Investigation finds at least 973 Native American children died in abusive US boarding schools

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — At least 973 Native American children died in the U.S. government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools.

The investigation commissioned by Interior Sec. Deb Haaland found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 U.S. boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness, accidents and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said.

The findings follow a series of listening sessions across the U.S. over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.

“The federal government — facilitated by the Department I lead — took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American Cabinet secretary, said in a news release Tuesday.

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