drawing on hundreds of thousands of government documents that also revealed how children were beaten and harshly punished if they did not adhere to strict rules in the classroom — and in the fields, laundry rooms, kitchens or workshops where they often were forced to spend half their days.
“These were not schools,” said Judi Gaiashkibos, executive director of the Nebraska Commission on Indian Affairs, whose relatives were sent to Indian boarding schools. “They were prison camps. They were work camps.”
The causes of death included infectious diseases, malnutrition and accidents, records show. Dozens died in suspicious circumstances, and in some instances the records provide indications of abuse or mistreatment that likely resulted in children’s deaths. A 10-year-old boy was fatally shot in 1912 at an Alaska school, a newspaper reported. A girl in Oregon“fell from a high window there & was brought home a corpse” in 1887, according to ateacher’s diary.
The findings show gaps in the federal government’s official accounting of what happened to Native American children who were wrested from their homes in the name of assimilation.They come as many tribes — long denied the chance to mourn and bury their dead — are seeking to find their ancestors’ remains and return them home.
But doing so is complicated by poor recordkeeping and uncertainty about the locations of many burial sites. While some cemeteries, like the one at Carlisle that held Almeda’s remains, are marked, others are hidden, neglected or have been paved over.
The schools were part of a sprawling system of more than 400 facilities created by the U.S. government, some in partnership with churches, religious orders and missionary groups, to target Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children. The Post reported in May that more than 1,000 children had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, sisters and brothers in multiple boarding schools.
The Biden administration has sought to bring attention to the legacy of boarding schools, though efforts in the United States lag far behind those in Canada, where at least 4,100 students at residential schools are believed by officials to have died or gone missing. There, school survivors have been paid billions in compensation, and a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 declared the schools a form of “cultural genocide.” Legislation to establish a similar commission in the United States passed the Senate on Friday, but it did not reach the House for a floor vote.
The Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary and member of the Pueblo of Laguna tribe, published two reports citing abuse in the schools. President Joe Biden formally apologized in October for “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.”
The government’s final report in July documented the deaths of 973 children and identified 74 burial sites while acknowledging that the numbers are incomplete. The Post filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Interior Department for the names of the children, how they died and where they are buried. The agency disclosed some records, but withheld all names and provided no information about their causes of death or burial sites.
The Post documented 66 additional cemeteries where students were buried at or near former boarding schools or school work sites.
In response to The Post’s findings, Interior Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said the agency’s investigation “was limited in scope by being exclusively restricted to federal records that did not tell the complete story of the trauma of the federal Indian boarding school era.”
He noted that “these schools were used to pursue a policy of forced assimilation over a century and a half. Our work has occurred over just three years.”
“Others must carry this work forward,” said Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community (Ojibwe). “What we’ve done over the past few years isn’t the end of the story.”
The Post’s investigation builds on the federal findings by reviewing government and boarding school records, newspaper obituaries and oral histories, and interviewing aging survivors. The Post also analyzed historical maps, death certificates and census rolls, and it used cartographic regression, a process comparing maps over time, to help identify graveyards.
The findings provide the most complete public accounting to date of how many Native American children died at the boarding schools, but many historians said they believe the death toll is far greater.
Preston McBride, a Pomona College historian who wrote his dissertation about four of the largest Indian boarding schools, has estimated the death toll to be as high as 40,000. He also estimates that Native American children in those schools died up to 18 times the rate of White children not living in boarding schools, but he said comparisons are limited by incomplete health records for Native American children.
The large number of deaths at Indian boarding schools “were tolerated as acceptable collateral damage in the government’s larger push to eradicate Indians and confiscate their lands,” McBride said in an interview.
It was a warm afternoon this fall, days after Almeda’s bones had been taken out of her grave at the Carlisle cemetery.
Several women from Fort Belknap gathered around a new pine casket on a table inside a tent. They were exhausted and emotionally spent. For two long days, they had sat with men from the tribe amid the graves as the children’s bones were exhumed. The men had sung, drummed and passed a ceremonial pipe while trying to honor their children over the din of traffic next to the cemetery.
