Two Native American tribes on Thursday filed what they called the first major lawsuit against the U.S. government’s notorious system of Indian boarding schools, which for decades splintered families and stripped Indigenous children of their language and culture.
The tribes argued that the federal government betrayed the promises it made in treaties to provide for the education of tribal youths. Instead, using money set aside for tribes, the government shunted Native children into schools where they were beaten, abused and forced to assimilate.
The class-action lawsuit said the survivors of the schools and their heirs have never been compensated for the “irreparable injuries” they have suffered, and said they are now owed an accounting of how the money was spent.
“Rather than provide what was promised and what was legally owed, the United States forcibly separated Native children from their parents, and systematically sought to erase their cultural identity, killing, torturing, starving and sexually assaulting many in the process,” the lawsuit said.
The suit, against the Department of Interior, its Bureau of Indian Affairs, its Bureau of Indian Education and its current leader, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, was brought by the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma on behalf of Native nations whose children attended boarding schools.
It was filed in federal court in central Pennsylvania, a symbolically significant location that was once home to the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School. There, children were renamed, and were forced to dress in Western clothes and have their hair cut, under the school superintendent’s philosophy of “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
In many cases, the children did not survive. A total of 973 children are confirmed to have died while attending the boarding schools, and tribal members believe hundreds more deaths have not been included in the government’s official tally.
“We all have stories,” said Tasha R. Mousseau, vice president of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes. She and several other women tribal leaders recently traveled to the former Carlisle school, where around 180 children have been buried, to retrieve the remains of one of her relatives.
“There are so many of our relatives who are unidentified or unclaimed,” she said.
Officials at the Interior Department, which oversees public lands and many agencies involving Native Americans, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Interior Department, which was led in the Biden administration by the first Native American Interior secretary, Deb Haaland, has recently tried to investigate and account for its role in the boarding-school system, which separated hundreds of thousands of Native children from their families and sent them to a network of more than 400 schools, beginning in the early 1800s through the late 1960s.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. apologized last year for the abuses, calling it “one of the most horrific chapters in American history.” Under Ms. Haaland, the department also last year issued a wide-ranging report that chronicled the dark history of boarding schools and called for a national memorial and investments to help Native communities heal.
But lawyers for the tribes said there had never been a full accounting of the inflation-adjusted $23 billion the government spent running those schools, including how much had come from tribal trusts funded by selling Native lands. Tribal leaders say that the harms have rippled across generations, and that they had a right to add up the bill.
“We’re entitled to an accounting,” said Adam J. Levitt, one of the lawyers representing the tribes. “We need to know what happened.”
Mr. Levitt said the case was one of the first major efforts to hold the government legally accountable for the boarding-school system, in part because most deadlines to sue over other abuses have long since passed.
But not, he said, in their case. The lawsuit argued that in cases of lost or mismanaged trust money, the clock does not start ticking until the tribes receive a full accounting from the government. That has never happened, the lawsuit argued.
“An accounting — which the United States is legally required to undertake — is an important step toward trying to right this horrific wrong,” the lawsuit said.
Indigenous survivors in Canada reached a settlement worth about $2 billion with the Canadian government in 2023 over that country’s boarding-home program.
The long-term costs to families, tribes and descendants of the boarding schools are staggering, tribal members say.
Survivors have described being snatched from their parents and sent to schools where they were hit, stripped and sexually abused, forbidden from practicing Native religions and forced to convert to Christianity. Reports on the boarding schools say the system left a legacy of shattered communities and long-term psychological trauma and ill health.
The lawsuit is infused with such stories. It tells of Ethel Roberts Wheeler, a member of the Wichita tribe, whose grandson said she had “lived in fear her whole life” after she was sent on a cattle car to an Indian school in Phoenix where children were beaten for speaking their Native languages.
Or there was Oscar Stephens, another Wichita boy, who tried to run away multiple times after being sent to the Carlisle school in 1908. There, his head was shaved and he was sent to do menial work for other families. His mother, brother and sister died while he was away.
Ms. Mousseau, the Wichita vice president, said the lawsuit could now offer “a symbolic win for all of our ancestors who were harmed, who did not survive the boarding-school experience.”
“This would be monumental for tribal identity throughout this nation,” she said. “Native people are very strong and resilient, and they deserved to have recognized the harms that were experienced by our children.”
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
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