Don't get ahead of the facts as the U.S. investigates Native American boarding schools

Exterior of the Phoenix Indian School Memorial Hall, Tuesday, February 19, 2019.
Exterior of the Phoenix Indian School Memorial Hall, Tuesday, February 19, 2019.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was understandably disturbed.

She had just learned that researchers had found some 215 unmarked graves in Canada at one of the historic boarding schools used to house and educate indigenous children.

Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a U.S. cabinet secretary, was well acquainted with the history of such facilities here in the United States.

Her grandparents were wards of a similar place, separated from family and community when they were 8 years old, as reported by Arizona Republic reporter Debra Utacia Krol.

In June 2021, Haaland launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to delve into the evidence and history of U.S. federal boarding schools − 408 of them plus another 1,000 religious and privately run schools that also trained Native peoples.

We cannot ignore the bad parts of history

If, as many in Canada and the United States suspect, these boarding schools were vehicles for crushing Native American culture and demanding conformity to white European customs, you could foresee a day when Phoenix, for instance, might no longer want to pay tribute to its own historic “Indian School” with a street name or commemorative park.

But we are long way from there, and with interest high in discovering more about these old places and whether they were instruments for good or evil or both, it is worth thinking hard about the nature of history and pay heed to some significant and contemporary warning flags.

Another view:How many died at Arizona boarding schools? It's time to find out

We should know the history of these places and take advantage of any opportunity to advance our knowledge of westward expansion and its effects on Indigenous peoples.

Much has been well documented about white European exploitation, ethnic cleansing and isolation of Native Americans, but we need a fuller understanding of the institutional training of indigenous children and whether that has had long term and detrimental effects on Native Americans.

Indian schools are part of our story

Students in an art class at Phoenix Indian School, June 1900.
Students in an art class at Phoenix Indian School, June 1900.

Man has a long history of inhumanity to man, and just as we should know of the Nazi’s industrial destruction of European Jewry or the abomination of the Atlantic slave trade or the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge or Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis, we should also know in fine-grain detail about the white-European mistreatment of Native Americans.

Man also has a long history of bad ideas and an even worse habit of acting on them. The only way to check our capacity for large-scale cruelty is to understand human nature and vigilantly guard against its worst impulses. In this way, telling the story tells us what we must guard against and exactly how insidious ideas take root.

The history of Native American boarding schools began with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819 and continued with legislation through the 1960s, Haaland said in a June 22, 2021 statement. “During that time, the purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities.”

“The languages, cultures, religions, traditional practices and even the history of Native communities was targeted for destruction,” said Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo.

To advance the mission of Interior’s boarding school initiative, Congress created the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act. It aims to advance Interior’s investigation of boarding schools and the policies that created them. It also aims to create guidelines to protect student graves and support the repatriation of bodies interred there.

History must be led by objective scholarship

As we pursue the story of our past, it is important that facts lead the journey. That means scholars trained to maintain critical distance from their subject can move with evidence, wherever it leads.

When historic discovery is led by activists, by people with political agendas, it will invariably be drawn to evidence that supports their claims and avert its eyes from evidence that does not.

Recent history − in fact, the events that led to the Interior Department’s interest in boarding schools − provides a warning to all of us.

The story of Canada’s unmarked graves emerged when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported on May 27, 2021, that ground-penetrating radar had detected soil disturbances at an Indigenous Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, run by the Catholic Church from 1893 to 1978.

The community’s chief, Rosanne Casimir, announced that a young anthropologist had discovered evidence of as many as 215 “missing children”.

A warning from the 'graves' in Canada

Canadian media ran with the story.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “The treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools is a dark and shameful chapter in our country.”

British Columbia Premier John Horgan tweeted, “Horrified and heartbroken to learn the burial site of 215 children has been confirmed on the grounds of the former Kamloops residential school.”

The news created a moral panic.

“Several media outlets amplified and hyped the story by alleging that the bodies of 215 children had been found, adding that ‘thousands’ of children had ‘gone missing’ from residential schools and that parents had not been informed. The undisturbed sites even became ‘mass graves’ where bodies were dumped in a jumble,” wrote Jacques Rouillard, emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal.

“On May 30, the federal government lowered the flags on all its buildings to half-staff. Later, it instituted a new holiday to honour ‘missing’ children and survivors of residential schools. Spontaneously, clusters of shoes and orange shirts and other paraphernalia were placed on church steps in many cities or on the steps of legislatures in memory of the little victims.

“Around the country, churches were burned or vandalized. Statues were spray-painted and pulled down in apparent retaliation for the fate of the children. The statue of Queen Victoria in front of the Manitoba Legislature was defaced and pulled down. Montreal’s statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, was knocked down, his detached bronze head symbolically rolling on the ground.”

The problem with the story was that there was no evidence of bodies, a group of 12 Canadian academics, including Rouillard, said. “This is the biggest fake news story in Canadian history. … They have come to believe things for which there is no evidence and it’s taken on a life of its own.”

There are stories of wrongdoing

There has been enough research to know that Indian boarding schools have a dark history.

In 1895, 19 Hopi men from Arizona were sent to the notorious prison Alcatraz or “The Rock,” on a small island in San Francisco Bay.

These men who opposed allowing the federal government to take their children were punished with hard labor “until they shall evince, in an unmistakable manner, a desire to cease interference with the plans of the government for the civilization and education of its Indian wards, and will make proper promises of good behavior in the future," according to Alacatraz History.

There is history of indigenous children getting punished when they used their tribal language or being farmed out as a kind of indentured servant in surrounding communities.

But also positive stories from Indian schools

Not all history is bad.

In her reporting, Debra Utacia Krol told the story of Donna Mitchell of Chinle, who had transferred to Phoenix Indian School in 1957 and graduated in 1961.

Mitchell said it was her own idea to transfer after a friend encouraged her. Her parents weren’t excited about the idea, but they permitted her to attend the school.

Mitchell said Phoenix Indian School was home for her and she had never experienced the abuse that countless others had reported from other boarding schools. Rather, she was given opportunities she otherwise would never have had. Her experience at Phoenix Indian School in the 1960s are some of her favorite memories.

"I loved it," Mitchell said. "I enjoyed it. I always talk about how Phoenix Indian School was the happiest days of my life."

History is complicated. As demonstrated above, sometimes it does not always point in one direction. Further, it is often the story of people who made decisions modern people wouldn't make with their greater enlightenment on civil and human rights.

But the work of history needs to be done, and it is most powerful when pursued with a strong commitment to truth, accuracy and facts.

As the United States builds a more complete picture of what happened in boarding homes such as the Phoenix Indian School, it is important we follow the evidence and honestly interpret its meaning. If we’ve done that, there will be more popular acceptance when we finally reach more-informed conclusions.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Indian boarding school investigation must be based on facts