Now, the women carefully laid Almeda’s bones on a buffalo robe in the casket. They added handmade earrings, a skirt and moccasins brought from their reservation. They trembled as they placed her skull in last.
In a somber ceremony, the U.S. Army, which oversees the Carlisle cemetery, transferred Almeda to the tribe. They also gave them the remains of two boys from her reservation who had been exhumed at the same time: John Bull and Bishop Shield, whose names in their Aaniiih language were Dwarf and Sleeps Above, respectively. An Army official placed a folded gray blanket on top of each casket.
John Stiffarm, a tribal ceremonial leader, addressed the group for several minutes in English and Aaniiih — something children would have been harshly punished for when they were at Carlisle.
The Army, he said, had offered dirt from the children’s graves to carry back to their reservation with the caskets.
“No,” Stiffarm said. “Leave that dirt here. They’re going to their homeland.”
The night of April 13, 1890, Almeda arrived at Carlisle by train. Her name — Heavy-Hair-on side of head — was soon shortened and anglicized. She was nearly 5 feet tall and weighed 92 pounds. A Carlisle official had removed her from the remote Fort Belknap reservation, home to the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribes in north-central Montana. Along with her came John, Bishop and 19 other children.
Once they arrived at Carlisle, the children were taken a half-mile to the campus, a former military installation in south-central Pennsylvania with manicured lawns and tall oak trees. Founded 11 years before by U.S. Army Civil War veteran Richard Henry Pratt, the flagship Indian boarding school’s philosophy was “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Pratt’s school took children from at least 200 different tribal communities and as far away as Alaska.
Carlisle became the model for boarding schools nationwide. Native American children wereforced to wear uniforms and follow military-like schedules. Some of the children were as young as 5; others were sent to the schools as teens and would stay there until they died asyoung adults.
They were assigned numbers and anglicized names. Their long hair was cut. The smallest infraction often led to a whipping, no food or solitary confinement. The children experienced extreme loneliness and fear.
“They were beaten up like dogs,” said Julia Carroll, an employee at the Genoa Indian Industrial School in Nebraska who testified before a congressional hearing in 1929. “I have seen those children beaten up until the blood would flow out of their noses.”
As the number of schools increased, waves of deaths swept across the system, according to enrollment records, government reports, death certificates and news clips. At least 270 died at Chemawa Indian Training School in Oregon, 146 at Haskell Indian Industrial Training School in Kansas, 110 at Fort Hall Boarding School in Idaho and 100 at Sherman Institute in California.
In the first year Carlisle was in operation, seven students died. Over the next 38 years, at least an additional 220 would perish, according to Carlisle historians.
The Post documented deaths at 202 schools and the causes of death for about 1,500 students. Of those, the leading killer was infectious disease, claiming 3 out of 4 students who died, records show.
Tuberculosis, pneumonia and the flu were the primary causes of death.
In 1941, Paul Sponge, 13, from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, died of pulmonary tuberculosis at St. Labre Indian Mission Boarding School in Montana. The next year, his two younger siblings — 8-year-old Bertha and 10-year-old Charles — died at the same school of the same illness.
The children also died of typhoid fever, measles and whooping cough, according to the annual reports of the federal commissioner of Indian Affairs. At Fort Hall Boarding School in Idaho, scarlet fever erupted in the dormitories in the winter of 1890, killing eight children in two months.
Sanitary practices and the lack of modern medicines in the late 19th century often led to poor health for the general population, but the conditions at boarding schools were even more dangerous, according to historians. Infectious diseases spread unchecked because of poor nutrition and hygiene, the lack of medical care, and overcrowding in unventilated dormitories.
The Meriam Report, a 1928 investigation commissioned by the federal government, concluded “frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.” The report called the health of Native American children in the schools below normal “as compared with standards for white children.”
Even as health conditions began to improve in the early 20th century for the overall U.S. population, the death rate for Native American children at boarding schools continued to surpass that of their White counterparts, said McBride, the Native American scholar.
“These institutions — where no measures were taken to disinfect tubercular sputum, where infected hand towels, drinking cups, schoolbooks and the mouthpieces of musical instruments passed freely among children, where the diet lacked nourishment, and where two or three students often were forced to sleep in a single bed — were hotbeds of contagion,” wrote David Wallace Adams, the author of “Education for Extinction,” a book about the boarding school era.
About 60 girls slept in one large dorm room with their beds pushed together at the Tulalip Mission School in Washington state, according to nun Elizabeth Schoffen, who recounted her five years at the school beginning in 1884 in her memoir.
“The accommodations for cleanliness were very poor, and the stench in that sleeping room was simply nauseating and there was no remedy for it, with the existing conditions, in the morning, I had to dress about 25 of these girls, and care for the running ... sores of many, who were diseased.”
McBride said the schools often sent home terminally ill students to reduce the number who died on campus. He estimates Carlisle’s true death toll to be more than double, or about 500, when accounting for the ill students who were sent home to die.
“It seems best … to get rid of some weak timber among those whose time has not expired,” wrote Pratt, the Carlisle founder, in a Sept. 10, 1883, letter to the commissioner of Indian Affairs about sending home 17 sick children.
Beyond the constant risk of disease, children also died of injuries sustained when they were forced to carry out heavy labor, according to school records and news reports.
In 1895 at the Tonasket Boarding School in Washington state, a 12-year-old boy trying to lift a “large vessel of hot water from the tank in the kitchen became overbalanced and fell in and was so badly scalded that he died from the effects,” according to a superintendent’s report.
In 1926, at the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma, student Richard Wolfe, 20, was working in the school’s boiler room when a pipe burst.
“Scalded to death by escaping steam” is how a newspaper article described Wolfe’s death.
“For so many of the children, these schools were death traps,” said Margaret Jacobs, a history professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who spent 25 years researching the Genoa Indian Industrial School and other boarding schools.
About 150 students died in what records and reports described as accidents, raising questions about culpability.
At Dwight Mission School in Oklahoma, 13 children died after they were trapped on a “sleeping porch” in a blaze in 1918, newspapers reported. Fire swept through the wooden dormitory of St. Joseph’s Mission School in Idaho in 1925 and killed six students, according to reports.
Students at the Seneca Boarding School in Wyandotte, Oklahoma, found their 13-year-old classmate Bobby Joe Marrujo hanging by an electrical wire from a tree limb on the school grounds during lunch hour. The sixth-grader from the Cherokee tribe “apparently slipped after tying a hangman’s knot in a strand of electric wiring,” according to a 1953 newspaper article. The local sheriff said the death was an accident.
Officials sometimes shipped children to schools hundreds of miles from their reservations. But students still tried to escape and go home. Of the deaths The Post documented, at least a dozen students died trying to flee and were killed after being struck by a train or as a result of exposure.
In 1970, 11-year-old Johnson Kee West died after he fled the Kayenta Indian School in northern Arizona and tried to climb a snowbound mesa to get home. “Frozen,” the Navajo boy’s death certificate noted.
West’s death — one of the most recent recorded by The Post — came as the era of federal boarding schools drew to a close, 76 years after Almeda had died at Carlisle.
On Aug. 28, 1894, Almeda died at age 16 of tuberculosis, then known as consumption. She also suffered from malnourishment, an analysis of her bones would later show. She was buried in a double funeral with another student, according to a death notice in the student newsletter, the Indian Helper.
By that time, Bishop, 17, had succumbed to pneumonia — barely four months after he arrived at Carlisle. John, 15, had died of tuberculosis in 1891. “Quietly laid away in our little cemetery last Thursday afternoon,” read his death notice.
On an uncomfortably hot day this July in Nebraska, Judi Gaiashkibos, who is Santee Sioux and a member of the Ponca tribe, trudged for hours through a vast soybean field on the site of the former Genoa Indian Industrial School about 100 miles west of Omaha.
In their search for lost graves, she and her team followed two dogs, trained to detect human remains. Suddenly, on a grassy patch next to railroad tracks, one of the dogs started barking and sat.
“She’s signaling that she detected the odor of human decomposition,” said Jim Peters, the dogs’ handler.
The Interior report recommended that the U.S. government take steps to help locate potential burial sites and “repatriate children who never returned.” Numerous tribes have begun searching for graves, but the searches are expensive and difficult. The farther the children were taken from home, the less likely their bodies were sent to their families, experts say.
In 2021, Indigenous leaders in Canada announced that, with the use of ground-penetrating radar, they had discovered 215 suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. After three years of investigating, no remains have been exhumed.
The effort in Genoa, where researchers say nearly 90 children died during the school’s 50 years of operation, demonstrates why finding remains is difficult.
Gaiashkibos has spent three years looking for student records and the lost cemetery. She and her team have relied on old newspaper articles, death records and an 1899 map indicating that a cemetery was located someplace on the 640-acre property, most of which is now privately owned.
Her team, working with the Nebraska state archaeologist, has used ground-penetrating radar and conducted a small excavation on the property but found nothing.
“They were forgotten,” Gaiashkibos said. “We want to find them and lay them to rest appropriately.”
Because the dogs “alerted” on potential remains for the second time in the same location, Gaiashkibos wants to search again. But she needs to notify 40 tribal leaders whose children attended Genoa and ask for permission from a local power company to dig on its land.
The earliest known map of the cemetery on the Genoa Indian Industrial School’s property is dated 1899. The cemetery appeared again in a map published in 1920 in roughly the same location.
The cemetery was absent from maps by 1958, according to U.S. Geological Survey records, and is not shown in current satellite images.
Overall, examining school sites across the country, The Post documented the graves of 811 students at or near schools they attended or near locations where they had been sent to work. Of those students, 133 of them were buried in cemeteries not included in the Interior report.
At the White’s Manual Labor Institute in Indiana, for example, the Interior Department concluded that no children died and there are no burial sites at the school. But historical documents and work by local researchers show that seven students died at the school between 1885 and 1890 and are buried on the school grounds.
The Post also found five graveyards marked on historical maps at or near former school sites, but the graveyards are neither listed on current maps nor referenced in school documents or other records. At least two of the sites now lie underwater after construction of nearby dams.
Many burial sites, experts caution, will never be found because deceased students were probably buried in unmarked graves, or in graves designated by field stones or wooden memorials that have long since deteriorated or been removed or vandalized.
In Oregon, at the Chemawa Indian Training School’s cemetery, the wooden headstones eventually rotted and became overgrown with brush and weeds. During a cleanup effort in the 1960s, some headstones were knocked down, and it became unclear where each of the 175 children was buried.
It took researchers more than 20 years to create a list of the children who died there and find their graves. They were helped by a map based on student names and burial sites scrawled on a wall inside a nearby abandoned building.
Not every tribe wants to disturb the graves.
In South Dakota at Rapid City Indian School, researchers and lawyers representing the local Native American community and tribes spent years talking to descendants and poring over historical documents to find their lost children. They now believe that many of the 50 students who died are buried on a hillside near the former school. But the group decided notto exhume them. They have preserved the area as sacred and plan to build a memorial.
Tatewin Means, one of the volunteer lawyers on the project, who is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota, said that the goal of “Western expansion and science is to keep digging and digging and digging until you feel like you know all that you can.” But her community listened to spiritual leaders who advised against disturbing the possible graves.
“Sometimes that spiritual side needs to take the lead and say just leave it alone. Just let it be. And so that’s what we’re listening to,” Means said.
The Carlisle school in Pennsylvania, where Almeda Heavy Hair died, is different from other boarding schools because more of its records have been preserved, allowing tribal leaders and families to learn details about the children’s deaths. When the school closed in 1918, the U.S. Army took over the property, now home to the U.S. Army War College.
In 1927, more than 30 years after Almeda was buried, her remains and those of other children were exhumed and moved to make room for development. The Army put their bones in wooden boxes and reburied them across campus, eventually adding white marble headstones engraved with names and crosses that symbolized the Christian religion the school wanted the children to embrace. The new cemetery was near what would become Jim Thorpe Road, named in honor of the famous Carlisle student who was the first Native American to win a gold medal at the Olympics.
In transferring the remains, however, missing and deteriorating headstones made it hard to match them with the correct children’s remains. Now, 20 graves are marked unknown.
Tribes have long requested to have their children at Carlisle exhumed and returned for reburial. In 1880, chiefs from the Sioux Nation in the Midwest wrote to the commissioner of Indian Affairs, asking for their children’s remains. “Our hearts will grieve too long if we do not have what is left of them back to our homes,” the letter said.
In 2016, after pressure from several tribes, the Army began to grant these requests. The remains of nine children with ties to the Sicangu Lakota were exhumed and returned to South Dakota 141 years after the chiefs requested them.
Last year, the Army reached out to the Fort Belknap tribes to see if they wanted to recover their children’s remains.
Almeda became one of the 40 students whose remains would be sent home.
‘We’re taking their spirits home’
On a September afternoon in Carlisle, several men from Almeda’s reservation gently placed her new casket into the back of a pickup truck towing a trailer. They did the same with pine boxes holding the unearthed remains of John and Bishop. The final journey of these Native American children was about to begin.
“We’re taking not just their physical remains,” said Michael Black Wolf, the Fort Belknap tribal historic preservation officer. “We’re taking their spirits home.”
A caravan of four vehicles with the men, women and teenagers, most of them from the Gros Ventre tribe, then set off for the nearly 2,000-mile trip west. After driving for hours through the green rolling hills and cornfields of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the group stopped for the first night in Indianapolis. At a Fairfield Inn, the men and teenage boys gently lifted each casket onto a luggage cart.
One of the men, Vincent Gone, smudged the caskets with burning sage to protect the children and the group. Then, the men wheeled the caskets into Randall Werk Sr.’s hotel room and placed them on the floor underneath the desk. Werk, a relative of Almeda’s, kept watch over the children each night — a tradition to not leave the dead alone. He fasted the entire trip out of reverence for the children.
In his room, he told them in the Aaniiih language: “We’re going home.”
At each hotel stop, the men solemnly unloaded the caskets for the night. Other travelers stared as the men pushed them through the corridors.
By the second night, in Minneapolis, several people in the caravan felt run down. They were sick with covid, but they pressed on across the Great Plains. Then, on the fourth day, the truck carrying the children broke down at a gas station off Interstate 94 in Dickinson, North Dakota.
For two hours in the chilly wind, the men tried to fix it. Jeffrey Stiffarm, president of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, thought it was a sign from the children — they had been rushing to get to Montana, at times driving 80 mph. “They’re telling us to pump the brakes,” he said.
They eventually rented a big moving truck and transferred the caskets. The caravan started again, moving west and then turning north into the rugged badlands and steep cliffs of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. By midday, the group crossed into Montana.
Word had spread on social media that the children were coming. And members of different tribes were lining the roads waiting for them. As they began to approach the Fort Peck Reservation — land of a people who were once their enemies — schoolchildren held up handwritten signs: “Welcome Home Almeda, Bishop & John.”
At the bridge marking the reservation boundary, the caravan was greeted by about 50 people. Fort Peck tribal leaders presented Stiffarm with Native American blankets and then escorted the caravan 85 miles across their reservation. Standing in the middle of a traffic circle were a group of men, with one holding an upside-down American flag that for some symbolizesdistress in Native American communities.
It was dark by the time the caravan made it to Fort Belknap, home to 4,000 Native Americans. By then, the pine boxes had been transferred from the truck to a hearse.
Hundreds of tribal members who had waited for hours in their cars fell in behind the procession. Under a full moon, the stream of car headlights stretched for nearly 10 miles through the darkened reservation. Tears filled President Stiffarm’s eyes as he looked in his rearview mirror.
Eight riders on horseback escorted them the last few miles to a large tepee where they unloaded the caskets. For days, the community had been preparing for the children’s return. Boys had dug graves. Women and men had prepared fry bread, steak and soup.
Just after 10 p.m., the group packed inside the tepee that had been decorated with Native American star quilts for a pipe ceremony and wake. A few feet from the three caskets, Werk broke his four-day fast by drinking a cup of water.
“They’re babies in one way, and in one way they’re our grandfathers and grandmothers,” he said. “They’ve been gone a long time.”
At the wake, tribal leaders spoke of the legacy of pain that they attributed to the boarding schools: broken families and the loss of language and culture.
The tribal members and their children lined up to walk by each casket, sometimes leaving coins or candy. Some children had written personal letters to Almeda and the boys. The moment was healing, several said. They felt intimately connected to these children who represented the government’s effort to shatter their way of life.
“Things are slowly being set right,” said tribal member George Horse Capture Jr.
The next day, the tribes buried John and Bishop atop a windswept hill with the sun shining on dozens of mourners, some in colorful ribbon skirts, at their traditional burial ground. The boys’ caskets were lowered one by one into graves beside each other in the vast open space. The mourners each threw a handful of dirt into the graves. Children ringed each mound with rocks.
That afternoon, members of the tribes and Almeda’s relatives gathered in her family cemetery on top of a neighboring hilltop amid wild sage overlooking a lush valley at the foot of the Little Rocky Mountains. She would be laid into the earth among the graves of her brother, nieces and nephews. Children held bouquets of flowers, and some of the men who had witnessed Almeda’s disinterment at Carlisle carried her casket to the open grave. Tribal members sang ancient melodies and drummed the rhythm of a heartbeat.
“She’ll be here, always. And that will be good,” Werk said.
As a soft wind rustled the grasses and raindrops began to fall, Werk and the other men slowly lowered Almeda’s casket into the ground.
About this story
The Post is examining the legacy of America’s network of Indian boarding schools. Do you have a tip or story idea for our investigation? Email our team at boardingschools@washpost.com.
Top photo credit: c.1892 portrait of Almeda Heavy Hair, Courtesy of the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Reporting by Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran and Nilo Tabrizy. Photography by Jahi Chikwendiu, Marvin Joseph and Salwan Georges.
Additional reporting by Rachel S. Cohen, Alice Crites, Marianne LeVine, Tamilore Oshikanlu, Claire Healy, Scott Higham, Susie Webb and Nate Jones.
Design by Natalie Vineberg. Development by Jake Crump.
Editing by David S. Fallis and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Meghan Hoyer, Jenna Pirog, Nadine Ajaka and Jay Wang.
Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Photo research by Troy Witcher. Graphic editing by Emily M. Eng.
Additional support from Peter Wallsten, Cameron Barr, Kathy Baird, Matthew Callahan, Brandon Carter, Matt Clough, Matea Gold, Jenna Lief, Jordan Melendrez, Gaby Morera Di Núbila, Sarah Murray, Amy Nakamura, Kyley Schultz, Savannah Stephens, Rushawn Walters and Emily Wright.
Methodology
To document deaths at Indian boarding schools and identify burial sites, The Post focused on 417 schools identified by the Interior Department as federally funded as part of the government’s 1819-1969 policy of forced assimilation.
The Post’s findings expand upon the Interior Department’s recent investigation, which documented 973 children who died. Because the agency declined to share names or details, it is unclear which of those students are included in the 3,104 documented by The Post.
Deaths:
To tabulate deaths and find details on students’ names and causes of death, reporters reviewed thousands of reports filed by school officials, enrollment records, death certificates, census records, archived news reports and research by local historians. Official documents included annual reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and Superintendents’ Annual Narrative and Statistical Reports, many available online from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The Post included in its tabulation only students who died at schools or at nearby hospitals or sanatoriums.
Student identifications are limited by misspellings or variations in how names were recorded. The name of a student’s tribe often referred to a broad tribal affiliation or a geographic area. For some children, only a first name was available. In some cases, students’ ages were listed in records only as estimates or not recorded at all. Many school records are illegible, missing or are in archives that are closed to the public.
A small percentage of the deceased students included by The Post were young adults at the time of their deaths, which aligns with the Interior Department’s methodology for its report. Children in some cases were sent to boarding schools as teenagers and remained there until they were in their 20s.
Burial sites:
To identify graveyards at or near former schools, reporters reviewed maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, Historic Map Works, Historic Aerials, Ancestry.com, university archives and local historical societies. Reporters compared historic and current maps, including ones from the USGS National Map Corps, and used Earth Point to translate antiquated descriptions to modern coordinates.
The Post then searched for evidence that a student who died was buried at a graveyard located near or at a school. This involved matching enrollment records and the names of deceased students with FindAGrave.com, a crowdsourced database of burial sites, and reviewing student obituaries, local cemetery listings, death certificates and census records. To identify potential burial sites, reporting included children listed in cemeteries who were enrolled as students on or near the date they died.
While the Interior Department found 74 student burial sites at 65 schools, The Post found evidence of 56 burial sites at or near an additional 51 schools. The Post found 10 additional burial sites associated with six of the schools listed in the Interior report. This includes four off-site graveyards where Carlisle students were buried after they died while on school-related work.
The Post is withholding the exact locations of individual graves in response to concerns from some community members about vandalism or looting.
To facilitate additional research, The Post is making available some of the data compiled for its investigation.
Reporting also drew on research from the following:
Alaska: Benjamin Jacuk of the Alaska Native Heritage Center; Lamont Hawkins Jr., a historian from Nenana; Coleen Walker Mielke, a historian in Wasilla; Chris Wooley, an archaeologist with the Tangirnaq Tribe. Arizona: Elaine Shilstut of the Presbyterian Historical Society, who researched the Tucson Indian Training School. California: Jean Keller of San Diego Mesa College, who researched the Sherman Institute and Perris Indian School. Colorado: State Archaeologist Holly Norton. Hawaii: Maile Arvin of the University of Utah, who researched the Industrial and Reformatory School. Indiana: Jeannie Regan-Dinius of the Crown Hill Foundation and Beth McCord of the state Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology, who researched the White’s Manual Labor Institute. Michigan: Shannon Martin, who researched Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. Minnesota: Anita Gaul, historian, and Janet Timmerman, researcher, who documented the St. Rose/St. Francis Xavier School; the Rev. Gary Mills, who has researched St. Paul’s Industrial School. Montana: Janine Pease and James Grant, who researched the St. Labre Indian Mission Boarding School; Ken Robison of the Overholser Historical Research Center, who researched the Fort Shaw Government Industrial Indian boarding school; Chloe Runs Behind of the Missoula Public Library, who has researched Montana boarding schools. Nebraska: Dave Williams, state archaeologist, Shelley Frear, who researched the Genoa Indian Industrial School; Margaret D. Jacobs with the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project. Oregon: SuAnn Reddick and Eva Guggemos, archivist at Pacific University, who researched the Chemawa Indian Training School. Pennsylvania: Jim Gerencser, Lily Sweeney, Kate Theimer and Frank Vitale of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center; Louellyn White of Concordia University, who researched the Lincoln Institution and Carlisle. Oklahoma: Jim Baker, former superintendent of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School; the Oklahoma Cemetery Directory; the Oklahoma Historical Society; the Oklahoma State University Digital Collections library. South Dakota: attorneys Heather Dawn Thompson, Tatewin Means and Rebecca Kidder, who researched the Rapid City Indian School. Washington: Linzie Crofoot of Northwestern Indian College, who researched the Cushman Indian School, where her great-grand uncle died. Other: Preston McBride, Pomona College; Bryan Rindfleisch, Amy Cary and Daniella Goldfarb of Marquette University, who researched boarding schools in records held by Catholic Missions; Joaquin Gallegos; the cartographic records staff at the National Archives, including Amy Edwards and Jared Chamberlin; the cartographic records staff at the Library of Congress; and archivists Cody White and Rose Buchanan of the National Archives and Records Administration."
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